Across this short series, I have argued that most organisations struggle to transform not because they lack effort, capability, or intent, but because they are working with the wrong assumptions about change.

We started with a simple observation. Improvement is not the same as transformation. You can optimise parts of a system without improving the system itself. Ackoff was blunt on this point. “If you improve the parts taken separately, you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved".

We then explored how planning reinforces this mistake. Much of what passes for strategic planning today is still, in Ackoff’s words, “an irrelevant ritual that produces short-run peace of mind, but not the future that is longed for”. Organisations default to prediction and control, even when complexity makes both unreliable. Strategy becomes a forecasting exercise, rather than a design activity.

From there, we turned to discipline. Ackoff warned that managers are not confronted by neat, isolated problems, but by “dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes… Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Before defining ambition, organisations must formulate the mess. They must agree what problem they are actually facing, and where their current trajectory leads if left unchanged.

We then explored idealised design and the danger of premature certainty. Ackoff’s alternative was not to specify the future in detail, but to design the kind of system stakeholders would choose if they were free to do so. As one summary of his method puts it, “An idealized design of a system is the design its stakeholders would have right now if they could have any system they wanted.” One might even suggest that Ackoff would borrow from de Beer such that leaders should design the kind of system that autonomously creates the desired future.

What remains is the most difficult question of all.

What does this require of leadership?
What Interactive Planning actually isInteractive Planning is often misunderstood as a method or a workshop sequence. It is that, but it is also a way of thinking about how organisations create change in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.
At its core, it is built on three principles:

• It is participative. Those who are affected by the system must be involved in designing it. Ackoff was clear on this point. No one can plan effectively for someone else.
• It is iterative. Plans are not executed once. They are continuously adjusted as the organisation learns.
• And it is holistic. You cannot improve a system by treating its parts in isolation. “Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes,” as Ackoff put it, capturing the interdependent nature of real organisational challenges .

From these principles flows a disciplined process.

The first step is to formulate the mess. This means building a serious understanding of the current state, the obstructions within it, and the trajectory the organisation is on if nothing changes. Ackoff argued that planning should deal with “messes as wholes, systemically” rather than as a bundle of independent problems. In his own words, “A mess, like any system, has properties that none of its parts have.”

The second step is ends planning, or idealised design. Here the organisation asks what it would choose if it were designing the system now. Not in fantasy, and not free of all discipline, but free of inherited assumptions. The design must remain feasible and viable. The design is constrained by what is technologically possible and operationally sustainable, while still being open enough to reveal alternatives that legacy thinking would otherwise suppress.

The third step is to work backwards from that ideal. Means, resources, implementation, and control are then planned in relation to the gap between current reality and the desired system. In this sense, Interactive Planning is not a one-off exercise. It is iterative by design. It expects adaptation and learning as conditions change

Where it breaks down
On paper, Interactive Planning is compelling. In practice, it often fails.
Not because the method is flawed, but because the leadership assumptions behind it remain unchanged. Interactive Planning demands something very different from senior leaders than most organisations are used to. It requires them to stop behaving as if leadership means having the answers. This is hard because most leadership cultures still reward decisiveness over design. Leaders are expected to reduce ambiguity, settle questions quickly, and provide certainty. But Interactive Planning depends on a different discipline. It depends on holding crucial questions open long enough for the organisation itself to think and decide.

If understanding comes from seeing the whole, then senior leaders cannot rely solely on positional authority, functional expertise, or top-down judgement. They have to create the conditions in which the wider system can surface what no individual can see alone.

This desire to control and close down the future is entirely understandable. Leaders are expected to provide direction. Ambiguity is uncomfortable. Open‑ended processes feel risky. But this instinct undermines the very conditions that Interactive Planning depends on.
Leadership as control versus leadership as designMost leadership models still assume that the role of senior leaders is to make decisions. Define the strategy. Set the direction. Resolve ambiguity. Align the organisation. Make lots of decisions. Interactive Planning challenges this model directly.
In complex systems, leaders rarely have sufficient information to determine the right answer unilaterally. The knowledge required to design the system is distributed across it.

The role of leadership therefore changes.
Under Interactive Planning, leaders still set intent and boundaries, but they do something more demanding. They design the conditions in which collective intelligence can emerge.

That means resisting premature closure. It means tolerating ambiguity long enough for a better formulation of the problem to appear. It means allowing different stakeholders to shape the design of the future, rather than merely reacting to it.

This is not a soft option. It is a much more exacting form of leadership.
Zeynep Ocak’s interpretation of Interactive Planning captures the inner discipline involved. She argues that the method “expands participants’ conception of what is possible and reveals that the biggest obstructions to achieving the future most desired are often self-imposed constraints.”
That observation applies to leaders as much as to organisations. In many cases, the greatest constraint on transformation is not capability, or funding, or market dynamics. It is the leadership assumption that direction must be imposed rather than designed.

The discipline of not knowing
This is where many leadership teams struggle.
Interactive Planning does not reward speed of decision or the detail of analysis. It rewards quality of understanding.
It requires leaders to tolerate ambiguity without paralysis. To hold direction without over‑specifying the future. To create space for disagreement without allowing fragmentation.
Most importantly, it requires leaders to acknowledge what they do not know.

Ackoff framed planning as “the design of a desired future and of effective ways of bringing it about” . Design is not the same as prediction. It involves exploration, iteration, and revision.
If leaders behave as though the future is already known, they collapse this process before it has even begun.
From heroic leadership to system stewardshipThere is a deeper shift here that is worth making explicit.
Much of modern leadership thinking still carries the imprint of the heroic leader. The individual who sees what others cannot, decides what must be done, and drives the organisation forward.

Interactive Planning does not remove the need for leadership. It redefines it.
Leaders become stewards of the system rather than owners of its solutions.Their responsibility is to ensure that the organisation is capable of understanding itself, designing its future, and adapting as conditions change.
Ackoff repeatedly returned to the importance of interaction over isolated control. “To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behaviour taken separately.
This includes setting boundaries, ensuring feasibility and viability are respected, and maintaining coherence over time. But it does not include defining the solution in advance.

Transformation, in this frame, is not something leaders do to the organisation.
It is something the organisation does to itself, if the right conditions exist.

A final reflection
Across this series, the argument has built step by step.

• Most transformation fails because it improves parts rather than redesigning systems.
• Most planning fails because it treats uncertainty as something to predict rather than design around.
• Most strategies lack traction because organisations have not agreed the problem they are trying to solve.
• Most visions constrain change because they specify the future too early.

When these patterns are combined, the result is familiar. Activity without progress. Alignment without clarity. ambition without direction.
So the leadership issue is not whether senior leaders should be hands-on or hands-off. It is whether they are willing to lead in a way that complexity actually requires.

Interactive Planning fails when leaders try to control outcomes instead of designing the conditions for learning, participation, and systemic redesign.

• It fails when they close debates too early.
• It fails when they confuse speed with progress.
• It fails when they ask the organisation to implement a future that has already been over-specified from above.

But when leaders do something different, the whole logic changes.
When they allow the mess to be formulated honestly, when they invite stakeholders into the design of the ideal, and when they treat implementation as an iterative learning journey rather than a compliance exercise, strategy becomes something more powerful than a plan.
It becomes a process by which the organisation develops the capacity to redesign itself.

That, in the end, is the real contribution of Interactive Planning.
It connects systems thinking, strategy, and leadership into a single worldview.

It says that transformation is not something leaders do to an organisation.
It is something an organisation can do with itself, if leadership is wise enough to make that possible.And that leaves one final question for any senior leader reading this.
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Are you trying to provide the right answers, or are you designing the conditions in which the system can discover them?
Because in a complex world, those are no longer the same thing.
It is also the one that makes transformation possible.

When I was teaching about social enterprise at the University of Northampton, I often used the case of Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York.

You may know their strapline. It has become almost iconic.
“We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.”
At one level, it is memorable because it flips a familiar business logic. But the deeper value of the case is what it reveals about strategy. It shows, very clearly, that strategy is not about optimising what you do. It is about being coherent with why you exist.

The strategic tension most organisations avoid
Greyston was never a bakery in the conventional sense. It was created in 1982 by Bernie Glassman to address poverty and exclusion in Southwest Yonkers by creating jobs for people who would otherwise not be employed.
Its approach was radical. It introduced what is now called “Open Hiring”. There are no interviews, no CV screening, and no background checks. People put their name on a list and are offered a job when their turn comes.

If you take that mission seriously, the implications for strategy are profound. You are not optimising for labour productivity. You are not selecting the most efficient workforce. You are explicitly choosing to absorb inefficiency in order to create social value.
That is where the tension begins.

Because as the organisation grows, it is pulled into a very different conversation. How do we improve margins. How do we increase throughput. How do we reduce waste. How do we standardise operations.
The case material shows this clearly. As Greyston scaled, leadership explored ways to improve efficiency, including better equipment, higher throughput and reduced waste.
All sensible moves. All advocated by every operations manual.
But they sit in direct tension with the founding purpose.

Strategy is not neutral
This is the part that many organisations struggle with.
We talk about efficiency and effectiveness as if they are universal truths. They are not. They are contingent on purpose.
If your purpose is to maximise financial return, then reducing labour, standardising processes and investing in automation will usually move you in the right direction.

If your purpose is to maximise employment for those excluded from the labour market, those same moves can become misaligned. In some cases, they actively undermine the mission.

So strategy becomes a set of trade-offs that are not only economic, but moral and social.
Greyston did not avoid those trade-offs. It lived them. It had to remain financially viable in order to sustain its mission. But it also had to resist the gravitational pull towards a purely efficiency-driven model.
That is why the phrase “we bake brownies to hire people” matters. It is not a slogan. It is a forcing mechanism. It defines the criteria by which strategic choices should be judged.

What happens to the value created
There is a second layer to this case that is often overlooked.
Greyston is not a traditional shareholder business. It operates as a hybrid model. The bakery generates revenue and profit, but that value is used in two ways. It is reinvested into the business to sustain and grow the model, and a portion flows into the Greyston Foundation to fund community programmes and support services.
Historically, this included housing, childcare and support for people living with HIV/AIDS.

This makes the question of strategy even sharper.
If efficiency improvements generate surplus, what should be done with it. Should it be reinvested in scaling the bakery. Should it be used to deepen community impact. Should it be used to stabilise the model.
There is no neutral answer. Each choice pushes the organisation in a different direction.

A decade on: a more complex reality
It is also worth looking at where Greyston stands today.
The bakery itself is still operating. It continues to supply brownies to Ben & Jerry’s and still uses the Open Hiring model. It employs around 80 to 120 people and there is still a long waitlist for roles.
But the wider system has shifted.

The Greyston Foundation has scaled back significantly. Its own site states that programmes have been paused while it refocuses resources on employment and long-term impact.
In simple terms, the core enterprise has endured, but the broader ecosystem of social support around it has contracted.
That should make us pause.
It suggests that sustaining a hybrid model over time is not straightforward. Even when the business model works, the wider social infrastructure it supports can remain fragile.

The lesson for leaders
So what should we take from this.
First, strategy is always framed by purpose. If you get that wrong, everything else becomes optimisation theatre.
Second, efficiency is not a virtue in its own right. It is only a virtue if it serves your intended outcome.
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Third, surplus is not success. What matters is how that surplus is deployed.
And finally, there is no stable equilibrium. Organisations like Greyston are constantly navigating tensions between viability, growth and impact. There is no point at which the problem is solved.
Purpose establishes the direction of the north star, and there is always a risk that your targets point to a different destination.
If you are leading a business today, it is worth asking a simple question.
What is your equivalent of “we bake brownies to hire people”?
Because until that is clear, every efficiency gain you pursue risks taking you somewhere you did not intend to go.

Most organisations believe they have a vision problem. In reality, they have a design problem.
Vision statements are everywhere. They are crafted carefully, tested for resonance, and communicated widely. They provide a sense of direction and intent. They reassure stakeholders that the organisation knows where it is heading.
Yet in many cases, they quietly constrain the very change they are supposed to enable.
When vision becomes a constraintA typical vision does something subtle but consequential. It describes a future state as if it were already understood. It specifies outcomes, capabilities, and sometimes even solutions. It signals certainty where none exists. It reduces ambiguity too early.
This creates a trap.
Ackoff was blunt that “most corporate mission statements are worthless” because they often just rephrase necessities (like “achieve profit”) as lofty goals – “like a person saying his mission is to breathe”. At Bell Labs, Ackoff saw that setting a rigid target five years out was folly: “where we say today we would like to be five years from now is not where we will want to be when we get there”.
Once a vision is set, everything else becomes execution. Questions shift from “What should this strategy be?” to “How do we deliver what we have already decided?” Assumptions harden. Alternatives narrow. Dissent becomes misalignment rather than insight.
What began as ambition becomes a boundary.
This is why many transformation programmes feel constrained before they have even started. The future has been decided before it has been designed.
The deeper problem: confusing ends with answersRussell Ackoff's point is that most planning fails because it starts in the wrong place. He observed that “successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem” rather than refining solutions to the wrong one.
Vision-led transformation often reverses this logic. It starts with answers.
Organisations ask “Where do we want to be?” and then describe it in concrete terms. But this question encourages premature specificity. It assumes the organisation already knows what form the future should take.
In complex systems, that assumption rarely holds.
A different question entirelyInteractive Planning replaces this question with a more demanding one.
Instead of asking where the organisation wants to be, it asks what the organisation would need to do if it were designed today.
This is not a semantic shift. It changes the entire orientation of strategy.
It moves thinking away from static outcomes and toward systemic properties. It forces organisations to focus on purpose, capability, and behaviour, rather than structure and form. These are concerns that affect the viability of the organisation within its system, rather than its operating model.
By focusing on what the organisation must be capable of rather than how it looks, this approach directs attention to purpose, essential capabilities, and behaviours instead of prematurely locking in one structural answer
Ackoff described this as idealised design. An idealised system is not one that reflects current constraints. It is “the design its stakeholders would have right now if they could have any system they wanted”.
That statement carries an important implication. The starting point is not feasibility. It is clarity of intent.
The discipline of designing from scratchIdealised design asks organisations to do something they rarely attempt. Imagine the current system does not exist. No legacy structures. No embedded processes. No inherited constraints.
Then design the system you would choose, subject only to two conditions. It must be technologically feasible and operationally viable.
Ackoff often started planning sessions with a provocative exercise: imagine your entire system was destroyed overnight. No sacred org chart, no “we’ve always done it this way” processes. Now design the system you truly want, as if you were founding it today. This matters.
It prevents thinking from drifting into fantasy. At the same time, it prevents legacy constraints from dominating the conversation. It creates a space where creativity is grounded, not constrained.
Ackoff saw this as essential to real innovation. Most improvement efforts, he argued, focus on fixing what went wrong. At best, they deliver marginal gains. More often, they create new problems elsewhere.
Idealised design breaks that cycle by shifting attention from problems to purpose.
Ackoff also built adaptability into the idealized design itself: it must be “capable of rapid and effective learning and adaptation”, recognizing that even our ideal can improve as conditions change. This is where using Viable Systems Model becomes an important additional tool within Interactive Planning
Why the North Star is not a destinationIn this context, the idea of a North Star needs to be handled carefully.
Many organisations treat their North Star as a fixed destination. A point in the distance that can be fully described and then pursued. This creates false certainty.
Interactive Planning treats the North Star differently.
It is not a detailed description of where the organisation will end up. It is a guiding reference that preserves coherence while allowing adaptation. It expresses what matters, not exactly how it will be realised.
In my workshop at SysPrac26 in Hull earlier this year, I said that the North Star is always just over the horizon, out of reach, rather than the destination itself. The North Star points towards the idealised future, but is not it.
This distinction is critical in complex environments. Over-specification creates brittleness and fragility that comes from a singular perspective and destination. Under-specification creates drift.
The role of the North Star is to provide just enough clarity to align action, without locking the organisation into a single imagined future. It allows us to describe how we will feel about that future destination, what we will be doing with whom, rather than zeroing in on a specific location.
Feasibility and viability are not optionalThere is a further discipline at work here that is often overlooked. Idealised designs must be feasible and viable. They must be achievable with known technology and capable of operating in the real environment.  This constraint is not limiting. It is liberating.
It forces organisations to confront the gap between aspiration and capability. It grounds ambition in reality without reducing it to incrementalism. It ensures that what is designed can, in principle, be built. Ackoff captured this tension simply. “Our ability to solve problems is limited by our conception of what is feasible.”
This cuts both ways. If feasibility is defined too narrowly, ambition collapses. If it is ignored entirely, strategy dissolves into wishful thinking. The discipline lies in holding both.
Who holds the design pen?Ackoff’s work reminds us that participation itself is a design choice. Who gets invited to formulate the mess or design the future? Which questions are on the table, and which are off-limits? These decisions shape the outcome.
Ackoff recognized that a planning process can unwittingly reinforce the biases of those already in power – “the mess is often formulated through the eyes of those who design the process, not those who inhabit it.”
This is why truly participative planning is crucial: it brings in diverse perspectives, including voices that might otherwise be marginalized under the status quo.
Werner Ulrich later formalized this idea in his Critical Systems Heuristics, urging planners to always ask: “Who is affected by this system, and have they been given a say in designing it?” By explicitly critiquing the boundaries of participation, planners can avoid a subtle trap: a reference projection or vision that reflects only the views of a privileged few.
In short, who holds the mapping pen matters — and Interactive Planning is deliberate about sharing it widely to get a full picture of the mess and a credible design for the future. Ackoff insisted that "Interactive Planning … accepts that no single group can plan effectively for everyone else.”
Why this matters for transformationMany organisations struggle not because they lack ambition, but because their ambition is over-specified too early.
They define target states that are too concrete, too fixed, and too tied to current mental models. They mistake clarity of description for clarity of direction.
Interactive Planning suggests a different path.
Start with purpose, not structure. Define what the system must do, not what it must look like. Design the ideal within the bounds of feasibility and viability. Then move towards it iteratively, learning and adapting as you go. This is more demanding than writing a vision statement. It requires participation, discipline, and a tolerance for ambiguity.
It is also more likely to produce real change.
In the final article in this series, I will turn to the implications for leadership. What it takes to lead a process that does not begin with certainty, does not rely on prediction, and cannot be controlled in the traditional sense.
For now, it is worth reflecting on your own organisation’s North Star.
Is it guiding you forward, or quietly holding you in place?

Most organisations are far better at describing where they want to go than at agreeing where they actually are.
Vision statements are crafted. Strategic ambitions are declared. Transformation programmes are launched with confidence and energy. Yet beneath the surface, there is often profound disagreement about what problem the organisation is trying to solve, or even whether there is a problem at all.
This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of discipline.
The rush to ambition
In many organisations, clarity is assumed rather than earned. Senior teams move quickly to defining the future because it feels positive, motivating, and decisive. Dwelling on the present can feel uncomfortable, slow, or politically risky.
As a result, ambition often precedes understanding.
The “current state” becomes a set of slide headings. Strengths and weaknesses are listed. Risks are noted. The exercise satisfies the procedural requirement to demonstrate awareness, but it rarely changes anyone’s mind.
This kind of analysis does not create clarity. It creates surface agreement while leaving deeper disagreements untouched.
Most planning skips the hard part.
Ackoff observed that many organizations race ahead to set goals and launch initiatives without first understanding their present situation. In reality, most corporate planning focuses, instead ,on the later steps (budgets, actions, KPIs), with little time spent on diagnosing the current “mess.”  He noted that virtually no company he worked with had a truly comprehensive picture of how it currently operated – they thought they did, but the information was fragmented and superficial. Rushing to declare an ambitious future while glossing over present realities creates a mere veneer of agreement. It feels decisive and upbeat, but it leaves deeper disagreements and blind spots untouched.
Why honesty about the present is so difficult
Phase 1 of Interactive Planning is known as formulating the mess. The language is deliberate. Complex organisational challenges are rarely neat problems with clear boundaries. They are tangled, contested, and uncomfortable.
Formulating the mess requires organisations to do more than catalogue issues. It requires them to articulate how their current trajectory actually plays out if left unchallenged.
This is hard for two reasons.
Psychologically, it forces people to confront the possibility of failure. Politically, it requires surfacing assumptions that different parts of the organisation may prefer to keep implicit.
Ackoff pointed out that organizations are often reluctant to face the possibility of their own failure until crisis hits. “Usually, organizations take action … when they realize that they are in a state of crisis,” he noted – and by then it’s often too late. Admitting how and where the current system is falling short can be psychologically painful for those in charge. it’s much easier to talk about aspirations (growth, innovation, “the next big thing”) than to openly discuss decline, mistakes or internal dysfunction. This instinct to avert our eyes from an uncomfortable present is human, but as Ackoff warned, postponing the pain only increases the eventual cost.
Many leaders sense this risk instinctively. It is safer to talk about aspiration than consequence. But safety comes at a strategic price.
The reference projection: where are we really heading?
One of the most powerful tools in Interactive Planning is the reference projection. It asks a simple but unsettling question. If we continue with our current plans, policies, and ways of working, and if the environment evolves as we broadly expect, where will we end up?
This is not a forecast in the traditional sense. It is a logical extension of today’s reality. It is not wishful thinking, it's a disciplined, logical extrapolation of the organization’s current course. It also identifies the organization’s “Achilles’ heel”, the “seeds of its self-destruction".
The purpose is not to scare people into action, nor to justify predetermined change. It is to create a shared understanding of direction of travel. Without that shared understanding, strategy becomes fragmented and performative.
When different groups hold different implicit reference projections, ambition loses coherence. Everyone supports change, but not the same change.
The reference projection is not a true forecast so much as a baseline to clarify the status quo trajectory. It asks the unsettling question: “If we change nothing, where will we end up?”
Logical scenarios, not wishful alternatives
Alongside reference projections, Interactive Planning uses logical scenario projections. These explore how the organisation might fail if key assumptions turn out to be wrong or external pressures intensify. essentially a narrative describing how, given the reference projection, the organization would eventually undermine or destroy itself. The term “burning platform” is often used badly in this context. It is treated as a story leaders tell to motivate others. Something dramatic enough to justify inconvenience.
These are not best‑case or worst‑case fantasies. They are disciplined explorations of plausibility.
The value lies not in the scenarios themselves, but in the conversations they provoke. What are we assuming about demand, capability, legitimacy, or resilience that may no longer hold? What dependencies have quietly become single points of failure?
Without confronting these questions, aspiration floats free of reality.
In Interactive Planning, the burning platform is not a narrative device. It is a collective sense‑making exercise.
A credible burning platform emerges when people recognise, together, that the system they are part of cannot continue as it is. Not because leadership says so, but because the logic of the situation becomes undeniable.
This is why formulating the mess is participative. Nobody can be convinced into seeing systemic failure. They have to understand it for themselves.
Interactive Planning insists that those responsible for implementation help formulate the mess and the need for change from the start. This broad participation builds genuine buy-in. Management scientist Michael Jackson, commenting on Ackoff’s method, noted that it “facilitates stakeholders’ participation … and generates commitment and consensus” around a shared case for change. Instead of the leadership theatrically announcing a burning platform, people co-create the case for change.
The process of creating logical scenario projections pushes executives to ask, “Which assumptions are we taking for granted? What could invalidate our plan?” This disciplined plausibility check often reveals hidden single points of failure (e.g. over-reliance on one big customer, or an aging core technology).


Why “as‑is” models are rarely enough
Many organisations believe they understand their current state because they have documented it. They have operating models, process maps, and capability frameworks, but the map is not the terrain.
These artefacts describe structure. They rarely explain behaviour.
Ackoff discovered that these formal artefacts of organisational structure are often fiction. “In every organization, there are incredible discrepancies between what it says it is doing and the facts,” he noted wryly. For example, a company might officially claim to be decentralized, but in reality no one makes a move without top approval. The informal system (the workarounds, personal networks, and unwritten rules) often bears little resemblance to the polished diagrams of the formal system – yet it’s the informal system that actually gets things done.
Paper diagrams rarely expose where decisions really get stuck or which unofficial channels people rely on. Ackoff’s takeaway: don’t accept the sanitized current-state story at face value.
Formulating the mess goes deeper. It explores how the organisation actually functions under pressure. Where decisions stall. How work really flows. Which incentives dominate when trade‑offs arise.
An honest picture of the present is not something you discover once. It emerges through dialogue, challenge, and iteration.
Clarity is an act of courage
There is a reason organisations avoid this step. True clarity limits what you can plausibly claim next. Ackoff noted that once you’ve mapped the real problems and failure points, certain grand visions get exposed as implausible.
You can no longer ignore, say, the massive talent gap or the unsustainable cost structure in pursuit of an overly rosy goal. This is precisely why Ackoff insisted on formulating the mess before jumping to idealized goals – it tethers ambition to reality.
But this is precisely why the step matters.
Without clarity about how the organisation might fail, ambition becomes performative rather than directional. It inspires activity without alignment.
Do the right thing, even if poorly, rather than the wrong thing well.
Ackoff frequently reminded managers that activity is pointless if it’s not solving the right problem. “All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter,” he warned – meaning we often expend enormous effort and ingenuity pursuing the wrong objectives. In corporate strategy, that’s the danger of skipping the clarity step: teams may execute flawlessly on initiatives that don’t address the real issues. Ackoff turned a folksy phrase on this point: “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It’s better to do the right thing wrong…” because at least you can correct course and improve.
Formulating the mess does not dampen ambition. It gives it substance.
In the next article in this series, I will explore what happens once organisations have the courage to see themselves clearly, how Interactive Planning moves from understanding the present to designing a future that is feasible, viable, and worth committing to.
Before answering where you want to go, it is worth asking a harder question.
Does your organisation agree on what problem you are trying to solve?

Most corporate planning processes are financially neat and strategically weak. They look coherent on a slide. They balance. They reassure. Yet they quietly turn business planning into a predictive lottery, where success depends less on judgement and design, and more on whether assumptions happen to come true.

Russell Ackoff warned us about this decades ago. He argued that organisations confuse planning with prediction, and control with design. Nowhere is this more visible than in annual and multi year budgeting.
The familiar pattern is easy to spot. Sales forecasts are projected forward. Historical performance is sliced by reporting unit. Utilisation targets are imposed to make delivery look “realistic”. Headcount is derived as if people were interchangeable units of capacity. Strategic investment is squeezed in late, once most choices have already been made. Profit appears at the end, but quietly acts as a constraint backwards through the system.

The result is a plan that looks disciplined but behaves destructively.

The core flaw is that the process assumes the future is an extrapolation of the past. Sales pipelines are treated as strategy, even though they mostly reflect where effort is being applied today, not where the firm should be competing tomorrow. This locks organisations into path dependency. New markets, new propositions and investment ahead of demand struggle to appear, because they cannot be forecast with confidence. In Ackoff’s terms, this is reactive or preactive planning dressed up as strategic intent.

As the process unfolds, a deeper problem emerges. Utilisation is introduced as a proxy for realism. This is where planning begins to eat itself. Utilisation measures busyness, not effectiveness. It actively suppresses learning, innovation and capability renewal, because any non billable activity is framed as waste. From this point on, the system quietly shifts from value creation to labour efficiency.

Headcount is then derived from these utilisation assumptions, as if capability could be inferred from numbers alone. This is a category error. Capability is about skills mix, learning rate, depth, resilience and leadership capacity. None of this appears in a headcount model. Organisations therefore end up with enough people and not enough capability at the same time.

By the time strategic investment is discussed, most degrees of freedom have already been used up. Investment is treated as overhead to be minimised, rather than as a deliberate choice about the future of the firm. Profit then appears as an output, but in practice it governs the system. When margins are threatened, utilisation targets tighten, headcount freezes and discretionary spend is cut. Capability erosion follows, quietly and predictably.

The tension between utilisation and profit is not a management failure. It is a design failure. High utilisation maximises short term revenue extraction from existing capability. Capability development, by contrast, requires slack, experimentation, redundancy in critical skills and investment before demand. The system rewards one and punishes the other. Managers are forced into a double bind. They can miss utilisation targets and appear inefficient, or hit them and slowly hollow out the firm. Ackoff described this precisely as the behaviour of internally contradictory systems. They reliably undermine their own stated goals.

Ackoff’s Interactive Planning offers a way out, not by improving forecasting, but by abandoning the idea that forecasting should lead. Interactive Planning starts with a different question. If the organisation were destroyed overnight, what would we design to replace it, given what we now know?

Translated into business planning, this reverses the logic completely.
Planning starts with the organisation you need to be, not the one you happen to be today. Strategic intent is made explicit. Target markets, roles in the ecosystem and the outcomes the organisation exists to deliver are defined first. This is ends planning, not financial projection.

Only then do you design the capability system required to deliver that future. This is not a headcount exercise. It is a system design exercise. You make explicit choices about depth, redundancy, learning mechanisms and resilience. Capability gaps are surfaced before cost constraints are imposed, not hidden by them.

Strategic investment becomes a first order decision, not an afterthought. Investment is justified against future viability and optionality, not current utilisation. Delivery capacity is modelled afterwards, with utilisation treated as a dependent variable. It is used diagnostically, not punitively. Sustainable ranges, protected learning time and surge capacity are designed in, rather than squeezed out.

Financials are then derived from the designed system. Profit is treated as a requirement for viability, not the sole objective. Trade offs are made explicitly, with their long term consequences visible. The budget becomes a hypothesis to be tested and adapted, not a contract to be defended.

The shift is subtle but profound. It is a move from budgeting to control behaviour, to budgeting to design a viable system. When planning is treated as design rather than prediction, business planning stops being a lottery and starts becoming an act of leadership.
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Ackoff did not give us better forecasts. He gave us a better question.

The world is shifting fast. AI, sustainability, and geopolitical changes aren't just headlines—they're redefining industries and creating a new demand for talent. For graduates entering the workforce today, being "job-ready" means more than just a degree; it requires a new blend of technical literacy, strategic thinking, and ethical awareness.
Based on insights from my recent presentation at Manchester Metropolitan University, here's a look at the five key trends shaping our future and the essential skills needed to navigate them.

The New Era of Work: Five Key Trends
Generative AI and Simulation: AI is no longer a futuristic concept. It's revolutionizing everything from engineering to logistics. Tools are shortening design cycles and enabling rapid "optioneering," where thousands of design variations can be tested in a fraction of the time. This changes the economics of bids and delivery, but it also raises new questions about efficiency and the environmental cost of computation.
IoT and Smart Infrastructure: Our physical world is becoming a data stream. Sensors and digital twins make assets "talk," providing real-time data on everything from performance to safety. This allows for predictive maintenance and operational efficiency, but it also massively expands the attack surface, making cybersecurity a critical, non-negotiable part of every project.

Net-Zero and Resilient Design: Sustainability is no longer a "nice-to-have." Regulations and client expectations now demand projects with lower embodied carbon and robust lifecycle analysis. Success in this environment requires understanding the circular economy and integrating ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) goals from the very start. It's about moving from compliance to competitive advantage.
Security Tech Convergence: Security is evolving, becoming more integrated and software-driven. Drones, AI video analytics, and biometrics are creating smarter, more comprehensive security systems. In a move towards sustainability, even mobile security units are being powered by greener energy sources like solar and methanol.
The Consulting Model Shift: AI and automation are taking over low-value tasks. This is a huge opportunity for professionals to focus on what truly matters: delivering measurable, high-value outcomes. The rise of smaller, specialized firms and platforms alongside traditional big consultancies is a testament to this shift.

The Skills That Matter Most
To thrive in this new landscape, graduates need a specific set of skills that bridges technology with human insight:
Data Technology Literacy: Understanding what AI can and cannot do. This isn't just about using tools; it's about knowing when and how to apply them responsibly.
Sustainability & Lifecycle Thinking: A deep understanding of embodied carbon and the circular economy. This knowledge must be baked into your P&L (Profit and Loss) logic, not just a separate CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiative.
Cyber Risk Awareness: The new frontline. Whether it's Operational Technology (OT) in a factory or the data on your laptop, understanding cyber risks is crucial for business continuity and national security.
Translating Complex Concepts: The ability to distill technical jargon into clear, compelling narratives for non-technical stakeholders—from the board to investors.
The most successful professionals won't just be experts in one field; they will be multi-disciplinarians who can connect these dots. They will be the leaders who understand both the strategic power of a digital backbone and the ethical implications of its carbon footprint.

As I transition to a new job after 15 years in the same organisation, it's good to reflect on key moments. One such moment was a cup of coffee with a police officer. It was a very long cuppa.

I had been presenting on soft systems methodology to a group of local authority and health staff. Their job was to establish the health needs of the communities around Northampton in a Joint Needs evaluation. They were animatedly discussing the implications of the data that they had to hand. My presentation was, in essence, that the data was potentially junk, out of date and inaccurate, and to gain a real understanding of the needs of the population, one needed to 'ground truth' the data, by checking that the data matched the reality on the ground. Let's say, my message didn't go down well, and I wasn't invited back to do more work. But, in the room was a senior police officer, and after the meeting he asked to have a cup of coffee with me. I was more than happy, and it was amusing to meet him a few days later on campus and accompany him to the restaurant which all the students side-eying a police officer in full fig.

He was Superintendent Richard James, it was sometime in 2010, and what I relay now is my recollection of how things panned out. I am sure he will be graceful if I have missed out vital elements in my story.

Richard was a senior police officer with command of a substantial patch of Northamptonshire Police's territory. It was a couple of years after the major economic crash and austerity economics was trashing the public sector. Richard was being tasked to reduce his workforce by 20% whilst improving his performance outcomes. He also had a few community issues on his hands, and his initial ask was simple 'how do we do community engagement better'? 

We agreed to collaborate for a bit, and I conducted a rapid evaluation of one neighbourhood team. I interviewed a slice of the team, from the Inspector down through sergeants, to police officers, to Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and members of the neighbourhood.  It was very clear that what Inspectors understood to be the case was very different from what PCSOs and community members experienced. It was the difference between statistics and the lived experience. Across the whole force, resourcing and strategic decisions were being made on the basis of very sparse and biased data sets, and did not match up with the operating conditions on the street. This is very common, and reminds me of my environmental management consulting days where pollution was occurring because management thought one thing was happening and operators knew that what they were doing was the wrong thing.

In a 'one, two, skip a few' style, I have to miss out tonnes of detail, but 13 years later, one Masters degree, a PhD and over 14 projects together, Richard and I are still offering each other cups of coffee, and are good friends, despite his love of 80s hair rock.

I was teaching on the BA in Social & Community Development, and one of my students joined me on the project for work experience. We worked with PCSOs and police officers to explore what PCSOs were doing really well in reducing crime in their neighbourhoods, what went wrong, and what was preventing them doing their jobs. We didn't use any management consulting tools, we just worked with them to help them explain what their lived experience was like. We then devised a training programme with them, and wrote a little handbook called Locally Identified Solutions and Practices (LISP), which was then rolled out to all the neighbourhood teams. They were just told, here's a process, find something to practice on, a problem that you have found challenging, and use this book, Richard and myself, to try and do something different. Amy, the student, went on after graduation to a high powered fast track NHS career).

We let the PCSOs get on with their day job, and then researched with them how the implementation went. We didn't interfere or create the usual implementation communication fuss. We were just interested in how they would cope with the new way of doing part of their day job. They did marvellously, and where appropriate found some interesting situations in which a new way of doing neighbourhood policing could be done. Their biggest problem was not being allowed to stick with an engagement long enough. The short-term policing time frame meant that if crime figures dipped very slightly, it was deemed a success, and they were abstracted to another locality. Soon enough, the crime reports bounced back.
The whole initiative got snarled up in a major centrally funded transformation project that was focused on big structural changes, so it didn’t really gain momentum. I met a PCSO from that time the other day and she said that she is still using the techniques we developed, but just doesn’t call it LISP.
Richard left that force, and we did a number of projects as pilots in that other force, bruising our knees on the pavement, and getting frustrated at the challenges of small scale organisational change. The whole infrastructure and culture of policing was not really fit for nuanced and detailed work at the street level, and progress founder every time there was a change of personnel. In all of the projects we did at that time, we did not complete a 40 week cycle with the same people that we started a project with. Nevertheless, we, and our implementation coaches (including Brendan O’Brien, Dave Spencer, Paul Halstead and Steve Carr) achieved some amazing work, helping the police force to really embed the needs, aspirations and energy of the community into neighbourhood policing. Incidentally, Steve travelled from Cardiff to west Yorkshire to join in with one of our projects. He loved it so much, he brought his police transformation expertise to the team!).
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Richard and I have both completed high level research degrees with this work, and we are pretty certain that we know what works and why. Richard runs his own business on the back of that experience, and I have moved out of the teaching side of academia into a social enterprise that does management consulting. It’s been huge fun, we have met some mazing people, we have moaned at each other over cups of coffee in random places around the UK.

Above all, we have done a good thing.

Today is my last day with the University of Northampton 05 October 2023.

When I arrived in May 2008, I was sheltering from a storm. The economic crash that had been building since 2006 peaked in the summer of 2008, just as I was selling two houses in Scotland and moving the whole family to England. I has been applying for a number of jobs, but when I went for interview at the University of Northampton, my biggest question for my interview panel was to be ‘why does UON want a senior lecturer in social enterprise?’. As I walked into the interview room, the question was already answered in the form of Wray Irwin, formerly head of Social Enterprise East Midlands, with whom I had already worked for over 4 years!

I found myself immediately on a steep learning curve of developing degree validation paperwork, as I developed and saw undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in social entrepreneurship through to fruition. All that was needed was to tell the world that we had a handful of new degrees to sell. But the marketing of the university was generic, and most people had not heard of social entrepreneurship as a subject, let alone a potential future career.

I also soon found myself in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, a place that had been no more than a fuzzy picture on the TV as single protestor faced down the tanks of the mighty state. As I stood there, I was expected to find out about the wonderful new movement of social enterprises in China. My visit showed me that China had already its own long history of social enterprises, that worked as ‘total economies’ educating the workers families, feeding them,  providing health care and long term employment. My ‘danwei’ paper was not as enthusiastically received by the Uni as I had hoped, but echoed my earlier paper from working at Oxford Uni on how grit (i.e trouble and failure) makes a pearl in social innovation terms.

Without anyone studying BA Social Enterprise, I made myself useful by teaching a class on social entrepreneurship to entrepreneurship students, and also a business ethics class to management students. I secured a little prize money from the millennium charity Unltd, for the best social innovation ideas, and this turned into quite a lot of money. Amongst some amazing ideas, Gill Gourlay and I helped students launch ‘Bag in Bag’ a simple retail social enterprise to give entrepreneurship students real world experiences of the end-to-end of small business creation and operation. We were told that we had to have a permit to trade on campus, but there wasn’t an application form to get that permission! The university wanted social entrepreneurs, but wasn’t acting as a social enterprise, or an incubator.

The new vice chancellor arrived. He was hungry for a new identity for the University, something that it would be internationally known for. He realised that there was a lot of social enterprise activities going on and decided that we should be ‘No 1 for social enterprise’. The problem was, there wasn’t a ranking system for this, and nobody else was competing to be number 1. I pitched to him that there was only one organisation that could validate what we did, and that was to apply to become a AshokaU Changemaker Campus. This was a venture created by students I had met at Oxford, and they had launched a global federation of campus wholly committed to creating the conditions for students to become social change agents over their lives.

Wray and I led the discovery process, convening a ‘core group’ that represented every activity on campus. A year later we found ourselves in San Diego being interview by AshokaU and become the first and only Changemaker Campus in England. This process led to the University of Northampton rediscovering its foundational purpose ‘to transform lives and inspire change’. This became the University strategy, and Changemaker Campus accreditation showed that we meant it. Any and all activities, programmes and initiatives on campus were filtered through the lense of ‘do this make the world a better place for ourselves, improving their ability to act?’.

During this time, I also met Chris Durkin and Sue Kennedy in the School of Health, whom I worked with the redevelop a Social Welfare degree into a BA in Social & Community Development. We introduced social entrepreneurship and innovation modules from first to third year, as well as community development and community organising modules. We also doubled the ‘good degrees’ received by these students, at the same time as doubling the student numbers. I created a ‘Changemaker Handbook’ with students, to be taught by third year students in a second year class. This co-written handbook had some assessment criteria in the back, which I had developed from ‘21st century skills’ rubrics from American Universities. This was picked up by Rachel Maxwell and turned into the Changemaker Learning Outcomes resource.

Wray has moved from being a Social Entrepreneur in Residence to head of the Employability service, as well as a range of other student directed services. At this time, students were becoming the primary customer, as funding shifted from block grants to student loans for fees. This put increasing pressure on programmes to show that they created high levels of employability. The students who were getting good results in the BA Social & Community Development generally didn’t want high powered graduate jobs, they wanted to better inform their existing community and health work. They wanted to, and did, start new charities and social enterprises or go back and volunteer in improving charities in their own communities. But, because of ‘poor employment outcomes’, the degree was removed from offer.

I was instead poached by Vicki Dean, who had been given the task of getting the Foundation studies offer to work properly. I came in to run one module for all the students, in which I buried research and investigation skills, but oriented towards a social innovation skillset, demonstrating that all degrees involved could contribute to improved capability for students in solving the worlds problems. Working across 150 students in 70+ degree programmes required a certain amount of consolidation, so over three years, all the students, whether artists or engineers, applied their research skills to their own experience, that of student food poverty.
This job morphed into revalidating the whole of the Foundation programme into a single year, embedding the social innovation skill set across the whole curriculum. This led to me stepping up as programme leader and line management of the team, having dodged that bullet for 13 years. I finish at UON as a deputy subject lead and Associate Professor with a PhD in social innovation. I came into the higher education sector with a yearning to figure out to get corporations to better care for the environment and communities they operate in. I have developed part of the answer, and have been surrounded by an inspiring group of people, from those in the Manchester Critical Group of UK academics, to the Changemaker Campus academics around the world, to close colleagues and curious students.
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A lot of people will remember the Changemaker brand, with good and frustrated memories, but beyond that has been a much more constant commitment to take the purpose of ‘transforming lives’ seriously.

July, in my job, is a moment of weightlessness, a liminal space and time of anti-gravity, while the existing students have not yet entirely left us, some grades outstanding, and the new students are just statistics in a spreadsheet, waiting to be met as vibrant and anxious individuals. It is this time of year where colleagues are on leave, and threads of some work are left undone, and new threads of others sit waiting to be dealt with. In these moments, bursts of creativity have allowed two journal papers to be written for the special edition of a new journal called Novation, dedicated to the field of innovation, of which social innovation is a Venn diagram segment. Two years ago, at this time, I completed by PhD and passed my viva, last year I was awarded my PhD and this year I was made an Associate Professor. It is a time for reflection, and writing, of considering who I am and how I want to be. July is a special month.
Whilst I was browsing LinkedIn and noticed that the academic Systems Thinking Interest Group have influenced the UK civil service with a handbook on systems analysis, my thoughts turned to what tribe I belong to. I have been developing my skills in systems thinking since the early 2000s but am mostly associated with the emerging field of social innovation, within which I have been exploring the critical question of what the ‘social’ is in social innovation.  I trained in the early 90s as a geographer at a time when social geography was also asking itself a similar question.
Doing geographies of society means to investigate how humans, as individuals, live, work and have their being together, in lumps of humanity. The spaces and places in which social relations are expressed form the backdrop, as well as structure, perform and, in turn, is structured by their relations. Space is made into place by social relations.
In writing my biography for the Associate Professor post, I had to cram 30 years of practice into three pages. This highlighted to me the multiple tribes of thought which I inhabit. My PhD is an investigation into social innovation in public safety, so there is a lot of sociology and criminology in it especially focused on how humans relate (often negatively) to the built and performed environments of neighbourhood. It draws on my experience and the literature on community development, as well as a therapeutic technique called Motivational Interviewing, two threads of work that are expressed in my religious community and pastoral volunteering as well as in my approach to teaching in higher education. I have been involved in environmental issues, most importantly interested in sustainable development, which is how societies and organisations of humans relate to their ecological environment. I also use Systems Thinking as a way of structuring my thinking about how humans gather together into communities and organisations, how they as thinking, feeling and emoting actors relate to, structures and are structured by inanimate objects, as the new materialists have it, as well as the transcendental aspects of their being, as expressed in critical realism.
Social innovation is, it seems to me, to be an investigation into how social relations are formed, reformed, and structured by agents acting within other social relations and the objects that form a part of that environment. Social innovators reconfigure social relations through reconfiguring resources and meanings associated with those objects.  Whether these reconfigurations are positive or negative, or to whom they are most positive is a separate question. Social innovation reconfigures socially structured agency.
This thinking brings me back to thinking about my tribes. I am at the same time an expert in social innovation, using soft systems methodology, as well as involved in sustainable development, and community development. I am interested in the spaces and places in which those social relations are made and remade. Ultimately, am I a Professor of Social Geography?

15/01/1990

Is that it?
hopes and fears
sweat and tears

Is that all there is?
Years of larning
years of toil
years of burning
the midnight oil
Hundreds of us read
thousands of books
some comprehending
mostly vacant looks

Some found it hard
others did not
a few retired
with what they’d got

The rest carried on
to the ultimate end
a degree to don
a certificate to send

Our teachers, they struggled
in their thankless task
through intellectual rubble
to reveal the farce
​
Because that is it
Just hopes and fears
just sweat and tears
that is all there is