The Early Years

My parents are fond of reminding me that as a child my nickname was “Why?” It seems the questions were endless regarding just about everything, to the point of being annoying, and some might comment that in that respect the quest has never stopped. There are numerous memories of getting in trouble for taking things apart and having little interest in putting anything back together.

Fortunately the habit of just taking things apart passed and was replaced by an interest in putting things back together. Because of the family context at that time this led to learning most of the home building trades.

As you might expect this arena wasn’t that interesting for long and interests moved on to electronics. Though as you might imagine this resulted in a whole new group of things being disassembled and not reassembled. Then, thanks to the US Navy, this area of interest deepened with schooling and an opportunity to work on a myriad of electronics equipment aboard ship at sea. It was quickly evident though that there was a preference for dry land.

In the early 70s education continued at Miami of Ohio working on a degree in Physics. There was a very rapid realization that there was an attraction to the IBM 360 residing in the basement of one of the buildings. While learning more than a dozen computer languages didn’t seem that difficult the language that almost destroyed my possibility of graduating was French. With help from some marvelous people, and a lot of luck, I did manage to graduate though ended up working away from computers and programming for several few years.

While at Miami of Ohio in 1975 Stafford Beer’s Platform for Change turned out to be a mind altering experience. The realization that everything is connected meant the world never look the same again.

A few years later, while in Boston one evening, I happened to walk by something called the “American Used Computer Store.” Being the inquisitive person I am I had to go in. It seems between the time I left the university and I ended up in Boston there had been a veritable explosion in the micro computer arena, and I was hooked. I bought the past few issues of Byte Magazine, which I devoured in a few days. Subsequently I purchased and assembled my Heathkit H8 Computer and H9 Video Terminal in my stateroom aboard ship. This led from one personal computer to another migrating from programming to developing models and doing simulations.

Upon leaving the Navy several years were spent developing computer programs while continuing to read about systems. In the midst of what appeared from my perspective a wonderful life, someone taught me how to spell marketing and essentially ruined the rest of my life. This led from one management position to another. I often found myself wondering what had happened to my life as I tried to understand what seemed to be the complete insanity of the antics ongoing among people within large high-tech organizations. As such I undertook to understand the nature of the interaction of people. As it turns out it pretty much makes complete sense once you have a basis for understanding.

Life seemed to evolve marvelously, or so I thought, until an article in Scientific American in 1991 presented STELLA, simulation software recently developed by Barry Richmond for for the Apple Macintosh. I had done some simulations in college in GPSS on an IBM 360 with punch cards which was unbelievably tedious. It was actually worse than watching paint dry though at the time there wasn’t much of an alternative. STELLA provided a whole new experience where one could develop a model and run it immediately to see the implications of the relationships. The more I worked with STELLA the more I began to think that Systems Thinking was just a not very grown up version of System Dynamics. This led me to wonder why there were so many models and methods that claimed to embrace The Systems Paradigm.

If this wasn’t chaotic enough what followed was several years engaged in assisting high-tech support organizations implementation of knowledge management processes. Processes which had the potential of enabling the organization to attain amazing levels of performance. Processes which in most instances only resulted in organizational performance becoming worse. It was this experience which set me on a path of study over a number of years endeavoring to understand why such potential remained unrealized in so many organizations.