July 14, 2011 When talking up Compression Thinking at the Lean Enterprise Research Center in Cardiff, Wales, one set of questions there differed from discussions in the United States: what is implied by “quality of life?” Compression Thinking hinges together two...
June 30, 2011 Some of the advisory group for the Compression Institute met last weekend. A mission statement has not been hammered out and wordsmith hardened, but it’s something like, “forming learning action groups to make Compression Thinking a common practice.” The...
June 30, 2011 In Scotland the Torness nuclear generating units have been shut down until at least July 5 to clean out jellyfish clogging the intake filters for cooling water. In France, as in the summer of 2009, unofficial channels report that nuke generators are...
June 10, 2011 How we view global food supplies parallels how we see many issues of Compression. How do you see global food problems? Using what evidence? How does that skew the further information you seek? This loop is sometimes called a ladder of inference. For...
June 10, 2011 Compression Thinking involves more than techniques. It shifts the values, and the valuation system, used to guide all kinds of working organizations, not just commercial ones. Bending our ideas of the criteria that represent success is apt to be...
David Veech, May 26, 2011 The Compression Institute is recommending that organizations take aggressive steps to become vigorous learning organizations. We make this recommendation because we lack perfect information. We can’t perfectly predict the future. Therefore...
May 27, 2011 “Reductionism,” just now edging into management literature, is too new to have begun degrading, like “linear thinking” for example. That buzzword meant to explain something using a simple model, and linear is simple. However, overtaken by buzzword decay,...
May 13, 2011 The concept of a progress trap embellishes the idea of unintended consequences. A 2004 book by Ronald Wright attracted attention to the phrase “progress trap,” so that today a Google search yields a variety of examples. All demonstrate human inability to...