The 2012 DSI Annual Meeting will feature these exciting plenary talks by leading professionals and academics in the decision sciences. Check back for more details.

Stuart Kauffman on “Beyond Entailing Laws”: The Illusion in our Habit of Control and the Promise of a Habit of Enablement”

We still live in the shadow of Newton, who taught us how to think scientifically. He invented differential and integral calculus, three laws of motion and universal gravitation. Consider billiard balls rolling on a billiard table. Newton tells us to specify the initial conditions of positions and momenta of the balls, the boundary conditions of the table, write his laws of motion giving the forces among the balls in differential equation form, then integrate the equations to deduce the future trajectories of the balls. But deduction is “entailment” and Strong Reductionism hopes for a Theory of Everything in which all that arises in the universe is entailed.

I will discuss recent, powerful results with mathematicians Giuseppe Longo and Mael Montevil of the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, posted on Physics ArXhiv and almost in press, which we believe show that the evolution of the biosphere and of the “econosphere” is beyond entailing laws. No Newton-like laws entail the evolution of the economy. More, we find that without selection in evolution, or intent in the evolving economy, each builds the very possibilities of its own future becoming in an unprestatable radical emergence. Think: Turing Machine, main frame, personal computer, word processing, sharing files, the Web, selling on the Web, content on the Web, Google browsers, Facebook and the Arabic Spring.

Critically, no one can prestate this emergence. Thus, not only do we not know what WILL happen, we often do not know even what CAN happen. We cannot prestate the possibilities. In this context, the 1950’s style General Motor top down management fails, for we do not know the ever new variables that become relevant, thus cannot optimize over a strategy space we cannot prestate. In its place we need to explore the promise of a habit of enablement, in management, and government.

Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits. In January 2009, he became a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing. The appointment is until the end of 2012. In January 2010, he joined the University of Vermont faculty where he will continue his work with UVM's Complex Systems Center.

Jeffrey K. Liker on "The Myth of Top Down Decision Making:  Distributed Problem Solving at Toyota"

The stereotype of corporate decision making features the lone CEO or the C-Suite team making decisions which are executed by the corporation as if organizations are computers and executives need only pick the right software and program it.  In reality organizations are complex social systems and decisions at the top are only loosely related to organizational processes and their outputs.  The correspondence between the intention of decisions and the results depend on organizational alignment which depends on organizational culture.  This presentation will use Toyota as an example focusing on hoshin kanri (aka policy deployment) as a methodology for organizational alignment.  Hoshin kanri depends on dedication and patience of developing leaders at all levels with the skills to use disciplined problem solving and convert objectives to actionable plans and lead teams through an exploratory process to work toward clear targets for improvement.

Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and principle of Optiprise, Inc. Dr. Liker has authored or co-authored over 75 articles and book chapters and nine books. He is author of the international best-seller, The Toyota Way (see YouTube book trailer), which speaks to the underlying philosophy and principles that drive Toyota's quality and efficiency-obsessed culture.

Jack Meredith on “OM Journal Research vis-à-vis Managerial Decisions: Where Are We?”

The talk will begin with a brief review of the research history of our field and the role of various journals in our research evolution. The focus will then shift to managerial decision making, including where we’ve been and where we seem to be today based on recent examples from the literature. From there we will explore some possible futures for our research and its impact (or not) on managerial decisions, with a brief final “plug” for more case and field research.

Jack Meredith is Professor of Management and Broyhill Distinguished Scholar and Chair in Operations at the Schools of Business at Wake Forest University. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Operations Management from 1994-2002 and more recently was the founding and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Operations Management Research from 2005-2011. He has co-authored five textbooks for college classes.