Kinston’s 1988 article is up.

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For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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Here’s the second in the set, from 1990. Warren probably hasn’t really looked at these for some time, and I know that he has taken things farther in documents coming out of his SIGMA Centre.
Warren Kinston and Ralph Rowbottom. 1990. “A New Model of Managing Based On Levels of Work”. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, [...]

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After Glenn Mehltretter’s comments about Kinston and Rowbottom’s article from 1990, I went and got copies, OCRed them, and got Warren’s permission to post them here. This is the first, from 1989. They are useful articles and should be in someone’s database but this journal has never been electronically archived anywhere that I could find.
Warren [...]

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If you’ve been following my discussions of Kinston and Algie’s Seven Languages of Achievement (aka Seven Decision Languages), here’s a good example of what someone who is a structuralist sounds like when talking to a pragmatist.
The manager, like most managers, is a pragmatist working in a pragmatist company. “Get ‘er done” is the motto. The [...]

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Warren Kinston needed to take the company in a direction that, at least for the next year or so, would preclude the work I had joined with him to do. We have therefore parted ways, and I wish him the best in getting his taxonomy into online products. Any questions about the future of the [...]

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From Kinston, Warren. 1988. “A total framework for inquiry”. Systems Research, 5(1): 9-25.

The inherent dangers in the Level VII' [the contemplative] inquiry include fixation on an incorrect idea and inappropriate messianism. Speculative ideas are not practically usable until they have been socially shared with the relevant community….
Scientific process occurs at this level through holistic syntheses [...]

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I’ve been studying Warren Kinston’s Strengthening the Management Culture [I work for one of Warren's companies]. I’d thought I’d blog some thoughts, partly because I feel that the title will turn people off in the New Economy Companies — I’d reckon that Building Your Organizational Culture would do better, although I’m not sure that it [...]

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