You’ve gotta love when you write a history of two ways of thinking and people jump to someone at the end of the story — known specifically for bringing those two paths together — then claiming things are confused… despite that being the point of the article.

Sure Ackoff became the Dean of System Thinking… in the late 80’s and 90’s — at the end of the marketing consultant chaos… but he also lauded as driving Design Thinking in that same period. Also few would agree with his definition of analysis or the scientific method. The former is dated (of course so was he) and the latter is just wrong…

But I think in most of these videos and papers, he is actually trying to do better defining analysis with his three steps and conflating it with the scientific method — which is about hypothesis building, testing, etc.

But then he was a management consultant and not a scientist or analyst…

Regardless — he is a great source for those wanting understand where all this came together a few decades back… there is also far more that happened since. But please — go here to get a good start on Ackoff.