Recently I asked three corporate executives what decisions they had made in the last year that they would not have made were it not for their corpora… - Russell L. Ackoff

An organization's mission statement (1) should contain its reasons for existence and its most general aspirations, its ideals. (2) It should identify in very general terms the way(s) by which the organization will pursue its ideals, that is, the business it wants to be in. (3) It should formulate the ways by which it will attempt to serve each of its stakeholder groups. (4) It should meet the preceding requirements in a way that is exciting and challenging to all its stakeholders. Finally, (5) it should establish the uniqueness of the organization.

Analysis of a system reveals how it works; it provides know-how, knowledge, not understanding; that is, explanations of why it works the way it does. This [understanding of why systems work] requires synthetic thinking... Analysis is the way scientists conduct research. Synthetic thinking is exemplified by design.

In proactive problem solving we specify where we want to go, and we try to get there. Although such an approach does not eliminate the possibility of overlooking relevant consequences of our solutions, it reduces the probability of doing so. The more ultimate the desired outcome we specify, the more likely we are to consider the intermediate and long-run consequences of our immediate actions. The more immediate the source of dissatisfaction we try to get rid of, the less likely we are to take account of relevant consequences. Therefore, the chances of overlooking relevant consequences are minimized when we formulate a problem in terms of approaching one or more ideals.