I’ve returned from the EURO 25 conference with 30 pages of notes and a new appreciation for my own bed.
Like many practitioners I never realized that what I had been doing for over a decade was operational research – OR.
Many businesses get stuck trying to figure out what to do as things change around them.
Take sustainability, for example. What happens now? Should you invest in sustainable choices? Will everything just go back to fossil fuels? How do you make decisions in such complex environments?
Those are the kinds of questions OR helps with – it helps decision makers make better decisions.
And there are four things – at least – that I took away from the conference.
- Meetings are where things are decided
Many people hate meetings. They love the idea of sending their virtual note taker instead and just reading the summary.
That would be a mistake.
Meetings are where ideas are exchanged, consensus is formed, decisions are made, and resources are allocated.
You need to be in the room.
Soft OR and problem structuring talks about ways to hold better meetings.
Some great talks in this stream from Mike Yearworth, Chris Smith, Leroy White, and the UCL team with Ke (Koko) Zhou, Nici Zimmerman, Irene Pluchinotta and others.
- Models capture complexity
Just talking is rarely enough.
Models give people the power to hold more complex ideas in their heads and build more complete pictures of situations and resource flows.
Systems thinking is having a moment, we were told.
And as many equate ST with Systems Dynamics, David Lane’s talks were a must.
- Let’s get philosophical
Systems approaches have their roots, the founders tell us, in different philosophies.
It gets complicated very quickly.
Which is why it was helpful to have a session on the philosophical foundations of Systems Thinking by Graeme Forbes, along with an alternative history by Roger James.
- Reflecting on the field
As OR practitioners, we want to make a difference and improve how organisations work.
Mike Jackson talked about the way this has been done in the past, talking about Russ Ackoff’s vision of OR.
And, to learn more about how to study interventions in-depth, I had my first introduction to Behavioural OR with a workshop run by Martin Kunc and Alberto Franco.
I’ve missed many more great speakers from this list, and even more sessions I couldn’t attend – given there were 2,000 odd talks.
But there’s lots to think about.
I think the most important thing that came out was in David Lane’s session – with Blackett’s advice to OR practitioners trying to get things done:
- Use what you have
- Get access to senior people
Handcrafted insight 