[throwawayboise]

> The interactive manager plans backward from where he wants to be ideally, right now, not forward to where he wants to be in the future.

I'm having trouble understanding this point. Is he saying the interactive manager looks backwards at what he might have done differently in the past, to be in a better place today? Would a better term for this be a "retrospective manager"?

Or does this mean something else?

[brody_hamer]

I’ve heard this put another way, when someone asked me: “what did the ideal version of yourself do differently today?”

Which I found to be a dramatically different, and dramatically easier question to answer than something like “where do you want to be in 5 years?”

I found it help me shift away from trying to make predictions, and towards making healthy, productive (not self-sabotaging), well-rounded decisions with obvious long term benefits.

[Terretta]

See also regret minimization framework.

[RHSman2]

Brilliant

[ItsMonkk]

There was a recent Chess topic[0] that should help explain better.

Basically all the engines in Chess start with the present position, and try to look into the future move by move. To be able to find the winning position like that is almost impossible for the position they were looking at. And yet, if you give the idea to an average Chess player, they will work out how to get a Checkmate. They will do so by finding Mate, then working back on how to get the board to that state. They will find the winning position when they reach the current state.

He's simply taken this idea and generalized it further to more than Chess.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188854

[qznc]

If you drop the assumptions that you can forecast or plan, you can only do small steps "interactively". So invest no effort into planning but think about the last days and change something so you will make better decisions tomorrow. For example, have real time metrics so you can quickly observe the impact of deployed changes.

People like Ackoff are discussing healthcare and education systems. As a software developer I find I can't learn much about agility/velocity there.

"Retrospective" does not suggest anything about the delay. Could be a manager who comes up with 20yo war stories all the time. I rather believe it is about tight feedback loops and "interactive" captures that quite well.

[dminor]

I think he's saying the interactive manager doesn't guess what the future will be and plot a course for success in that future, but rather asks what would be ideal right now and plots a course to achieve that ideal.