Friday, 8.41pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. – Alexander Graham Bell
The world is a complicated place. So how do we make sense of what we see happening around us? How do we operate businesses, institutions, and systems in a world of flux and change? In a world of hypercomplexity?
I don’t know about you but I find the pace of change seems to be exceeding recommended speed limits.
Whether it’s the dismantling of political systems or the daily advance of AI tooling things are happening too quickly to comprehend.
Systems thinking is one of the few fields that can make sense of situations and intervene with an understanding of the technology, culture and politics that affects what is going on
The Systemist is the journal of the UK systems society and, in its Summer 2024 issue, observes that new and better methodologies are not much use if there aren’t people who can understand, select and use them in the real world.
The reason for this is because the field is new and the scholarship is still primitive (Checkland, 1992).
It’s new, Checkland argues, in the sense that the origins of systems thinking go back to 1948, a mere 77 years, which is nothing compared to the 2000 years or more that the Western intellectual tradition has developed over.
But what exactly is lacking in scholarship – what does it mean to be scholarly?
A scholarly approach is one that tries to eliminate intellectual confusion.
I read somewhere that good writing does not seek to be understood, it seeks to not be misunderstood.
The confusion in the systems field includes: how systems ideas are presented; the difference between reality (ontology) and how we study it (epistemology); and what people want systems thinking to be and what it is.
Checkland’s paper makes one vitally important point.
There was a time that people believed that there was a way to communicate between different scientific fields – that there was a “Unity of Science”.
It was a hope that speakers of different languages could talk in a single general language and then translate their findings back into their own languages.
That doesn’t work.
General solutions do not work. As Checkland writes, “You pay for generality with lack of content”, and quotes Ken Boulding who said, “All we can say about practically everything is almost nothing.”
The real power of Systems thinking is when you have a real-world problem – something you care about and want to do something about.
And thinking and writing clearly about that problem and how you approached it is the way we become more scholarly.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Checkland, P., 1992. Systems and Scholarship: The Need to Do Better. The Journal of the Operational Research Society 43, 1023–1030. https://doi.org/10.2307/2584098
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