Month: April 2025

Wednesday, 9.29pm

Sheffield, U.K.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. – Samuel Butler

I talked in my last post about having to work on a talk about the history of SSM.

For the next several posts I’m going to work on this project – so you may ending up learning more about SSM than you might consider necessary.

Here goes.

I could look at this history chronologically or thematically.

Let’s start at the end.

Peter Checkland, the name most associated with Soft Systems Methodology or SSM, delivered a keynote at OR 60, the Operations Research conference.

The paper that followed was called Reflections on 40 years in the management field: A Parthian shot (friendly).

A Parthian shot is a hit-and-run battle tactic used by the Parthians, an Iranian people.

Their cavalry would attack the enemy, then turn tail and run. The enemy would chase them believing they were fleeing. When the pursuers were close the Parthians would swing around in their saddles and fire their arrows into the chasing army.

This is where the term “parting shot” comes from – delivered by the person who has to have the last word as he or she leaves the room.

The talk and paper mark the end of Checkland’s professional career and so are perhaps the right place to start from to understand the journey that led to SSM.

They are reflections on the years “spent trying to understand the everyday real world in order to bring about positive changes in real-world situations which are taken to be problematical”.

Let’s unpack some of these elements – what are real-world situations that are taken to be problematical?

Wars, for starters. The Second World War was decidedly problematical. And it led to the creation of Operations Research as a field.

After the war, however, OR practitioners looked for other fields in which to apply their learnings, such as the management of organisations.

This in turn led to a rich set of techniques that were increasingly reductionist in nature, as benefitted a field that considered itself scientific.

And that led to another issue. A technique that solves a clear problem is great. But what if the problem itself is unclear?

This is something most people never really stop to consider.

Think about the last conversation you had where someone came up with a problem.

Did you feel like you had to offer a solution instantly?

Did you feel like even if you didn’t have one, there was a solution out there that could be found?

Did you ever stop to consider that the problem might be the way you were thinking about problems?

SSM’s origin story is somewhere in this space – in that period between when people believed that science could solve everything, and we learned that people behave in ways that science finds hard to deal with.

That’s a rabbit hole for the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 10.51pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A road’s just an opinion about which way to go. – Rudy Rucker

A few weeks back we went to visit the remains of a Roman fort at Housesteads.

Some unnervingly straight roads take you there.

It’s strange when you travel on a straight road in the UK.

If you do it usually means you’re on a road laid down by the Romans around 2,000 years ago.

I prefer to meander. It seems a more natural way to be. Or, I’m trying to excuse procrastinating.

I’m working on a paper about the history of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).

I find that when I have a project to work on these days I start by avoiding working on the thing itself.

Instead, I find ways to think about how to work on the thing.

I started by re-reading John McPhee’s essay on Structure.

I go back to this one quite often because he insists that his students start with a structure of some sort. It can be an outline. It can be a diagram. But the starting point is always a structure.

I like to start with a drawing of some kind – like the one that starts each of my posts.

The approach seems straightforward – you start with a structure, with an outline – something that you can build from like a design blueprint.

But, I think that sometimes the structure can only be seen when you aren’t looking for it.

It’s something you spy out of the corner of your eye as you distract yourself with something else.

I’ve read quite a lot about SSM over the years.

If I were following McPhee’s approach I’d first collect all my notes, sweep up all the raw material I have and put it in a pile.

Then, I’d go through this list, making and organising notes chronologically and thematically.

Then I’d look at my collections of notes and start to arrange them in a way that matched the structure I was thinking about.

And then I’d write.

This is the right way. A good way.

So why do I find it so hard to do?

Instead of following this approach I complained a lot in a series of notes.

Then I had something else to do.

When I had a few minutes free again, I tapped out an outline, something that started at the end, worked back to the beginning, and listed a number of themes that need to be put in some kind of order.

I’m finding that this approach seems to be helpful with other kinds of tasks as well.

Want to write some code?

Do your research. Read background information. Take notes.

Then, take a walk. Think about something else. Avoid working on the problem.

Then start work and see how the next stage goes.

This separation between stages, the willingness to give yourself time is hard to do – but it seems to help.

Perhaps it’s about giving your subconscious time to work on something while your conscious mind takes a break.

Still, the work does need to be done.

Perhaps tomorrow I should work on getting the outline finished.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.14pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I don’t write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do. – Octavia E. Butler

We live in uncertain times. The S&P500 is down 13% since the start of the year and no one really knows how things will play out.

Is this really something new?

Not really. Since I became aware that such things like markets existed, back at the start of this century, we’ve had a dot com crash, a housing crash, an energy crisis, the start of deglobalisation, a pandemic, a number of big and small wars, and what’s happening whenever you read this.

If you’re interested in making decisions under uncertainty what should you do, are there any models that can help?

I’m starting to think there aren’t.

Everything gets more complex the more you look at it.

Take something simple – the amount of time you spend reading versus the time you spend writing.

What do you read these days?

My list is depressing. I look at the BBC and CNN and get a set of world highlights.

I don’t bother with social media other than taking a brief look at LinkedIn.

I read the Economist when I remember to log into my library app, which suggested in its last issue that LinkedIn is the last space where you get useful information but that’s changing because users don’t spend enough time on it – less than an hour a week versus 35 hours on Tiktok if I remember correctly, although 35 hours – really?

I find stuff worth reading on Mastadon, where you come across pointers to posts like this one by Kat Hicks.

There’s a section in this post that talks about how you see what’s actually going on, the real rules that people play by when you’re not watching.

It talks about how to understand a thing you must also understand its opposite – things come in pairs.

This is similar to Kelly’s concept of bipolar constructs that underpins Colin Eden’s Strategic options development and analysis (SODA).

I have a lot on my mind right now and Hicks’ post reminded me of the power of pairs and I used them to jot down some of the things I’m thinking about.

Reading, in this case, led to writing.

I used a model to help me get started but, if you remember, I said earlier that I’m not sure models help that much.

So what’s going on?

I’m not going to go through the rest of my list in the image above, but what I think I’m trying to say is that life consists of contradictions.

We spend our days trying to figure out where to position ourselves between these extremes, driven partly by what we want to do and partly by what the environment demands from us.

And that means we have to be comfortable with uncertainty, with complexity, with the unavailability of clear answers and simple solutions.

We have to figure our way through situations that are never as bad as they seem and never as good as we’d like them to be.

We usually find that the future is obscured, that we see dimly, that of the many options that we could pick from none are compelling enough to commit to completely.

It’s when we commit that we take on risk. It’s when we commit that we reap rewards. How can things be both good and bad? And yet they always are.

I therefore reach this unhelpful conclusion.

Keep all your options open for as long as possible.

When given a choice between two things, do both.

Except when you have to make up your mind and commit to one thing.

Then do that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh