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
Handcrafted insight 