From Science To SSM – A Summary

Wednesday, 9.39pm

Sheffield, U.K.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. – John W. Gardner

In Peter Checkland’s 1981 book “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice” (STSP), there is a helpful summary of the arguments developed in the book.

The scope, however, is vast.

Let me try and make sense of the summary, by in turn summarizing it.

In the beginning, there was magic and mystery and then science came along.

As an aside, I’m currently watching the BBC series Merlin, for no defensible reason.

The legends of King Arthur are set in a post-Roman time around the 5th and 6th centuries.

In the reimagined series, there is quite a lot about the methods of science.

The scientific method and modern science are really associated, however, with the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th century.

The three Rs made it clear what was science and what was not.

Reductionism, repeatability and refutation made it possible to build a reliable and continuously refined account of what went on in the world.

This worked very well in the restricted sciences like physics, and pretty well in the unrestricted sciences like biology.

But the methods of natural science start to break down when they are applied to complex and social situations.

In particular, they struggle with questions of ends and means – of “managing” activities.

While science is concerned with bits it’s less worried about wholes – and that’s where the systems concept entered the picture.

The systems concept is concerned with wholes and characteristics that emerge at different levels – characteristics that do not arise from lower levels.

For example, in biology, the science of cells does not explain why a particular arrangement of cells makes up a human body that sings.

The systems concept was seen as a useful way to address management problems associated with human activity.

But then we came up against different types of problems.

The techniques of analysis and engineering being used worked well on certain kinds of problems – hard ones – where there was a well defined problem that needed to be solved.

How do we bridge that large gap so a train can get from here to there, for example.

But the systems concept struggled with ill-structured problems.

How do you start to fix something that you know is broken but you’re not sure how to express the problem in the first place?

That issue led to the development of a new methodology from 1969 to 1972 in 9 studies.

We’ll dig into this in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh