Month: May 2025

Sunday, 8.41pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves. – Will Rogers

This post is a set of reading notes from Holwell, S., 2000. Soft Systems Methodology: Other Voices. Systemic Practice and Action Research 13, 773–797, as I prepare to give a talk on the history of soft systems methodology (SSM).

I was going to carry on from my last post which was working through the summary in Systems Thinking Systems Practice (STSP) but then I felt I would just be repeating what Checkland had already said.

I stopped, thinking I should look more widely first and searched my collection of papers and came across Holwell (2000).

She makes the following observations:

1. Many people simply repeat Checkland’s work, more sophisticated approaches focus on specific aspects of the work;
2. A lot of people just don’t get it;
3. Early work in Lancaster was based on systems engineering – how do we approach that and is it dated?
4. The secondary literature is starting to impact the way people think about SSM.

From positivist thinking to interpretivist thinking

Brace yourselves. This is going to be heavy going. I find it tricky.

Checkland’s defining contribution is bringing “the concepts and philosophy of interpretive social science into systems thinking” (Flood and Ulrich, 1991, p.186).

Let’s unpack this.

First, interpretive rather than positivist refers to two ways of looking at the world. Positivism says that the world is real and all that matters can be observed and measured. Interpretivism says that you create the world along with others in your mind.

The systems concept is about wholes and the properties of wholes.

The application of systems thinking in the social sciences is usually under the heading of functionalism. This is Emile Durkheim’s theory that socity is similar to a biological organism. There are parts to it, and there are structures that connect these parts and that the workings of these parts within the whole enables a successful society.

A functionalist model “sees” society as parts and connections and can therefore accept that these parts can be designed, constructed and managed.

Society is a machine that can be controlled.

Now, you can see that this line of thinking leads to possibly problematic outcomes, such as dictatorships.

SSM has a model of social reality that is derived instead from Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology.

Husserl’s approach says something like rather than going with the traditional Western rationalist bias, pay attention to your real lived experience – it’s sometimes called the science of experience.

I think this must be similar to the Japanese concept of going to gemba – the place where the work is actually happening.

So I think what this is saying is that rather than starting with a framework that says this is how societies work and this is how we should organize things, go and look and see for yourself and rely on an intuitive approach, without assumptions or intellectualizing to “get” what is going on.

Which is a lot of big words to say something like just open your eyes and see what is in front of you rather than what you believe is in front of you.

The other connection SSM has is with Weber’s interpretive sociology, which combines a social group’s needs to have a coherent world view, but also what the power relationships are in their environments.

Again in simple terms – this is about why are we where we are, and how can we hold on to, or gain more power.

Think about this like a manager – why are you in your job, and how do you keep your position and get ahead?

Let’s stop here and carry on in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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