lecture 9: soft systems methodology
introduction
• Checkland distinguishes between the following:
• systems engineering:
engineers make sense of the world in the
following way: a product or a complete system is carefully specified as
required – the engineer uses her professional skills to meet the specification in
the most efficient, economic and elegant way – the engineer’s thinking is
teleological,she asks “what is the purpose to be served by the product” and
works back from the purpose to create the product that will achieve that
purpose
• systems analysis: developed by RAND Corporation is similar; it aims
to select the best alternative from among a discrete set so as to achieve the
given purpose in the most economical way
• operational research: originally sought to apply the empirical
method of natural science to real world operations with a purpose relying on
mathematical models that reflect the logic of situations
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• all these approaches assume that an important class of
real-world problems can be formulated as a search for
an efficient means of desirable objectives
• they reflect hard systems thinking
• Checkland started to develop the SSM when he saw
that systems engineering failed in many cases because
facts and the logic of the situation never supply a
complete description of a human problem situation;
equally important will be the meanings by which
humans make sense of their worlds
• the SSM was developed by working over hundreds of
projects as a learning system rather than a system
concerned with achieving objectives
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• briefly, SSM:
– is an organised but flexible process
– that deals with situations,
• someone sees as problematic
• that call for action to improve them
– so as to make these situations
• more acceptable
• less full of tensions and unanswered questions.
• it is a process of “thinking your way to
taking sensible action, to improve the
situation” based on systems ideas
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• the everyday life that we experience is a
complex flux of events, ideas, actions
emotions..
• to which we attribute a meaning
• that turns part of that flux into a
situation
• which may be seen as problematic and
needing intervention
• interaction with a situation means that
we make judgements about it that
depends on our Weltanschauung
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• systems ideas (such as communications, control,
hierarchy and emergence) are useful in SSM when
we realise that the common characteristic of
all problem situations is that they involve
individuals acting purposefully
• the purposeful action can be perceived as a
system, that can be
• represented by a purposeful activity model
• these are models of what we think purposeful
activity is; not models of what is taking place in
the real world
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• the purposeful activity model for fence painting
reflects the W of the fence painter
• there could be other similar models reflecting the W of
the neighbours or the wife of the painter
• so these models are not descriptions of the real world
• they only express one way of looking at the problem
situation
• and serve as intellectual devices of producing good
questions to ask about the situation
• so that different W’s are revealed and can be discussed
• with the purpose of achieving an accomodation that is
– systemically desirable and
– culturally feasible
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four-step SSM
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• these four ‘steps’ are never executed in sequence
• although SSM often starts with step 1, activity will then
continue simultaneously in more than one ‘steps’ as
shown in the following example:
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