Soft Systems Methodology Retrospective Checkland 2000

Although the history of thought reveals a number

of holistic thinkersÐ Aristotle, Marx, Husserl

among themÐ it was only in the 1950s that any

version of holistic thinking became institutionalized.

The kind of holistic thinking which

then came to the fore, and was the concern of a

newly created organization, was that which

makes explicit use of the concept of 'system', and

Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year

Retrospectivea

Peter Checkland*

25 Pinewood Avenue, Bolton-le-Sands, Carnforth, Lancashire, LA5 8AR, UK

INTRODUCTION

Although the history of thought reveals a number

of holistic thinkersÐ Aristotle, Marx, Husserl

among themÐ it was only in the 1950s that any

version of holistic thinking became institutionalized.

The kind of holistic thinking which

then came to the fore, and was the concern of a

newly created organization, was that which

makes explicit use of the concept of `system', and

today it is `systems thinking' in its various forms

which would be taken to be the very paradigm

of thinking holistically. In 1954, as recounted in

Chapter 3 of Systems Thinking, Systems Practice,

only one kind of systems thinking was on the

table: the development of a mathematically

expressed general theory of systems. It was supposed

that this would provide a meta-level language

and theory in which the problems of many

different disciplines could be expressed and

solved; and it was hoped that doing this would

help to promote the unity of science.

These were the aspirations of the pioneers, but

looking back from 1999 we can see that the project

has not succeeded. The literature contains very

little of the kind of outcomes anticipated by the

founders of the Society for General Systems

Research; and scholars in the many subject areas

to which a holistic approach is relevant have been

understandably reluctant to see their pet subject

as simply one more example of some broader

`general system'!

*Correspondence to: Peter Checkland, 25 Pinewood Avenue, Boltonle-

Sands, Carnforth, Lancashire, LA5 8AR.

aReproduced from Soft Systems Methodology in Action, John Wiley &

Sons, Ltd, Chichester, 1999.

But the fact that general systems theory (GST)

has failed in its application does not mean that

systems thinking itself has failed. It has in fact

flourished in several different ways which were

not anticipated in 1954. There has been development

of systems ideas as such, development of

the use of systems ideas in particular subject

areas, and combinations of the two. The development

in the 1970s by Maturana and Varela

(1980) of the concept of a system whose elements

generate the system itself provided a way of capturing

the essence of an autonomous living system

without resorting to use of an observer's

notions of `purpose', `goal', `information processing'

or `function'. (This contrasts with the theory

in Miller's Living Systems (1978), which

provides a general model of a living entity expressed

in the language of an observer, so that what

makes the entity autonomous is not central to

the theory.) This provides a good example of the

further development of systems ideas as such.

The rethinking, by Chorley and Kennedy (1971),

of physical geography as the study of the dynamics

of systems of four kinds, is an example of the

use of systems thinking to illuminate a particular

subject area.

This paper provides an example of the third

kind of development: a combination of the two

illustrated above. We set out to see if systems

ideas could help us to tackle the messy problems

of `management', broadly defined.

In trying to do this we found ourselves having

to develop some new systems concepts as a

response to the complexity of the everyday problem

situations we encountered, the kind of situations

which we all have to deal with in both our

professional and our private lives. The aim in the