• • • Abstract Soft systems methodology (SSM) is an approach for tackling problematical, messy situations of all kinds. It is an action-oriented process of inquiry into problematic situations in which users learn their way from finding out about the situation, to taking action to improve it. The learning emerges via an organised process in which the situation is explored using a set of models of purposeful action (each built to encapsulate a single worldview) as intellectual devices, or tools, to inform and structure discussion about a situation and how it might be improved.

This paper, written by the original developer Peter Checkland and practitioner John Poulter, gives a clear and concise account of the approach that covers SSM’s specific techniques, the learning cycle process of the methodology and the craft skills which practitioners develop. This concise but theoretically robust account nevertheless includes the fundamental concepts, techniques, core tenets described through a wide range of settings. • We all live in the midst of a complex interacting flux of changing events and ideas which unrolls through time. We call it ‘everyday life’, both personal and professional. Within that flux we frequently see situations which cause us to think: ‘Something needs to be done about this, it needs to be improved.’ Think of these as ‘problematical situations’, avoiding the word ‘problem’ since this implies ‘solution’, which eliminates the problem for ever. Real life is more complex than that!

Purpose of the system and therefore the problem. Two key players in the development of the SSM are Peter Checkland [1999] and Brian Wilson [2001] who through “action research” were able to put together a practical and pragmatic approach to the identification and solution of “soft” ill-defined problems. This methodology. Dynamics, Group Model Building, Modelling as Radical Learning, Agency Dynamics (Lane. (1999), Vennix (1996)), which are approaches near to the interpretive and learning paradigm. 2.2 SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY (SSM). Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is one of the most developed Systems.

• Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is an organized way of tackling perceived problematical (social) situations. It is action-oriented. It organizes thinking about such situations so that action to bring about improvement can be taken. • The complexity of problematical situations in real life stems from the fact that not only are they never static, they also contain multiple interacting perceptions of ‘reality’.

This comes about because different people have different taken-as-given (and often unexamined) assumptions about the world. This causes them to see it in a particular way. One person’s ‘terrorism’ is another’s ‘freedom fighting’; one person sees a prison in terms of punishment, another sees it as seeking rehabilitation. These people have different worldviews. Tackling problematical situations has to accept this, and has to pitch analysis at a level that allows worldviews to be surfaced and examined. For many people worldviews are relatively fixed; but they can change over time.

Sometimes a dramatic event can change them very quickly. • All problematical situations, as well as containing different worldviews, have a second important characteristic. They always contain people who are trying to act purposefully, with intention, not simply acting by instinct or randomly thrashing about - though there is always plenty of that too in human affairs. • The previous two points - the existence of conflicting worldviews and the ubiquity of would-be purposeful action - lead the way to tackling problematical situations. They underpin the SSM approach, a process of inquiry which, through social learning, works its way to taking ‘action to improve’.

Its shape is as follows: • 1.Find out about both the problematical situation and the characteristics of the intervention to improve it: the issues, the prevailing culture and the disposition of power within the overall situation (its politics). Ways of doing these things are provided. • 2.From the finding out, decide upon some relevant purposeful activities, relevant that is to exploring the situation deeply, and remembering that the ultimate aim is to define and take ‘action to improve’. Express these relevant purposeful activities as activity models, each made to encapsulate a declared worldview, the model being a cluster of linked activities which together make up a purposeful whole. (For example, one model could express in terms of activities the notion ‘prison’ as if it were only ‘a punishment system’, another could express it as ‘a rehabilitation system’.) Such models never describe the real world, simply because they are based on one pure worldview. They are devices, or tools, to explore it in an organized way.

Techniques for building and using such models have been developed. • 3.Use the models as a source of questions to ask of the real-world situation. This provides a coherent structure to a discussion or debate about both the situation and how it might be changed, a discussion which will surface worldviews and generate ideas for change and improvement. • 4.In the course of the discussion, continually bring together the results of the ‘finding out’ in (1) and the ideas for change in (3).

The purpose now is to find changes which are both arguably desirable (given these models) but also culturally feasible for these people in this particular situation with its particular history, culture and politics. This is a process of seeking accommodations between different worldviews.

That is to say, it is a process of finding versions of the to-be-changed situation which different people with conflicting worldviews could nevertheless live with. (Don’t expect the worldviews to go away, nor wish that they would. Clashing worldviews, always present in human affairs, stimulate energy and ideas for change.) • The elements (1) to (4) above constitute a learning cycle.

They have necessarily been described linearly here but in use there is much iteration within the cycle as learning occurs. It is never followed in the flat-footed way in which it has been laid out here for explanatory purposes. Also it is apparent that it is essentially a group process leading to group learning.

It is best carried out by people in the problematical situation itself, not left to an outside ‘expert’, though knowledgeable people can facilitate the process. • Taking action to improve a problematical situation will of course itself change that situation, so that the learning cycle could in principle begin again. In any case the changing flux of everyday life will itself bring new events and new ideas, so that no human situation could ever be rendered static. In this sense SSM’s learning cycle can be seen as never-ending. It ultimately offers a way of continuously managing any ongoing human situation.

It does this by helping understanding of complex situations, encouraging multiple perspectives to be taken into account, and bringing rigour to processes of analysis, debate and taking ‘action to improve’. 5.1 SSM’s cycle of learning for action 5.1.1 What Can SSM Be Used for? The application area for SSM is very broad. This is not due to megalomania on the authors’ part.

Rather it stems from the wide applicability of two key ideas behind SSM. One of these is to create a process of learning your way through problematical situations to ‘action to improve’ - a very general concept indeed. The other is the idea that you can make sure this learning is organized and structured by using, as a source of questions to ask in the real situation, models (systems models) of purposeful activity. This is because every real-world situation contains people trying to act purposely, intentionally. It is the sheer generality of purposeful action - the core of being human - that makes the area in which SSM can be used so huge.

Stories of SSM use come from all sizes of company from small firms to large corporations, from organizations in both private and public sectors including the National Health Service. SSM is much used in the world of information systems and information technology. This derives from the fact that for any purposeful activity model (Fig. 5.7 being a very simple example) you can ask of each activity: What information would support doing this activity? And what information would be generated by doing it? Since information is what you get when you attribute meaning to data in a particular context, and meaning attribution depends upon worldview, SSM’s strong emphasis on worldview explains its relevance to this field. In summary, SSM can be used in any human situation which entails thinking about acting purposefully, and is especially useful in any situation in which it is helpful to lift the level of discussion from that of everyday opinions and dogma to that level at which you are asking: What taken-as-given worldview lies behind these assertions of opinion?

5.1.2 Is SSM Mature? Obviously it is never possible to claim that the development of any approach to human inquiry is ‘finished’, though some features of any such process may become so taken-as-given as to appear permanent. For example, in the inquiry process of natural science, if you are testing a new drug you give some patients the drug while others receive a placebo.

The difference between the group ingesting the drug and the so-called ‘control’ group taking the placebo tells you what effects the drug produces (given a statistically significant sample size). This pattern would seem to be a permanent feature of scientific experiment. In applied social science, where SSM sits, the situation is less definite. Nevertheless, after hundreds of studies the core processes of SSM do now appear to be well-established, though the application area continues to expand. In the early days each significant study was likely to cause some rethinking of the process itself; but such changes became increasingly rare over the 30-year development period.

We now regard it as a mature process. The most recent addition to the literature about its development describes the use of SSM both in relation to the perceived content of the situation in question - SSM (c) and in relation to the process of carrying out the inquiry itself - SSM (p). This is in a paper published in 2006. But this is a case of the literature lagging behind practice, as these twin uses of SSM have been recognized and exploited by those developing the approach since the early 1980s. So SSM is now considered mature enough to justify inclusion in this book. 5.1.3 How Was SSM Created?

The classic way of doing research comes from natural science: set up a hypothesis and then test it experimentally. It is not easy to transfer this model of research to the gloriously rich social and human arena, though strenuous efforts to do that have been made over many years. SSM was developed using an alternative model of research, one more suitable for ‘social’ research at the level of a situation, group or organization, namely ‘action research’. In this kind of research you accept the great difficulty of scientific experimental work in human situations, since each human situation is not only unique, but changes through time and exhibits multiple conflicting worldviews. Hence the pattern for the action researcher is to enter a human situation, take part in its activity, and use that experience as the research object. In order to do that, to do more than simply return from the research with a one-off story to tell, it is necessary to declare in advance the intellectual framework you, the researcher, will use to try to make sense of the experience gained.

Given such an explicit framework, you can then describe the research experience in the well-defined language of the framework. This makes it possible for anyone outside the work to ‘recover’ it, to see exactly what was done and how the conclusions were reached. This ‘recoverability’ requirement is obviously not as strong as the ‘repeatability’ criterion for scientific findings within natural science. But then human situations are very much more complex than the phenomena studied in physics and chemistry labs! It is the declared framework and recoverability criterion which clearly separate accounts of well-organized action research from novel writing - which, alas, too much published social research resembles. In the action research which produced SSM the initial declared framework was the Systems Engineering approach developed by the Bell Telephone Company from their own case histories.

Systems Engineering (SE) is a process of naming a ‘system’ (assumed to be some complex object which exists or could exist in the real world), defining its objectives, and then using an array of techniques developed in the 1950s and 1960s to ‘engineer’ the system to meet its objectives. This framework was rapidly found to be poverty-stricken when faced with the complexity of human situations. It was too thin, not rich enough to deal with fizzing social complexity. The SE framework was modified (and enriched) in the light of and in direct response to real-life experiences.

Eventually, we had in our hands an adequately rich framework, but it was far removed from the starting point in SE. It became known as Soft Systems Methodology. It then took some time for even its pioneers to realize just how radical the shift had been from SE to SSM.

Having introduced the notion of ‘worldview’ - essential in dealing with human social complexity - we were thereafter thinking of systems models not as descriptions of something in the real world but simply as devices (based on worldview) to organize a debate about ‘change to bring about improvement’. That was the key step in finding our way to SSM. This important shift in thinking is not abstruse, but it turns out to be very difficult for many people to grasp, simply because everyone is so used to the casual everyday-language use of the word ‘system’.

In ordinary talk we constantly refer to complex chunks of the everyday world as systems, even though they do not come close to meeting the requirements of that concept. We speak of ‘the education system’, ‘health-care systems’, ‘the prison system ‘, etc. Using the word ‘system’ simply to indicate a chunk of reality which seems to be very complex but is, in some vague sense, a whole, something which might be better ‘engineered’. Figure gives a visual indication of the shift in thinking as SE was transformed into SSM.

Once the end point in Fig. Was reached, and the SSM framework had been established, it was further developed, modified and honed in a few hundred new experiences.

Out of this came a model which captures all of these developmental experiences. The model, known as the LUMAS model is shown in Fig..

(It is in fact a generic model for making sense of any real-world application of any methodology, remembering that that word covers a set of principles which need to be embodied in an application tailored to meet the unique features of a particular situation.). 5.3 The LUMAS model - learning for a user by a methodically-informed approach to a situation LUMAS stands for Learning for a User by a Methodology-informed Approach to a Situation. In order to ‘read’ this model, start from the user (U) in the centre.

He or she, perceiving a problem situation (S) and appreciating the methodology (M), tailors the latter to the former to produce the specific approach (A) to be used in this situation (S). This not only produces an improved situation but also yields learning (L). This will change the user, who has gained this experience, and may also modify or enrich appreciation of the methodology. Every use of SSM can in principle be described in the language of this model.

It is the gradually diminishing activity, over the years, of development occurring along the arrow which links L and M that makes it legitimate to describe SSM as mature. 5.1.4 How Does SSM Differ from Other Systems Approaches?

As described above, changes had to be made to Systems Engineering when it proved too blunt an instrument to deal with the complexity of human situations. Those changes explain SSM’s difference from the other systems approaches developed in the 1950s and 1960s. SE is an archetypal example of what is now known as ‘hard’ systems thinking. Its belief is: the world contains interacting systems. They can be ‘engineered’ to achieve their objectives. This is the stance not only of SE; this thinking also underpins classic Operational Research, RAND Corporation ‘systems analysis’, the Viable System Model, early applications of System Dynamics and the original forms of computer systems analysis.

None of these approaches pays attention to the existence of conflicting worldviews, something which characterizes all social interactions. In order to incorporate the concept of worldview into the approach being developed, it was necessary to abandon the idea that the world is a set of systems. In SSM the (social) world is taken to be very complex, problematical, mysterious, characterized by clashes of worldview. It is continually being created and recreated by people thinking, talking and taking action. However, our coping with it, our process of inquiry into it, can itself be organized as a learning system. So the notion of systemicity (‘systemness’) appears in the process of inquiry into the world, rather than in the world itself.

This shift created ‘soft’ as opposed to ‘hard’ systems thinking, the different stances adopted by the two being shown in Fig., itself another version of Fig. This brings us to the end of a skeletal account of SSM as a whole. The next sections expand on this, describing the techniques used in the cyclic process in detail. Meanwhile it seems worthwhile to try to summarize the broad account of SSM in a couple of sentences.

SSM is an action-oriented process of inquiry into problematical situations in the everyday world; users learn their way from finding out about the situation to defining/taking action to improve it. The learning emerges via an organized process in which the real situation is explored, using as intellectual devices - which serve to provide structure to discussion -models of purposeful activity built to encapsulate pure, stated worldviews. 5.2 SSM in Practice. The aim of the work which led to the development of Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland 1981) was to find a better way of dealing with a kind of situation we continually find ourselves facing in everyday life: a situation about which we have the feeling that ‘something needs to be done about this’.

We shall call such situations ‘problematical’, rather than describing them as ‘problem situations’, since they may not present a well-defined ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ out of existence - everyday life is more complex than that! A company might feel that it needs to stimulate sales, perhaps by introducing a new product; or should they bid for the equity of a smaller rival? A university may feel that its student intake is too biased towards students from middle-class homes.

What are the implications of changing that? A government may struggle to define legislation which would increase the feeling of security on the streets, given the threat of terrorism, without diminishing civil liberties. A local council may be receiving complaints that the delivery of its services is not sufficiently ‘citizen-friendly’. What should it do? A head teacher may wonder how to decide whether to take on the responsibility for providing school meals (the school benefiting from any surplus generated) or to leave that function to the local education authority. An individual may develop a sense of unease about the future viability of the firm he or she works for, and wonder whether to look for a job elsewhere. All these are ‘problematical situations’.

They could be tackled in various ways: by appealing to previous experience; intuitively; by randomly thrashing about (never a shortage of that in human situations); by responding emotionally; or they could be addressed by using SSM. So what is it? It is an organized, flexible process for dealing with situations which someone sees as problematical, situations which call for action to be taken to improve them, to make them more acceptable, less full of tensions and unanswered questions.

The ‘process’ referred to is an organized process of thinking your way to taking sensible ‘action to improve’ the situation; and, finally, it is a process based on a particular body of ideas, namely systems ideas. That these ideas have proved themselves to be useful in dealing with the complexity of the social world is hardly surprising. Social situations are always complex due to multiple interactions between different elements in a problematical situation as a whole, and systems ideas are fundamentally concerned with the interactions between parts of a whole. So it is systems ideas which help to structure the thinking. (However, the way systems ideas are used within SSM is fundamentally different from the way they inform the various earlier systems approaches developed in the 1950s and 1960s). In order to ensure that the previous two paragraphs are clear, we need to unpack them somewhat, and say a little more about the crucial elements within them.

Four elements in the paragraphs above will be expanded: ‘everyday life and problematical situations’; ‘tackling such situations’; a ‘flexible process’, and ‘the use of systems ideas’. 5.2.1 Everyday Life and Problematical Situations As members of the human tribe we experience everyday life as being quite exceptionally complex.

We feel ourselves to be carried along on an on-rushing turbulent stream, a flux of happenings, ideas, emotions, actions, all mediated through the slippery agency of language, all continually changing. Our response to our immersion in this stream is not simply to experience it. Beyond that, we have an innate desire to try to see it, if we can, as meaningful.

We attribute meaning to it - the ability to do this being one of the characteristics which marks us out as human. Part of this meaning attribution is to see chunks of the ongoing flux as ‘situations’.

Nothing is intrinsically ‘a situation’; it is our perceptions which create them as such, and in doing that we know that they are not static; their boundaries and their content will change over time. Some of the situations we perceive, because they affect us in some way, cause us to feel a need to tackle them, to do something about them, to improve them. 5.2.2 Tackling Problematical Situations As we tackle a situation we see as problematical, we are intervening in order to take action intended to bring about improvement. In order to do that sensibly we need to have a clear idea of what it is we are intervening in. This means having a clear view of the nature of the flux which constitutes everyday life. We have already described it as complex, changing, and having multiple strands: events, ideas, emotions, actions.

To this we can add an answer to the question: What then happens when we intervene in a part of the flux seen as a problematical situation? When we interact with real-world situations we make judgements about them: are they ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’, ‘permanent’ or ‘transient’?

Now, to make any judgement we have to appeal to some criteria or standards, these being the characteristics which define ‘good’ or ‘bad’ etc. For example an ‘eco-warrior’ would judge any economic activity ‘good’ only if it met the environmentalists’ criteria for ‘good’, namely ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘sustainable’. A ‘capitalist’ would see an economic activity as ‘good’ if it were ‘profitable’.

And where do such criteria come from? They will be formed partially by our genetic inheritance from our parents, the kind of person we are innately - and, most significantly, from our previous experience of the world. Over time these criteria and the interpretations they lead to will tend to firm up into a relatively stable outlook through which we then perceive the world. We develop ‘worldviews’, built-in tendencies to see the world in a particular way. It is different worldviews which make one person ‘liberal’, another ‘reactionary’.

Worldviews cause one observer’s ‘terrorism’ to be another’s ‘freedom fighting’. Such world-views are relatively stable but can change over time. Thus a paranoid person whose worldview is ‘this hostile world owes me a living’ might become a more integrated member of society as a result of experiencing love and generosity. This concept of worldview (the German Weltanschauung being the best technical word for it) is the most important concept in understanding the complexity of human situations, and indeed, the nature and form of SSM. 5.2.3 A Flexible Process It is obvious from the argument so far that any approach able to deal with the changing complexity of real life will have to be flexible.

It could never be reduced to a sequence of steps, which might be handed over to an intelligently programmed robot. It needs to be flexible enough to cope with the fact that every situation involving human beings is unique. The human world is one in which nothing ever happens twice, not in exactly the same way. This means that an approach to problematical human situations has to be a methodology rather than a method, or technique. A methodology, as the word indicates, is a logos of method; that is to say it is a set of ongoing principles which can be adapted for use in a way which suits the specific nature of each situation in which it is used.

SSM provides a set of principles which can be both adopted and adapted for use in any real situation in which people are intent on taking action to improve it. 5.2.4 The Use of Systems Ideas As stated above, systems ideas concern interaction between parts which make up a whole; also, the complexity of real situations is always to a large extent due to the many interactions between different elements in human situations. So it is not surprising that systems ideas have some relevance to dealing with real-world complexity (though they are only very rarely useful in describing that complexity). The core systems idea or concept is that of an adaptive whole (a ’system’) which can survive through time by adapting to changes in its environment. The concept is illustrated in Fig..

A system S receives shocks from its changing environment E. If it is to survive, it requires communication processes (to know what is going on) and control processes (possible adaptive responses to the shocks). Also, the system may contain sub-systems SS, or may itself be seen by a different observer as only a sub-system of some wider system. The idea of a layered structure is thus fundamental in systems thinking. Finally, what is said to be a system must have some properties as a single whole, so-called emergent properties. The relevance of this kind of thinking to SSM emerged when it was realised that every single real-world problematical situation, whether in a small firm making wheelbarrows, a multi-national oil company, or in the National Health Service (which employs more than a million people) has one characteristic in common. All such situations contain people trying to act purposefully not simply acting by instinct or splashing about at random.

From this observation comes the key idea of treating purposeful action as a system. A way of representing purposeful action as a system, i.e. An adaptive whole (in line with Fig. ) was invented.

Figure shows its general form. 5.7 A simple example of an activity model: a system to paint the garden fence by hand painting The model in Fig. Is essentially within the worldview of whoever would do the fence painting. It is an instrumental model which spells out what is entailed in painting a garden fence. It could express the householder’s worldview: ‘I can do useful DIY jobs to improve my property.’ However, if painting the fence were an issue in a real situation other worldviews would be relevant, even in an example as trivial as this - for example, in this case, those of the neighbours or the partner of the fence-painter. In general there will always be a number of worldviews which could be taken into account leading to a number of relevant models.

Suppose, for example, you were carrying out an SSM study of the future of the Olympic Games. For anything as complex as this global phenomenon it is obvious that it could be looked at from the perspective of worldviews attributed to the International Olympic Committee, the host country, the host city, the athletes, the athletes’ coaches, the spectators, hot dog sellers, commercial sponsors, those responsible for security, television companies, a terrorist group seeking publicity for their cause, etc.

This list could go on and on; there could never be a single model relevant to all these different interests. An important consequence flows from this: these purposeful activity models can never be descriptions of (part of) the real world.

Each of them expresses one way of looking at and thinking about the real situation, and there will be multiple possibilities. So how can such models be made useful? The answer is to see them as devices (intellectual devices) which are a source of good questions to ask about the real situation, enabling it to be explored richly. For example, we could focus on the differences between a model and the situation, and ask whether we would like activity in the situation to be more, or less, like that in the model.

Such questioning organizes and structures a discussion/debate about the real-world situation, the purpose of that discussion being to surface different worldviews and to seek possible ways of changing the problematical situation for the better. This means finding an accommodation, that is to say a version of the situation which different people with different worldviews could nevertheless live with.

Given the different worldviews which will always be present in any human situation, this means finding possible changes which meet two criteria simultaneously. They must be arguably desirable, given the outcomes of using the models to question the real situation, but must also be culturally feasible for these particular people in this particular situation with unique history and the unique narrative which its participants will have constructed over time in order to make sense of their experience. Figure illustrates this.

• A problematical real-world situation seen as calling for action to improve it • Models of purposeful activity relevant to this situation (not describing it) • A process of using the models as devices to explore the situation • A structured debate about desirable and feasible change This gives the bare bones of the process of SSM, whose shape can now be described. 5.2.5 What Is the SSM Process? The SSM process takes the form of a cycle. It is, properly used, a cycle of learning which goes from finding out about a problematical situation to defining/taking action to improve it. The learning which takes place is social learning of the group undertaking the study, though each individual’s learning will be, to a greater or lesser extent, personal to them given their different experiences of the world, and hence the different worldviews which they will bring to the study. Taking action as a result of the study will of course change the starting situation into a new situation, so that in principle the cycle could begin again (a relevant system then being ‘a system to make these changes’).

SSM is thus not only a methodology for a specially set-up study or project; it is, more generally, a way of managing any real-world purposeful activity in an ongoing sense. This description of the cycle as activities (1) to (4) may give a false impression that we are describing a sequence of steps. Although virtually all investigations will be initiated by finding out about the problematical situation, once SSM is being used, activity will go on simultaneously in more than one of the ‘steps’. For example, starting the organized discussion about the situation (3) will normally lead not only to further new finding out (1), perhaps focused on aspects previously ignored, but also to further new choices of ‘relevant’ systems to model. In real life, an investigation which sets out narrowly to improve, say, aspects of product distribution in a manufacturing company’s distribution department, may well later sweep in issues concerning, perhaps, communications between production and marketing departments. Figure illustrates a typical pattern of activity of the kind which emerges as an investigation digs deeper. 5.10 A typical pattern of activity during an SSM investigation Figure shows an on-going ‘finding out’ activity, three bursts of model building, discussion fed by both the models and the finding out, which itself leads to more finding out and more modelling.

The final (fourth) burst of modelling shown here as an example follows from defining the ‘action to improve’ and would consist of purposeful activity models relevant to carrying out the action agreed. Finally, in describing the SSM cycle, we could add (though this is really a point from the end of this chapter) that as users of SSM become more sophisticated they treat Fig. Not at all as a prescription to be followed, but as a model to make sense of their experience as they mentally negotiate their way through the problematical situation.

The previous sections have still focused on the basic question about SSM - what is it? Additionally, they have provided some context for its development, its application areas and the crucial difference from the systems approaches of the l950s and 1960s. In the next sections the focus shifts more to ‘how’ rather than ‘what’: How exactly does the user move through the learning cycle of SSM, shown in Fig., in order to define useful change? Which techniques for finding out, modelling and using models to question the real situation have shown themselves robust enough to survive in many different circumstances, so that they have become part of the classic approach?

The account here will follow the four basic activities of the broad-brush account (finding out, modelling, using the models to structure debate, and defining/taking action), with the usual reminder that activity in any project using SSM will reflect the kind of pattern shown in Fig. Rather than a stately linear progress. 5.2.6 The SSM Learning Cycle: Finding Out Four ways of finding out about a problematical situation have survived many tests and become a normal part of using SSM. In the language of SSM they are known as ‘making Rich Pictures’ and carrying out three kinds of inquiry, known as ‘Analyses One, Two and Three’. These focus, respectively, on the intervention itself, a social analysis (What kind of ‘culture’ is this?) and a political analysis (What is the disposition of power here?).

They will be described in turn. 5.2.6.1 Making Rich Pictures. Entering a real situation in order first to understand it and then to begin to change it in the direction of ‘improvement’ calls for a particular frame of mind in the user of SSM. On the one hand the enquirer needs to be sponge-like, soaking up as much as possible of what the situation presents to someone who may be initially an outsider.

On the other hand, although holding back from imposing a favoured pattern on the first impressions, the enquirer needs to have in mind a range of ‘prompts’ which will ensure that a wide range of aspects are looked. Crack Corel X5 Remove Protexis Surgical Gloves. Initially two dense and cogent questions were used as a prompt. • What resources are deployed in what operational processes under what planning procedures within what structures, in what environments and wider systems, by whom? • How is resource deployment monitored and controlled?

Certainly, if you can answer these questions you know quite a lot about the situation addressed. But these questions did not survive as a formal part of SSM. The problem with them is that when they were formulated, in the early days of SSM development, the thinking of the pioneers had not sufficiently divorced itself from thinking of the world as a set of systems. The questions imply intervention in some real-world system - hence the references to ‘wider systems’ and to monitoring and control - rather than the intervention being addressed to a situation.

The questions would no doubt have been changed eventually as the true nature of SSM was realized. However, what happened instead was that the questions were dropped because the phrase ‘rich picture’ quickly moved from being a metaphor to being a literal description of an account of the situation as a picture. The rationale behind this was as follows.

The complexity of human situations is always one of multiple interacting relationships. A picture is a good way to show relationships; in fact it is a much better medium for that purpose than linear prose. Hence as knowledge of a situation was assembled - by talking to people, by conducting more formal interviews, by attending meetings, by reading documents, etc. - it became normal to begin to draw simple pictures of the situation.

These became richer as inquiry proceeded, and so such pictures are never finished in any ultimate sense. But they were found invaluable for expressing crucial relationships in the situation and, most importantly, for providing something which could be tabled as a basis for discussion. Users would say: ‘This is how we are seeing your situation. Could we talk you through it so that you can comment on it and draw attention to anything you see as errors or omissions?’ In making a Rich Picture the aim is to capture, informally, the main entities, structures and viewpoints in the situation, the processes going on, the current recognized issues and any potential ones. Here is a real-world problematical situation described in a paragraph of prose: The newly appointed headteacher of an 11s-to-18s school, which has overspent its budget in the last year or two, finds herself, in her first term, facing an issue concerning the provision of school meals. Currently these are provided by the county education authority through their catering services company, the contract being renewed annually.

A member of that company who is leaving to set up her own catering company urges the headteacher to make a contract with her instead of the county, suggesting the school could save money on this. Some staff members agree with this, others want to stick with the status quo. Some parents, alerted by a national debate about school meals, want more nutritious meals as long as they don’t cost more.

Pupils say: ‘We like burgers and chips.’ The school governors are discussing this issue; the Chairman, himself MD of a catering company, is urging the headteacher to be entrepreneurial and to take on responsibility for the provision of school meals, believing this could be profitable for the school. Figure represents this situation in a Rich Picture. Our point is that this picture is a more useful piece of paper than the prose account.

It could lead to better-than-usual level of discussion because not only can it be taken in as a whole but also it displays the multiple relationships which the head teacher has to manage, not just immediately, but through time. That is the power of such pictures, though we have to remember that however rich they are they could be richer, and that such pictures record a snapshot of a situation which will itself not remain static for very long. Wise practitioners continually produce such pictures as an aid to thinking. What Is Psychology 3rd Edition Pastorino Pdf File. They become a normal way of capturing impressions and insights. Whenever SSM is used to try and improve a problematical situation three elements - the methodology, the use of the methodology by a practitioner and the situation - are brought together in a particular relationship, namely that shown in Fig. The practitioner will adapt the principles and techniques of the methodology to organize the task of addressing and intervening in the situation, aiming at taking action to improve it.

In developing SSM, this process was organized in a sequence of real situations, and it was quickly found useful to think about Fig., in a particular way. Three key roles were always present. It is important to see why these are named as ‘roles’ rather than particular people. It is because one person (or group) might be in more than one role. For example, if the head teacher in the Rich Picture (Fig. ) were to herself carry out an SSM-based study of her complex situation, she would not only be both ‘client’ and ‘practitioner’, she would also be one of the people in the list of ‘issue owners’ who care about the outcome.

Sometimes a manager who causes an intervention to take place delegates detailed involvement in it to others, and so is only in the role ‘client’. In this case the person(s) in the ‘practitioner’ role needs to take steps to ensure that the ‘client’ is kept informed about the course of the intervention so that the outcome when it emerges does not come as a big surprise. In every case the ‘practitioner’ needs to make sure that the resources available to carry out the investigation are in line with its ambition. Don’t undertake a study of ‘the future of the A-level examination in British education’ if you have only got one man and a boy to work on it between now and next Thursday.

5.13 SSM’s Analysis One Much learning came out of the simple thinking which led to this ‘Analysis One’. For example, it was always useful to think about the client’s aspirations for the intervention. They should always be taken seriously but should not be the sole focus of the work done. Thus, the person(s) in the ‘client’ role should be in the list of possible ‘issue owners’ but should very definitely not be the only one in the list.

In this connection it was interesting to hear a senior manager from the RAND Corporation declare, some years ago, ‘The RAND analyst places his or her expertise at the disposal of a real-world decision-taker who has to be a legitimate holder of power.’ In the language of Fig. This was to declare that for RAND the client is the issue owner, full stop. This cuts off all the richness which comes from the practitioner compiling a list of persons or groups who could be taken to be issue owners; for it is that list which introduces multiple worldviews. They in turn open up the chance of a richness of learning at a deep level for all involved in the intervention, leading, perhaps, to major change. The RAND manager’s statement would define the practitioner as only a servant to the legitimately powerful.

In the situation shown in Fig., for example, ‘issue owners’ might include: the head teacher; the school governors, staff and pupils; parents; the county education authority and their catering services company; other catering companies, etc. The many worldviews from such a list give a chance that the richness of the inquiry can cope with the complexity of the real situation. They suggest ideas for ‘relevant’ activity models - ones likely to be insightful. Some final learning, which is important in understanding SSM as a whole, comes from the fact that the person(s) in the ‘practitioner’ role can include themselves in the list of possible ‘issue owners’. Normally SSM is thought of as a means of addressing the problematical content of the situation, which will include would-be purposeful action by people in the situation.

It is that, of course. However, the practitioner(s) is about to carry out another purposeful activity, that of doing the study, which is a task always associated with the practitioner role.

Carrying out the investigation can be thought about, and planned, using models relevant to doing this. Thus SSM can be applied both to grappling with the content of the situation and to deciding how to carry it out. These two kinds of use of the methodology are known as ‘SSM (c)’ and ‘SSM (p)’ - c for content, p for process.

Use of SSM (p) often leads to the first models made in the course of an intervention being models related to doing the study. Figure illustrates these two ways of using SSM. 5.14 SSM(p) concerned with the process of using SSM to do the study and SSM(c) concerned with the problematical content 5.2.6.3 Carrying Out Analysis Two (Social) It might seem obvious that if you are going to intervene in, and change, a human situation, you ought to have a clear idea about what it is you are intervening in. You should have some sense of what you take ‘social reality’ to be. However, this is not too obvious! The Management Science field, for example, tries to get by through concentrating almost entirely on the logic of situations, even though the motivators of much human action lie outside logic, in cultural norms or emotions. So, if we are to be effective in social situations, we have to take ‘culture’ seriously and decide what we mean by it.

This is especially important for SSM as an action-oriented approach. If we are to learn our way to practical action which will improve a situation under investigation, then the changes involved in ‘improvement’ have to be not only arguably desirable but also culturally feasible. They need to be possible for these particular people, with their particular history and their particular ways of looking at the world. We have to understand the local ‘culture’, at a level beyond that of individual worldviews. This might be straightforward if there were an agreed definition of exactly what we mean by ‘culture’. However, there is no agreed definition, though the concept is much discussed by anthropologists, sociologists and people writing in the management literature.

By the 1950s, a survey (by Kluckhohn and Kroeber) found 300 different definitions, and no agreement has been reached since then! In spite of that, everyone has a general, diffuse sense of what the word means. If you say “This is a ‘can-do’ culture”, or “This is a ‘buttoned-up culture’”, or assert that ‘The Civil Service is a punishment-avoiding, rather than a reward-seeking culture’ then it will be accepted that you have said something meaningful. To anyone familiar with the society in question, those statements will have conveyed some sense of the ‘feel’, or ‘flavour’, of the situation: its social texture. In order to pin down such feelings more firmly, in a way which makes practical sense, SSM makes use of a particular model. This is a model which does not claim the status of rounded theory, but it has proved itself useful in situations from small firms dominated by individuals to large corporations which develop and (partially) impose their own norms. 5.15 SSM’s model for getting a sense of the social texture of a human situation Together the three elements help to create the social texture of a human situation, something which will both endure and change over time.

Consider the three elements in turn. Roles are social positions which mark differences between members of a group or organization. They may be formally recognized, as when a large organization has, say, a chief executive, directors, department heads, section heads and members of sections. But in any local culture informal roles also develop.

Individuals may develop a reputation as ‘a boat-rocker’, or ‘a licensed jester’ - someone who can get away with saying things others would suppress. The informal roles which are recognized in a given culture tell you a lot about it. Norms are the expected behaviours associated with, and helping to define, a role. Suppose you told a friend you were going to meet ‘the vice-chancellor of a UK university’ next day. If you returned from the meeting and said that the VC sat picking her teeth, with her feet on the table, and was very foul-mouthed, your friend would be flabbergasted.

Such behaviour is way outside the expected behaviour of someone in the role of VC in British society. Values are the standards - the criteria - by which behaviour-in-role gets judged. In all human groups there is always plenty of gossip related to this.

People love to discuss behaviour in role and reach judgements which praise or disparage: ‘He’s a very efficient town clerk who services committees well’; ‘She’s an ineffective vice-chancellor who won’t take decisions.’ It is obvious from these definitions that the three elements - roles, norms, values - are closely related to each other, dynamically, and that they change over time as the world moves on. Anyone who has ever been promoted within an organization will know that occupying the new role changes them, as they adopt a new perspective appropriate to the role. Equally, how they enact the new role will have its effect, in future, on the local norm - the behaviour which people expect from whoever fills that role. The elements also change over time at a macro level. For example, when the authors were growing up in British society the worst role for a young woman to find herself in was to be an unmarried mother. At that time, society judged harshly the behaviour which led to this. Not anymore; the social stigma attached to the role has disappeared in the UK over the last 50 years.

So how exactly is the model of linked roles, norms and values in Fig. At the start of an intervention open a file marked ‘Analysis Two’. Then, every time you interact with the situation - talking to people informally, reading a document, sitting in a meeting, conducting an interview, having a drink in the pub after work - ask yourself afterwards whether that taught you anything about the roles, norms and values which are taken seriously here and characterize this particular group.

Record the finding in the ‘Analysis Two’ file. Carry on doing this throughout the engagement, and put a date on every entry so that later on you can recover the progress of your learning, and reflect upon it. Figure summarizes Analysis Two. 5.16 SSM’s Analysis Two 5.2.6.4 Carrying Out Analysis Three (Political) The experienced reader will have noticed that so far in this discussion of ‘Finding Out’ about a problematical situation we have made no mention of the politics of a situation, an aspect which is always powerful in deciding what does or does not get done. That is the focus of Analysis Three: to find out the disposition of power in a situation and the processes for containing it.

That is always a powerful element in determining what is ‘culturally feasible’, politics being a part of culture not addressed directly in the examination of roles, norms and values of Analysis Two. The ‘political science’ literature contains many models - usually fairly complex ones - which set out to express the nature of polities. The model used in SSM, in Analysis Three, does not come from that literature but from some basic ideas found in the work of the founding father of the field: Aristotle. Aristotle argues that in any society (for him, the Greek city-state) in which human beings constantly interact, different interests will be being pursued. If the society as a whole is to remain coherent over time, not breaking up into destructive factions, then those differing interests will have to be accommodated; they will never go away. Accommodating different interests is the concern of politics; this entails creating a power-based structure within which potentially destructive power-play in pursuit of interests can nevertheless be contained.

This is a general requirement in all human groups which endure, not only in societies as a whole. There will be an unavoidable political dimension in companies, in international sport, in health-care provision, in the local tennis club - in fact in any human affairs which involve deliberate action by people who can hold different worldviews and hence pursue different interests. Analysis Three in SSM asks: How is power expressed in this situation? This is tackled through the metaphor of a ‘commodity’ which embodies power. What are the ‘commodities’ which signal that power is possessed in this situation? Then: What are the processes, by which these commodities are obtained, used, protected, defended, passed on, relinquished, etc.? Figure summarizes Analysis Three.

The commodities which indicate power in human groups are, of course, many and various. There is a link here to Analysis Two, since occupying a particular role embodies power: the chief constable has more power than a detective sergeant, by virtue of his role. Other common commodities of power include, for example: personal charisma; membership of various committees in organizations; having regular access to powerful role-holders; in knowledge-based settings, having intellectual authority and reputation; having authority to prepare the minutes of meetings - a chore, perhaps, but it gives you some power!

Many commodities of power derive from information. Having access to important information, or being able to prevent others from having access to certain information, is a much-used commodity of power in most organizations. 5.17 SSM’s Analysis Three A dramatic example of an unusual commodity of power in a specific SSM project was revealed when two managers in a consultancy company were being interviewed as a pair. They began to disagree with each other and, in a deliberate bit of power-play, one of them suddenly said: ‘You say that, but you’re NKT; I’m KT’. This local private language within this company referred to those partners who ‘knew Tom’ and those, more recent joiners, who ‘never knew Tom’, Tom being the charismatic founder of the company, now deceased. This taught those facilitating this use of SSM that there was an unstated but very real hierarchy here. The KTs, Tom’s original disciples, were much more influential than the come-lately NKTs.

This indicated that the only changes likely to be culturally feasible in this situation would be those supported by the KTs, whose power stemmed from their association with the charismatic Tom. This is an interesting example of a commodity of power which would gradually fade over time.

And this itself reminds us that, as with Analysis Two, Analysis Three deals with elements which are continually being redefined as life moves on. The way of doing this analysis echoes that of Analysis Two: open a file and record in it - with a date - any learning gained about power and the processes through which it is exercised. Do this, and reflect upon it, over the whole course of an investigation.

5.2.6.5 The SSM Learning Cycle: Making Purposeful Activity Models As explained earlier, in order to ensure that learning can be captured, SSM users create an organized process of enquiry and learning. They do this by making models of purposeful activity and using them as a basis for asking questions of the real-world situation. This kind of model is used because every human situation reveals people trying to act purposefully. Since each model is built according to a declared single worldview (e.g.

‘the Olympic Games from the perspective of the host city’) such models could never be definitive descriptions of the real world. They model one way of looking at complex reality. They exist only as devices whose job is to make sure the learning process is not random, but organized, one which can be recovered and reflected on. This section describes how to make these devices. The task is to construct a model of a purposeful ‘activity system’ viewed through the perspective of a pure, declared worldview, one which has been fingered as relevant to this investigation. In order to do that we need a statement describing the activity system to be modelled.

Such descriptions are known in SSM as Root Definitions (RDs), the metaphor ‘root’ conveying that this is only one, core way of describing the system. A too-simple example would be: ‘A system to paint the garden fence’. Here the worldview is unclear, and it is obvious that a richer description would lead to a richer outcome when the model is used as a source of questions to ask of the real situation. A number of ways of enriching an RD have shown themselves to be useful. For example, we could more richly express the RD above as: ‘A householder-owned and staffed system to paint the garden fence, by hand-painting, in keeping with the overall decoration scheme of the property in order to enhance the appearance of the property’.

This makes clear that the model takes a householder’s worldview as given, and that that particular householder believes in DIY activity to improve it. In addition it not only describes what the system does (paint the fence); it also says how (by hand-painting) and why (to enhance the appearance of the property). (Also the worldview assumes a link between painting and improving appearance.) Clearly this would lead to a richer questioning of the real situation to which this purposeful activity was thought to be relevant as a device to structure the questioning. The PQR formula: The formula followed in enriching the fence-painting RD above is always helpful, and can apply to every RD ever written. It is known in SSM as ‘the PQR formula’: do P, by Q, in order to help achieve R, where PQR answer the questions: What? PQR provides a useful shape for any and every RD.

Remember, though, in using PQR, that if the formula is complete, with all three elements defined, then the transforming process is captured in Q, the declared ‘how’. In the simple example above the Q is ‘hand-painting’ (not simply ‘painting’). Also, though it is not an issue in this example, the model builder has to be able to defend Q as a plausible ‘how’ for the ‘what’ defined by P. If you were to write ‘define health-care needs’ as P and then define Q only as ‘by asking patients for their views’ this would not be easily defensible.

The Root Definition: The PQR formula allows you to write out the RD as a statement. This always describes the purposeful activity being modelled as a transformation process, one in which some entity (in the example an ‘unpainted fence’) is transformed into a different state (here, a ‘painted fence’). Any purposeful activity you can think of can be expressed in this way, which is useful because it makes model building a straightforward process. For complex activities the entity being transformed will probably be best expressed in an abstract way, for example: ‘the health-care needs of Coketown citizens’ transformed into ‘the health-care needs of Coketown citizens met’. But the idea of purposeful activity as a transformation always holds, whether the transformation is concrete or abstract. Putting together the activities needed to describe the transforming process (i.e.

‘building the model’) can begin when an RD is complete, but before moving on to this, elements 3 and 4 in Fig. Should be considered. They further enrich the modelling and improve it as a source of questions to ask in the real situation.