Comments are closed.
Practical Soft Systems Analysis
September 1st, 2005
As an approach to problem situations, systems thinking can be extremely powerful. Put simplistically, it considers situations in terms of inputs, transformations and outputs - so you could consider a company as being a system that transforms raw materials into profit through a process of manufacturing and selling.
The power of the technique is part of the problem - it’s often difficult to get a handle on a starting point, and the inherent messiness of the kind of situations that the technique lends itself to complicates things even further.
Soft systems methodology is one of the most commonly used techniques, and has been around since the mid-70s when it was first development by Peter Checkland at Lancaster University. It’s used a lot in the UK public sector, not least because it works well in the type of unstructured situations that are common in this area.
If you’re interested in getting to grips with the process, then unfortunately “difficult” doesn’t even begin to describe Checkland’s writing - while the methodology is sound, his explanations often come across as more philosophical than practical. Other books on the subject also take a highly-academic approach, which while interesting if you’re after that sort of thing, isn’t the rapid “get me up and running” approach that’s needed in most business situations.
Although it’s a good 15 years old, David Patching’s Practical Soft Systems Analysis is still one of the best introductions to the technique. It’s resolutely practical, focussing on the ‘how’ as much as the ‘why’, and resists the temptation to wander off on some of the more meditative cul-de-sacs that Peter Checkland visits. There’s a good practically-oriented treatment of the background to the soft systems methodology, detailed coverage of the process itself, and several examples of practical applications.
Overall, it’s written in a fairly accessible and down-to-earth style. It’s probably not a manual as such - I’m not convinced this is the only book you’ll need in order to become a practitioner of the technique - but it’s a good introduction to the methodology that’s a great deal more readable than the Checkland titles. Unfortunately it’s rather expensive as a new title, but Amazon generally have a number of second-hand titles for rather more affordable prices.
Filed under Working smarter |4 Responses to “Practical Soft Systems Analysis”
In response to Tim’s review I wholeheartedly agree that David Patching’s book is a great book on SSM. I teach the use of SSM on an educational psychologist training course. I train the psychologists to use the techniques in schools. Every year the trainees undertake exciting, original and effective pieces of SSM all with the help of Patching’s book.
Thanks for that reference. I had been wading through the Checklands for a while, thinking “is it me?”.
Soft Systems methodology was developed by Peter Checkland for the express purpose of dealing with problems of this type. He had been in industry for a number of years and had been working with a number of hard system methodologies. He saw how these were inadequate for the purpose of dealing with extremely complex problems which had a large social component so in the 1960’s he turned to the University of Lancaster, in the UK, in an attempt to research this area and deal with these SOFT problems.
Since the early 90s, we have been grappling with the growing need for professional authors to become functioning parts of IT-based systems, a need materially increased with the advent of the Web and XML. While we dealt with all of the differences between the “hard problems” thinking of the IT world and the very “soft” nature of a high-end authoring population, we didn’t happen onto SSM until very recently. Instead, we based our work (with authoring populations up to 1000) on the principles of Concurrent Engineering. CE, developed in the product design and engineering world, describes the structural aspects of authoring evolution quite well but does not do such a great job as SSM at the human aspects. We are working with several major authoring populations now and with the IT organizations attempting to cope with authors’ “lack of discipline, arrogance and general immaturity” (you can imagine how that is received by a PhD author with 40 years experience in his or her field.) With the permission of the blog, I would like to describe, in subsequent posts, some of the phenonema we deal with and some of the SSM-related techniques we have developed to cope with them.
Regards,
Barry Schaeffer