Acknowledgements

This free course was written by Andy Lane.

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The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course:

Course image: © Peshkova/Getty Images Plus

Week 3

Table 1: adapted from Casti, J.L. (1994) Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise, London, Abacus.

Week 4

Text: Beware of the human factor: Downes, Samantha (1999) ‘Technology isn’t to blame for the Government’s recent computer problems’, The Independent, 6 September. © The Independent (1999).

Week 5

Figures 3(a) and (b): adapted from Winter, M.C. (2002) Management, Managing and Managing Projects: Towards an Extended Soft Systems Methodology, PhD Thesis, University of Lancaster, UK, pp. 67 and 83.

Table 1: adapted from: Ulrich, W. (1983) Critical Heuristics of Social Planning: A New Approach to Practical Philosophy, Stuttgart, Chichester; Haupt, John Wiley, pp. 245–50.

Week 6

Box 1: Martin, D. and Rosenhead, J. (2002) ‘Stafford Beer: world leader in the development of operational research, who combined management systems with cybernetics’, The Guardian, 4 September. © Dick Martin and Jonathan Rosenhead.

Figure 2: Richmond, B. (1998) ‘Closed loop thinking’, The Systems Thinker, vol. 9, no. 4, Pegasus Communications, Inc.

Week 7

Figures 3, 7 and 8: Checkland, P.B. and Scholes, J. (1990) Soft Systems Methodology in Action. Copyright © 1990 by John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Table 2: adapted from adapted from: Checkland, P.B. and Scholes, J. (1990) Soft Systems Methodology in Action, New York, Wiley, p. A36.

Week 8

Figure 8: expanded from Winter, M.C. (2002) Management, Managing and Managing Projects: Towards an Extended Soft Systems Methodology, PhD Thesis, University of Lancaster, UK, pp. 67 and 83.

Table 1: adapted from Shaw, P. (1996) ‘Intervening in the shadow systems of organisations: consulting from a complexity perspective’, Complexity and Management Papers No 4, Complexity and Management Centre, University of Hertfordshire, pp. 8–10.

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