Solutions

Activity 1 Why are you studying this course?

Part

Comment

Activity 1 is the first of several such activities. It is an example of a pattern of activities that constitute reflective practice or reflective learning. This style of learning is based on the notion that the understandings most useful to us, and that most readily become part of us, are learned by experience. The activities are designed to enable you to discover your own learning by experience. There will be a lot about reflective practice in this course but for now you will be introduced or re-introduced to some basic ideas about it.

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Activity 2 Self-directed learning

Comment

Some people enjoy the initial meeting with new material most. Others enjoy testing their newly acquired understandings in exercises. Still others enjoy their new perspectives on things quite external to the course that their new understandings give them. Do any of these match your previous experience? If not, what was it for you? You may also like to explore the question of what you didn’t like. Have you changed in ways that might make your experience of this unit different?

What were you, as the learner, expected to do as you worked through previous self-study courses?

Many courses follow a fairly steady pattern of a bit of theory, followed by an example of what the theory means in practice, followed by an exercise where the learner applies what they have just learned to another situation. Do you recognise this pattern? Have you experienced it? Have you experienced variations on this theme? What were they? Have you experienced alternative approaches? How successful have these patterns been for you?

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Activity 3 Systems thinking

Comment

My own answer to this activity follows. You should not treat this as the right answer. You should certainly not make judgements about your own performance in light of my response. My notes arise from my experiences, yours arise from your own. I would like to think you and I were both engaged in an activity that gives rise to new experiences and thus builds our own understandings from our own experiences. So I would much rather you treated the following as if we were in a conversation and use my ideas to develop your own.

The important features of systems thinking, as I see them, are these.

  1. Systems thinking attends to the connections between things, events and ideas. It gives them equal status with the things, events and ideas themselves. So, systems thinking is fundamentally about relationship and process, a framework for understanding inter-relationships. It is often the relationships between things, events and ideas that give them their meaning. Patterns become important. The nature of the relationships between a given set of elements may be manifold. They may be causal (A causes, leads to, or contributes to, B); influential (X influences Y and Z); temporal (P follows Q); or relate to embeddedness (M is part of N). These relationships spring to mind immediately but there are many others, of course.

    This attention to relationships between things, events and ideas means I can observe patterns of connection that give rise to larger wholes. This gives rise to emergence. Thinking systemically about these connections includes being open to recognising that the patterns of connection are more often web-like than linear chains of connection.

  2. Systems thinking respects complexity, it doesn’t pretend it’s not there. This means, among other things, I accept that sometimes my understanding is incomplete. It means when I experience a situation or an issue as complex, I don’t always know what’s included in the issue and what’s not. It means I have to accept my view is partial and provisional and other people will have a different view. It means I resist the temptation to try and simplify the issue by breaking it down. It also means I have to accept there is more than one way of understanding the complexity.

    Complexity can be quite scary. But it need not be: complexity becomes frightening when I assume I ought to be able to ‘solve’ it. Systems thinking allows me to let go of this notion and allows me to use a multiplicity of interpretations and models to form views and ideas about the complexity, how to comprehend it, and how to act purposefully within it. Essentially it is about using practical frameworks for engaging with multiple perspectives.

  3. Systems thinking makes complexity manageable by taking a broader perspective. When I was studying science as an undergraduate, we were taught to break down situations into their component parts. This approach is so deeply entrenched in Western culture it seems natural and obvious to anyone brought up or educated in this culture that this is the way to tackle complex situations.

    While this approach is powerful for some situations, it’s hopeless for others. For example, it now seems clear that climate change induced by human activity is likely to have major impacts on the planet, its physical environments, and its living organisms, including people. But all of these effects are so interdependent it is impossible to discover what the effects are likely to be by breaking the situation down.

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Activity 4 Expectations

Part

Comment

Most people move into and out of these attitudes. The difference being proposed is that you consciously try and adopt them as you improve your capacities as a systems thinker. Do you think these attitudes will be useful to you? Have you adopted them in doing this activity? How successfully? You may like to record some judgement about whether you like the idea of these attitudes. Notice that I referred previously to ‘a willingness to experiment with styles of learning that may not initially feel right or comfortable’. Does this reflect anything you are experiencing at this stage?

Notice your intuitive responses as well as your intellectual responses. Are you puzzled? Stimulated? Surprised? Excited? Hoping it will get somewhere? Eager to find out more? Suspending judgement? Frustrated?

Any or all of these responses, even if they are a little difficult to live with, are likely to enable you to make good use of what comes in the rest of this course.

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Activity 2 Reviewing your notes on difficulties and messes

Comment

That the characteristics of messes and difficulties are influenced by the perspectives of the observer may seem uncontroversial, but how much is this simply taking a rational approach to complex situations? Did you also have an emotional reaction when writing down your thoughts? Does this matter?

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Activity 3 Emotional and rational aspects of situations

Comment

In summary, difficulties and messes are broad terms and the distinction between them is not clear-cut and categorical. Rather they provide the opposite ends of a continuum, with many problems lying somewhere in between. The attributes that distinguish between difficulties and messes concern their scale and the uncertainty associated with them. There are also elements of rational and emotional complexity to be considered. Although no single characteristic provides an essential criterion, to describe a situation as messy, rather than just a difficulty, implies that in some important respects it is unbounded.

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Activity 4 Hard and soft complexity

Comment

In summary, complexity, as understood in this course, has many different facets based on both rational and emotional factors. The rational factors tend to involve technical or computational complexity, otherwise known as ‘hard’ complexity. The emotional factors or ‘soft’ complexity includes the way people view and interact with the situation. These ideas also relate to those of difficulties and messes whereby difficulties involve more hard complexity and messes more soft complexity but most situations will probably involve both. Perceived complexity arises because of our cognitive limitations as well as characteristics of the situation. Our embodied ways of knowing – individuals and the explanations they accept have different traditions and histories – lead to only seeing aspects of a situation never the whole.

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Activity 1 Identifying systems of interest in a complex situation

Part

Comment

Here are my answers to the questions, by way of an example.

The complex situation I have chosen is the ‘higher education system’.

  1. Why does it present you with a problem?

    I find this puzzling at the moment, even though I work in a university, since there seems to be so many changes afoot as higher education policy and practice is also being discussed and debated around the world. This extends to what is the role and mission of universities; who pays for higher education; will massive open online courses make universities obsolete; how is research evaluated; how is teaching evaluated; and so on.

  2. Whose purposes does this system serve?

    Well it does serve students and their teachers. It serves the government in that it contributes to a highly educated workforce and undertakes basic research. It also brings in export income from international students and reputation for the host country. It also serves companies in providing well educated employees and again research findings they can exploit. It serves the wider public by contributing ideas and debate around important issues. Through open educational resources such as this badged open course it provides benefits to anyone who can access them. In other words there are lots of groups who can be seen as stakeholders in the higher education system.

  3. What is the system for?

    Here are five possibilities (out of many) I came up with.

    1. A system for delaying school leavers from entering the job market. This is not a planned or designed system but it is a consequence of the higher education system. Delayed entry to the job market has further consequences such as pay levels, years taken to build up a pension, the possibility that some students never enter the job market. So taking this perspective starts to raise questions that may need to be addressed by policy makers.
    2. A system for providing employment for researchers. This is more of a planned system in that funders of research and universities both have to take account of the careers and prospects of university employees who may be on research-only contracts as well as those on both teaching and research contracts. However many researchers are also employed in industry so this is also about the mobility of researchers and collaboration between universities and industry.
    3. A system for creating media stars. Radio, television and the internet all provide means for experts in certain subjects to either be employed to present or appear on programmes or to gain ‘fame’ (if not fortune) by blogging or having their lectures recorded and put online by their university. These stars may then attract students to their university or attract people to embark on higher education who may not have done so without the inspiration of that star.
    4. A system for supporting book publishers. Textbooks for university students are a big market, more so in some countries than others. Many of those textbooks are written by university academics and few get rich on the royalties they are paid as most books do not sell in large numbers; and it is academics who recommend the textbooks their students should read. So there is a mutually beneficial but some might say pernicious market where book publishers benefit the most.
    5. A system for boosting the local economy. Universities can often be the largest employer in some host cities or towns and so the more successful they are in attracting students and research grants the more that will feed into the local economy. Local authorities are often very keen to support their existing university and lobby to have one established in their city/town because of the benefits it can bring.
  4. Do the answers you have written give you any ideas about changing the behaviour of the system?

    Naming these different purposes has certainly highlighted different perspectives on a complex situation. I have not gone into such detail that it is easy to identify ways to change the behaviour of each system of interest. But for b. I could note that many of those on research contracts have their employment tied to external grant funding. When the grant money runs out so does their employment unless there is another grant. This means researchers can be changing jobs and employers very frequently. Perhaps funders and universities need to ensure such contracts are never less than, say, three years in duration to give more stability to those researchers. Further, for system d. perhaps governments need to intervene a bit in this market place by paying for/subsidising a guaranteed number of textbooks in core subjects that means textbooks are not too costly but that authors and publishers still get reasonable income from them.

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Activity 2 Identifying systems of interest – a visual approach

Comment

Once again I have decided to provide an example myself for you to compare yours with. Figure 6 is what I came up with when thinking about my untidy office and generally shows groupings according to influence and control in what is more of a difficulty than a mess (if you can excuse the pun!).

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Activity 3 Reflections on categorisations

Part

Comment

The purpose of this activity was to invite you to reflect on what it is that we do when we categorise anything. One way of reading this table is as a set of two categories each containing different category members. The mechanism employed in this categorisation is to add an adjective in front of the noun ‘system’. So they are different categories of system. This is the same process as developing a typology. Of course this is something we do all the time but I do not think we reflect very often on the implications of doing this! The implications for systems practice are discussed next.

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Activity 1 Your thoughts and feelings about diagramming

Comment

If you are worried or nervous, you are not alone. It is a common reaction because diagramming is equated with drawing. As I have already said an ability to draw is not important. Equally you may be aware how much information is now presented in a graphical form. Understanding some of the ins and outs of diagramming is a lesson in thinking and representing that thinking on paper or screen in ways that is not just linear text or spoken words.

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Activity 2 Drawing a spray diagram about diagramming

Comment

I hope this activity has not proved too difficult. Certainly do not worry if your spray diagram contains less information than my example shown in the video. As with any skill it takes practice to improve and the main aim here is to show how a diagram can help with sense-making.

Video content is not available in this format.

Drawing a spray diagram about diagramming

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Activity 3 Have your thoughts and feelings changed?

Comment

Whether your thoughts and feeling have changed or not I hope you now appreciate that diagramming does not require drawing skills and that the diagrams I have introduced to you do help to make the connections between things, events and ideas more readily understandable, which I claimed in Week 1 as a key aspect of systems thinking.

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Activity 1 Meanings of managing

Part

Comment

Some of the verbs we (I did this with a colleague) thought of were

understanding,
surviving,
seeing,
visioning,
allocating,
optimising,
communicating,
commanding,
controlling,
helping,
defending,
leading,
supporting,
backing,
enabling,
coping,
informing,
modelling,
facilitating,
empowering,
encouraging,
delegating.

I identified three categories that helped me make sense of the list.

These were

  1. getting by;
  2. getting on top of; and
  3. creating space for.

I make no claim that this list is definitive; my categories are ones that I found useful at the time. Undoubtedly your list and categories will be different.

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Activity 2 Advice on diagramming

Comment

Here is my not necessarily exhaustive list.

  1. Most diagrams take several attempts to help your thinking and understanding. The whole point is to learn about the situation, so expect new insights and expect to have to redraw to incorporate these new insights.
  2. A diagram does not just use words and lines. It uses space as well. Cramped diagrams are always unclear. Spread them out.
  3. Don’t depart too far from recognisable diagram types, especially if you haven’t made much use of diagrams before. However, diagramming is not an exact science. It is a craft skill with a distinctly personal element, which develops through practice.
  4. The first thing to clarify in drawing a diagram is your own purpose: what aspects of the issues you are considering are you trying to represent? This is essential if you are to choose an appropriate type of diagram within which to work.
  5. Each diagram should have a title which describes what type of diagram it is and its purpose.
  6. If the meaning of lines and arrows is not fairly self-evident, use a key to explain different sorts of lines or label the arrows.

You may already be thinking when reading this list that some of these points may not be as easy to follow if there are several people all contributing to the development of a diagram as their knowledge of the technique, their disposition towards it and expectations of what will come from it will be different. Equally this all depends on the relationships involved and whether you are a ‘manager’ who is part of the situation or a ‘researcher’ who is an observer of the situation (you will return to this point in Weeks 7 and 8).

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Activity 3 How do you work with others?

Comment

As a systems practitioner it is important that I am always aware of, and attend to, how I relate to and work with others, the approaches I choose to use and also the situation under investigation. For the systems practitioner as juggler this touches on all four balls of being, engaging, contextualising and managing.

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Activity 2 Systems Dynamics

Comment

Systems Dynamics was influenced by Operations Research and falls into the range of approaches that see systems as ontologies.

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Activity 3 Management cybernetics

Comment

Management cybernetics was influenced by (mainly) first order cybernetics which in turn was influenced by work across a wide range of subject disciplines. It tends to recognise systems as epistemologies.

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Activity 4 System approaches – Sir Geoffrey Vickers

Comment

Vickers interest is in social systems and tends to see these as being ontologies rather than epistemologies. Equally he puts great store on what he calls appreciative systems, a description of the ongoing process of sense-making over time using a combination of concepts and values that equates more to an epistemology.

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Activity 5 Soft systems methodology

Comment

The work of Peter Checkland is influenced not only by his personal experiences but also by second-order cybernetics which itself was influenced by first-order cybernetics and some other subject disciplines. Because of this it falls very much into seeing systems as epistemologies.

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Activity 6 Management science

Comment

Russ Ackoff is noted for being a pioneer of the application of systems thinking to management and being responsible for many innovations in operations research, with the former eventually leading him to disavow classical OR and push for a broader, more strategic form known as soft OR that saw systems as epistemologies and not ontologies.

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Activity 1 Two different models of SSM

Comment

My answer is influenced by having read about, studied and used SSM for many years and could cover many aspects you would not be aware of if you are new to SSM. So I confine myself to points which can be picked up from the depictions themselves. For me some of the main differences between the two depictions of SSM are:

  • In the early depiction (Figure 7) there is a distinction between the real world and the conceptual world which is not made in the later version (Figure 8).
  • The original purpose of the line was as an aid to distinguishing between the everyday world of the problem situation and the systems thinking about it. For me, the absence of this division in the later version means that one is always iterating between the so-called real world situation and the conceptual world of systems thinking about the situation.
  • There is no clear division occurring in a sequence of steps (as conveyed, perhaps unwittingly by the original model). Of course the onus is on the systems practitioner to be aware of these distinctions as they practise.
  • The early model has seven stages. Checkland (1999) describes this as happy chance, coinciding as it does with the research done which suggests we can only cope with 7± 2 concepts at a time. This means that it is easy enough to remember all the steps and not need to look them up in a book all of the time.
  • The later model has two streams of analyses running concurrently – the cultural analysis which includes analysis of the intervention, the ‘social system’ and the ‘political system’ and the logic-based stream of analysis. The logic-based stream of analysis is much the same as depicted in the earlier version except it is presented in a linear format.
  • Doing SSM is always cyclical and iterative but this is implicit rather than explicit in both depictions although the two-headed arrows between the cultural and logic streams of analysis in the latter figure show that there is constant iteration between these two streams and that both continue throughout the life of a project.
  • The addition of the people icons to the later version make this depiction richer for me because it reminds me that there are systems practitioners and other stakeholders who engage with the problem or opportunity situation.
  • The later version draws attention to the fact that the problem/opportunity ‘real world’ situation has a history. This history is amenable to analysis: the systems practitioner also has a history which I call a tradition of understanding.
  • What has not changed between the two versions is the central place of constructing relevant systems, and activity modelling, the process being used to gain insights, to learn, about the real situation, not to model it as it ‘is’.

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Activity 2 Revisiting the juggler metaphor

Comment

Choosing between these two ways of using SSM is, for me, a very good example of how the systems practitioner juggles both the E (engaging) and C (contextualising) balls. But the act of choosing implies that we can always sit back and think rationally about our choices – my experience suggests that in the day-to-day flux of managing this is a rare luxury so I would propose that the issues that Scholes and Checkland have grappled with relate to how a practitioner juggles the B ball – their being as a systems practitioner. In both cases the systems practitioner needs to manage (the M ball) their involvement with the situation they are applying the approach to. It is the internal mental use of SSM as a thinking mode in everyday situations that is described as Mode 2 use of SSM (see Table 2 in the next section).

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Activity 2 Looking back

Comment

Weeks 1–4 deal more with being (the B ball) though not exclusively, with a shift to engaging (the E ball) in Weeks 5 and 6, followed by contextualising and managing in Week 7 (the C and M balls), returning back to being a systems practitioner in Week 8.

Week 1 Systems thinking in practice B ball
Week 2 Systems thinking and complexity B ball
Week 3 Identifying systems of interest B ball
Week 4 Representing systems of interest B ball
Week 5 Understanding multiple perspectives E ball
Week 6 Key systems thinkers E ball
Week 7 Systems thinking approaches C and M balls
Week 8 Becoming a systems practitioner B ball

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