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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Back to - Activity 2 Reviewing your notes on difficulties and messes
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.
Back to - Activity 3 Emotional and rational aspects of situations
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.
Here are my answers to the questions, by way of an example.
The complex situation I have chosen is the ‘higher education system’.
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.
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.
What is the system for?
Here are five possibilities (out of many) I came up with.
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.
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!).
Figure 6A map of the features contributing to my office being untidy.
Back to - Activity 2 Identifying systems of interest – a visual approach
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.
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.
Back to - Activity 1 Your thoughts and feelings about diagramming
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
Back to - Activity 2 Drawing a spray diagram about diagramming
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.
Back to - Activity 3 Have your thoughts and feelings changed?
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
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.
Here is my not necessarily exhaustive list.
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).
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.
Systems Dynamics was influenced by Operations Research and falls into the range of approaches that see systems as ontologies.
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.
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.
Back to - Activity 4 System approaches – Sir Geoffrey Vickers
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.
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.
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:
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).
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 |