Soft Systems Methodology: a 30-year retrospective


Peter Checkland
Department of Management Sciences
Lancaster University Management School
Bailrigg
Lancaster LA1 4YW
United Kingdom
Tel +44 1524 594468
Email: P.Checkland@lancaster.ac.uk



This note summarizes the argument to be presented in the author’s Plenary Address.


I
What is now known as Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) has been continuously developed
and honed in a programme of action research which is now in its thirtieth year at Lancaster
University. Development continues, but SSM can fairly be described as ‘mature’, that
maturity stemming from a conscious focus not on systems theory, not on systems practice, but
on the relation between the two: how the two continuously create each other.


II
Initially, the action research was structured by trying to use a hard systems engineering (SE)
approach in messy management problem situations. That methodology failed; and rethinking
the fundamental basis of SE led to SSM. SE is a systematic appraisal of alternative means to
achieve objectives taken as given. The experiences in the research programme required a
more holistic systemic approach, and SSM emerged as a learning system.


III
Four key thoughts made sense of the experiences and hence shaped SSM:

(1) focus on the fact that all management problem situations contain people trying to act
purposefully; model purposeful activity;

(2) accept that one observer’s ‘terrorism’ is another’s freedom fighter; make models
according to a pure, declared worldview;

(3) establish a learning process by using a number of such models to structure debate about
change, by using the (pure) models to question the (messy) situation; the debate seeks the
accommodations between conflicting view points which enable ‘action to improve’ to be
taken;

(4) turn activity models into models related to information support for purposeful action.

SSM thus “aims to bring about improvement in areas of social concern by activating in the
people involved in the situation a learning cycle which is ideally never-ending” (von Bulow).

IV
This emergence of SSM established the two fundamental stances in systems thinking: hard
and soft, the distinction between the two depending upon the attribution of systemicity. Hard
systems thinkers choose to see the world as systemic (hence: SE, RANDSA, Classical OR
etc); soft systems thinkers choose to see the world as problematic, but believe that the process
of inquiry into the world can be organized as a learning system (hence: SSM, Appreciative
systems theory etc).


V
Within the overall process of SSM many detailed processes are now available: rich picturing,
social analysis, political analysis, modelling, using models to structure debate etc.


VI
As methodology, the logos (principles) of method, SSM is undecidable: every use will entail
three inseparably linked elements: methodology as words on paper; user; perceived situation.
Outcomes may be dominated in different cases by different mixes of these three. This means
that the core constitutive rules for SSM are necessarily at a high level: a belief that social
reality is not a given, but is continuously socially constructed; explicit use of certain devices
(including concepts of purposeful activity modelled according to declared worldviews); a
process of exploration to gain insight leading to action.


VII
Though normally taught initially as a stage-by-stage process, internalized SSM comes into its
own as a sense-making process. So: sophisticated uses are always situation-driven, not
methodology-driven. Overall, SSM is best seen as a practical way of operationalizing
Vickers’ notion of the social process as an appreciative system.



Reference
Checkland P. Soft Systems Methodology: a 30-year retrospective J. Wiley

This will be published during 1999. It will be included in re-published versions of
both Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981) and Soft Systems Methodology in
Action (1990)