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Soft Systems Analysis
Photomicrographs on this page by Doug Craft, see website
Combining Methods
Rarely do people assume that all they need is some tool or technology to solve what they see as “problems” or to navigate what they see as “issues”. People are pretty well aware that they need to collaborate with others, or to bend others to their view, or to bend themselves to the other’s views in order to get a job done. Politics enters into the equation, as do individual aspirations and desires.
However, how does one separate the personal passions from deep cares and beliefs about what matters in the world? To do that people find various methodologies to reveal what they can all accept as information or knowledge about their problem or situation. We use various approaches to understand the systems “out there” - establishing and projecting relationships and thus possible outcomes of actions intended to improve things.
Problems Are Not Unitary
It hardly needs to be stated that in the “real world” problems are not generally a matter of singling out something, taking a specific corrective action, and leaving everyone concerned happy. Humans live in different values, cares, and concerns in overlapping communities of conversation. What concerns one, may be invisible or irrelevant, or even antithetical to another.
Furthermore, coming to an understanding or agreement in principle as to what should happen does not necessarily offer any guidance as to the whole constellation of actions required: what to do, who should do them and provide for them, how to evaluate and amend if the responses are different than anticipated.
We also use various approaches, ranging from totally informal to highly structured to enable us to converse and come to an understanding of what others know, how they see the issues, what matters to them, and thus how we can go forward.
So it is not surprising that people will select more than one systems method to work with in any one circumstance. Its not uncommon to run a workshop that uses various systems diagrams or the development of a systems model as a means of integrating the human concerns.
There are also many other ways of combining activities for groups of people with more technical analyses. A syntegration could be coupled with a simulation model. A world cafe could be supplemented by a statistical analysis such as in Gapminder.
Method and Methodology
Before looking more deeply at the Soft Systems Methodology, it is probably useful to distinguish between methods and methodologies.
As the figure indicates, tools and skills are combined to create a method, but a methodology can usually incorporates and adapts several methods - all for a particular purpose in a particular situation.
Consequently a methodology is inherently adaptive, and therefore it cannot be fully prescribed. However guideline are possible, and that is what Peter Checkland, who developed the Soft Systems Methodology has accomplished. There are many very different instances of the successful use of this methodology, and they differ enormously.
S.Kneebone, in Ison Systems Practice