Peter Checkland and Jim Scholes
John Wiley, 1999
[originally published 1990,
reprinted with a 30-year retrospective]
ISBN 0471986054 (paper)
Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)
Checkland is the founding father of soft systems methodology, and this book, along with his Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981) established both the field and his continuing reputation.
Wiley have republished the book with a chunky sixty-page 'retrospective' that looks rather ruefully back over the varied reception his thinking has had among certain critics and academics
"many of whom demonstrably write on the basis of only a cursory knowledge of the primary literature."
Checkland freely admits there are barriers to the adoption of SSM. He has written extensively about it, and the very volume of literature is a barrier. The word 'soft' could put people off, if they think it means 'sloppy' or 'casual'; or perhaps "to do with software programming". Popular words are overloaded with different meanings: it is an irony that the disentanglement of multiple threads of meaning and of diverse points of view on a given problem is a vital part of SSM.
The difficulty of grasping a methodology rather than a single neat method or instant technique is also important; methodologies are meta-things, and the meta-level is inherently slippery. I should also mention that Checkland is an academic, at least partly in the social tradition. His willingness to use words like Weltanschauung certainly didn't make adoption easier in the hastier and more cynical reaches of industry. And there is definitely something Kantian in all the talk of structuring the world with our ideas, even if Checkland manages to make it seem plain and down-to-earth.
But SSM has been widely employed, and at the highest levels in both government and in industry. It is not specifically aimed at information systems, though this book includes a section on its use for that purpose, as well as an appendix containing a lecture on the subject under the banner 'Time to Unite?'.
One of the key concepts in SSM is of course the idea of a system as something very different from the hard, engineering-based view propounded by Herbert Simon in the 1950s. This has worked well, up to a point, in engineering and software systems, but is much less able to deal with the complexities of systems that involve people. Even engineering projects have other dimensions: legal and contractual, commercial, political, social. Checkland worked as a consultant to the Concorde project, and
"thinking like systems engineers at the time (What is the system? What are its objectives?)"
he failed
"to think of it as anything other than an engineering project".But it was a bargaining counter in the politics of the European Community between Britain and France at the time. Checkland moved towards seeing
"SSM as an inquiring process. And that in turn established the 'hard/soft' distinction in systems thinking".
SSM became a learning system itself.
Checkland's work is extensive, and a research community has grown up around it. Suffice it to say that Checkland, the primary source, is lucid and often funny. Unlike some of his hangers-on, he is anything but waffly and sociological, and has plainly had much experience of consulting and dealing with difficult people.
There are obvious reasons why requirements engineers should be interested in ways of thinking about systems in the large, not just ones that sit in boxes of electronics. Every business is a system, and its interactions in the world have bearings on requirements. Both requirements elicitation and participative development can be treated as inquiry processes such as Heron's Co-operative Inquiry. There is increasing recognition that human stakeholders and their viewpoints - such as in the VORD method, incidentally another product of the University of Lancaster's humane tradition of engineering research - matter in system development. Checkland ought to be part of the education of every systems engineer, and one day he probably will be.
© Ian Alexander, 2001, 2004
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