Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 769771

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Reply to Eden and Ackermann: Any future for problem structuring methods?
Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 769771. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602111

These comments are written in the light of Eden and Ackermanns Where Next for Problem Structuring Methods (in this issue). They are intended to be both complementary to their paper and complimentary towards their judgements, with which I largely agree. My intention is to consider the future of problem structuring methods (PSMs) in the light of their past. My ambiguous title can be read in two ways; and I shall try to answer both versions of the question it poses. The rst reading of the question is: Is there any future for PSMs? Will they perhaps fade away like a management fad? The alternative reading is: Will any future do for PSMs? Is there a desirable direction for future work with them? Both interpretations are worth taking seriously and both will be dealt with here. (Since Eden and Ackermanns references constitute a useful bibliography of this area, I shall mainly include only references that extend their list.)

Is there a future for PSMs?

Anyone working in the broad eld of management will be all too familiar with the never-ending stream of management fads. Intellectually, they usually give the impression of having been plucked out of the air or dreamed up in a bathtub. They are quickly seized by commercial providers of short courses who put them in shiny brochures which always make the same two claims: that the new fad is at the same time, epoch-making (it will transform your business almost overnight), and really very simpleyou will be able to absorb it in a day or two at d550 per day plus VAT. PSMs do not t this pattern. They are not management fads, and they will have a future because they have a history. They can be seen to be part of the evolving history of ideas about the complexity of managing; and, especially in the case of soft systems methodology (SSM), strategic choice (SC) and strategic options development and analysis (SODA), they are ideas whose form and content have evolved through interaction between the ideas and their practical use. This portion of the history of ideas can be summarized (somewhat drastically) as follows. Immediately after the

Second World War, there was an upsurge in work aimed at bringing about a more scientic approach to issues of management. This returned to and was built upon the interest in the systematic appraisal of work tasks, initiated by such pioneers of scientic management as the Americans Frederick Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in the early years of the 20th Century. However, this resurgence was now fed by a greater interest in ideas about systems as whole entities, and in the feedback mechanisms by which systems can maintain their viability. (Wieners Cybernetics, with its emphasis on feedback mechanisms, was published in 1948.) This post-war blossoming stemmed partly from the successes achieved during the war as a result of attaching scientists to military operational groups. Bringing their ways of thinking to bear upon wartime operations led to the emergence of operational research (OR) in the UK (operations research in the US). During the 1950s and 1960s many such approaches emerged. They included, as well as classic OR: Systems Engineering (Bell Telephone Laboratories), RAND Corporation systems analysis, Beers functionalist model of any viable system, early computer systems analysis, and Forresters System Dynamics, developed initially to deal with inventory problems. This is a family of approaches in that broadly they draw upon and embody the same core idea: the notion of system, and the same image of human activity, which they see as goal-seeking. Fundamentally, they focus on carefully dening goals or objectives and then creating a system to meet those objectives. (Underlying that image is a philosophy of positivism and a sociology of functionalism, both of which are taken as given rather than examined.) These ideas and these approaches have been very successful, and we nd them underpinning the conventional wisdom concerning the notion of management, as expressed in numerous texts on both management and information systems written for college and university students. That conventional wisdom can be summarized as follows:     Organizations: goal seeking Management: taking decisions in pursuit of goals Information systems: support that decision-making Research: testing hypothesesas in natural science.

Now, these are not foolish ideas, to be casually tossed away. But, after 3040 years of these ideas in action, some researchers have found them to be not rich enough to cope with the labyrinthine changing complexity of human

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situations. In the human tribe, a single logic only occasionally rules, and multiple ways of seeing any situation exist, not one of which is unequivocally prime unless power structures (foolishly) make it so. This was the milieu in which problem structuring methods emerged (though as Eden and Ackermann argue, this is a misleading phrase since SSM, SC and SODA are all focussed on action to improve not simply on structuring). All three treat models only as intellectual devices (Eden and Ackermanns transitional objects) and put emphasis on intellectual processes in which a group of people will use the devices to help with sensemaking in the search for action. It is this emphasis on process (meaning intellectual processes, not simply procedural ones) that has resulted in SSM, SCA and SODA being deemed soft approaches as compared with the hard approaches of the 1950s and 1960s where process is relatively neglected. The distinction is a very useful one, since the philosophical and sociological underpinnings of the soft approaches are, respectively, phenomenology and interpretive sociology (of the kind developed by Alfred Schutz out of Edmund Husserls philosophy) rather than the positivism and functionalism of the hard approaches from the 1950s and 1960s. One consequence of this is very important. As Checkland and Holwell (2004) show, soft does not throw away hard. Rather, the two are asymmetrically complementary to each other, with the hard approaches being a special case, in particular circumstances, of an intervention using soft methodology. Thus, in an SSM study, the practitioner-group can decide: In this situation, with this group, in this organization with its history, now, useful action would be to engineer a system to do X . This means that, as a conscious choice, under the umbrella of a soft approach, all the earlier hard approaches are available within soft practice if that seems desirable (Checkland and Holwell, 2004; Checkland, 1999). I conclude from this argument that PSMs such as SSM, SC and SODA will have a future beyond the short lives of briey modish management fads. That they will help to create a new and richer conventional wisdom in the management eld is suggested by changes in the language occurring now. Thus the phrase Soft OR is now generally accepted as meaningful in the eld of OR, at least in Europe. (In the USA the iron grip of positivism within operations research is much stronger, and movement is slower.) Similarly, within the System Dynamics community, the phrase qualitative SD is now achieving acceptance. Both of these changes suggest an increasingly general acceptance that the proliferating complexity of human situations calls for a richness of approach greater than that provided by the thinking developed in the 1950s and 1960s. This has serious implications for the necessary rethink of the curriculum of courses in this area, as Eden and Ackermanns analysis of the similarities between PSMs also indicates.

Will any future for PSMs do?

Anyone who has carried out research in social situations will recognize the force of the old generals remark in WG Sebalds masterly exploration of the inuence of the past on the present, Vertigo:
ywhen one thinks of it, a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of the battleplan and that of the nal despatches. (p 156)

We can substitute research plan for battleplan and published paper for nal despatches! Blackett certainly recognized the unfathomable contingencies in the early development of OR. In his 1943 report (reprinted in Studies of War (Blackett, 1962)), he points out the
y large number of chance events and individual personalities and abilities that are involved in even a small operation. (p 162)

However, he discovers that if an operation is repeated many times, aggregated results can be expressed statisticallyhence the emergence of the OR algorithms for queuing, depot location, etc. They express the logic of problem situations that recur. Unfortunately, however, managers spend most of their time wrestling not with the logic of their situations, but with the specic idiosyncrasies which always render them unique. This means that the future of PSMs ought to lie in the detailed exploration of specic cases through action research in which the uniqueness of a situation is accepted. In this mode of research, the researcher does not isolate a chunk of the real world and arrange to test hypotheses about itas happens so successfully in natural science; rather, the researcher, with some research themes in mind, no more, enters a real situation in which would-be problem solving is going on, takes part in the activity and uses that involvement as a research experience. Obviously, such research cannot aspire to the powerful criterion for judging the validity of the research results which characterizes natural science, namely the repeatability of experimental results. This cannot be the criterion, since every human situation is unique, and no two human situations ever unfold through time in exactly the same way. The validity criterion for action research has to be that the intellectual process of the action research involvement is expressed in a way which makes it recoverable by anyone wishing to subject the research to critical scrutiny. In order to achieve that, in order to ensure that an account of the research is more than simply story-telling, it is necessary for the action researcher to declare in advance a methodological framework, in terms of which, what counts as knowledge from the research will be dened. (SSM, SC and SODA offer just such frameworks.) If that is done, and only if that criterion is met, then an external person who scrutinizes the research can recover the mental processes used throughout which led to the conclusions reached. The scrutinizer and the researcher may then make different

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interpretations of the results, but coherent debate will be possible and they will know exactly the basis of their agreement/disagreement. (For discussion of the validity of action research see Checkland and Holwell (1998, especially part 4).) It is noticeable that the main PSMs (SSM, SC and SODA) have in fact all been developed in extended programmes of action research. In each case, that has entailed relentless involvement in real situations over a long period of time, enabling ideas and real-world experience to be related to each other. That is the source of the honed methodological frameworks which they provide. This is the pattern which needs to be followed if PSMs are to have a future in keeping with their past. That said, it has to be acknowledged that in the UK, at present, this is not an easy road to follow, given the baleful inuence of the research assessment exercise (RAE) in universities which causes Deans to ask not the proper question: What research is now ready to be reported? but rather: What papers can be written to meet the RAE

requirements? This leads to a plethora of papers about other papers, which few will read, rather than ones describing engagements with real life. Until the publish or perish atmosphere in universities fades it is practitioners who will have a special importance in carrying forward work on PSMs.

References
Blackett PMS (1962). Studies of War. Oliver & Boyd: Edinburgh. Checkland P (1999). Soft Systems Methodology: a 30-year Retrospective. Wiley: Chichester. Checkland P and Holwell S (1998). Action Research: its nature and validity. Systemic Prac Action Res 11: 921. Checkland P and Holwell S (2004). Classic OR and Soft ORan asymmetric complementary. In: Pidd M (ed). Systems Modelling: Theory and Practice. Wiley, Chichester, pp 4460. Sebald WG (1999). Vertigo. Harvill Press: London. Wiener N (1948). Cybernetics. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Lancaster University

P Checkland