![]() ![]() Humans are not always rational, or our last name would be Spock or something. It is the key to systemic inquiry as described in “The design of inquiring systems” (Churchman 1971, see also here).Įnemies The systems approach is a rational system. “And/or” here means that people can play different roles at the same time. These people play roles in system design as client, decision-maker and/or planner. Churchman’s great “trick” is to build a categorical framework centered on people. We must also abandon any claims of absoluteness (without falling victim to the idea of relativity, which is replaced by the idea of approximation). In Churchman’s words, we must see through the eyes of others to discover the restrictedness of our own perspective (including that of ‘experts’ or ‘managers’). The essence of the systems approach, “therefore, is confusion and enlightenment ” (The Systems Approach, p. The key idea is that when we perceive a problematic situation in a certain way, this obscures certain key aspects that can only be brought to light by perceiving it in a totally different way. People Among the principles that Churchman developed are also the four principles of deception-perception. One of them is the Maximum Loop Principle (see here). In fact, a whole set of new principles had to be developed in order to provide a solid foundation for addressing wicked problems. Such a narrow view is what Churchman calls the ‘environmental fallacy.’ This fallacy is not part of classical logic. Systems thinkers believe that such problems – often designated “wicked problems” – are caused by taking too narrow a view of the situation. ![]() The question is: what can be done about it? Fixing the most obvious problem in systems often doesn’t work, but even makes the situation worse, delays a real solution, or simply costs a lot of money and effort to keep it functioning, be it poorly. Problems Many human “systems” function poorly. In soft systems lingo we speak of the “boundary critique.” Systems are not closed, they are mostly conceived as semi-open, which implies that their boundaries are subject to debate. The systems idea implies that systems have components (subsystems) and boundaries. FLATOUT 4 ENEMIES FULLThe human environment is full of systems: organizations, businesses, projects, governments, nations, the world, shopping systems, transport systems, security systems, financial systems etc. Systems Social systems are all systems with humans in them. This post has been reblogged by The Systems Community of Inquiry at, the global network of systems thinkers, scientists and practitioners (Thanks!). I believe it could serve as a useful introduction to Churchman’s work. I used the abstracts to produce a concept map (see below), which I will describe in this post. Churchman’s work is the focal point of CSL4D. West Churchman’s ‘The systems approach and its enemies’, which was Churchman’s last book of his great trilogy. Here is a link to the abstracts of the individual chapters of C. ![]()
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