Soft Systems Methodology - History

History

SSM was developed from 1966 by a team of academics from the University of Lancaster led by Prof Gwilym Jenkins, and resulted from their attempts to tackle management problem situations using a systems engineering approach. The team found that Systems Engineering, which was a methodology so far only used for dealing with technical problems, proved very difficult to apply in real world management problem situations. This was especially so because the approach assumed the existence of a formal problem definition. However, it was found that such a unitary definition of what constitutes ‘the problem’ was often missing in organisational problem situations, where different stakeholders often have very divergent views on what constitutes ‘the problem’.

SSM has received its fame and recognition through the work of Prof Peter Checkland who joined the team in 1969 appointed as the new Professor of “Commercial” systems and Dr Brian Wilson who had joined in 1966 and ran the action research programme through the University's consulting arm 'ISCOL' from 1970.

SSM lends itself particularly well to dealing with complex situations, where those involved lack a common agreement on what constitutes the problem, and that needs to be addressed. In such situations (e.g. How to improve health service delivery; How to conduct a business in a more sustainable way; How best to deal with youth offenders; or How best to deal with drug abuse), there may exist many different perspectives, values, and beliefs around what aspects of the situation are most important and how to address them. Those various aspects perceived as problematic tend to be highly interrelated; changing one aspect is likely to have knock-on effects on other aspects. It is important therefore to develop a comprehensive understanding of those interrelationships between the various aspects of the problem situation. As a systemic methodology, SSM aims to aid its users in developing an improved understanding through an iterative learning process.

As an offspring of Enid Mumford's 1960's "Participative Approach" (and sometime MSc. External Examiner at Lancaster), stakeholders are likely to reach accommodations – agreements about what changes to the situation the participating parties can live with. The notion of accommodation needs to be distinguished from the concept of consensus. Consensus implies that all the stakeholders fully agree that the proposed changes best serve all of their needs. The concept of accommodation recognises that this is a very rare state of affairs in most real-world situations, and that most of the time individual needs can only be partially met by collective propositions.