Summary
Two inquiring systems developed since the 1960s--Vickers's concept of the appreciative system and the soft systems methodology, are highly relevant to the problems of the 21st century. Both assume that organizations are more than rational goal-seeking machines and address the relationship-maintaining and Gemeinschaft aspects of organizations, characteristically obscured by functionalist and goal-seeking models of organization and management Appreciative systems theory and soft systems methodology enrich rather than replace these approaches...
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This article reviews how the triangle of expectations, wealth generation, and protection of the planet--will have to be managed with great care at many different levels as we enter the 21st century if major disasters are to be avoided. Unfortunately, our current ideas on management are rather primitive and are probably not up to the task. They stem from the technologically oriented thinking of the 1960s, and they now need to be enlarged and enriched. This may well be possible from the systems thinking of the 1970s and 1980s, which has placed that body of thought more firmly within the arena of human affairs.
Anyone who has been a professional manager in an organization knows that it is a complex role, one that engages the whole person. It requires not only the ability to analyze problems and work out rational responses but also, if the mysterious quality of leadership is to be provided, the ability to respond to situations on the basis of feelings and emotion.
Thus a manager at any level occupies a role within a structure of roles that constitutes an organization. The activity undertaken by managers can be seen as a system of activity that serves and supports and makes its contribution to the overall aims of the organization as a purposeful whole. If one system serves another, it is a basic tenet of systems thinking that the system that serves can be conceptualized only after prior conceptualization of the system served.
The critiques proposed in the article is summarized as:
(1) In describing human activity, institutional or personal, the goal-seeking paradigm is inadequate. Regulatory activity, in government, management or private life consists in attaining or maintaining desired relationships through time or in changing and eluding undesired ones. (2) But the cybernetic paradigm is equally inadequate, because the helmsman has a single course given from outside the system, whilst the human regulator, personal or collective, controls a system which generates multiple and mutually inconsistent courses. The function of the regulator is to choose and realise on of many possible mixes, none fully attainable. In doing so it also becomes a major influence in the process of generating courses. (3) From 1 and 2 flows a body of analysis which examines the "course-generating function, distinguishes between "metabolic" and functional relations, the first being those which serve the stability of the system (e.g. budgeting to preserve solvency and liquidity), the second being those which serve to bring the achievements of the system into line with its multiple and changing standards of success. This leads me to explore the nature and origin of these standards of success and thus to distinguish between norms or standards, usually tacit and known by the mismatch signals which they generate in specific situations, and values, those explicit general concepts of what is humanly good and bad which w invoke in the debate about standards, a debate which changes both.
