Category: Uncategorized

  • Appreciative Design & Soft Systems

    Appreciating The Context of Organizational Activity

    Human-centered design requires that we understand – or rather, appreciate – the need for changes to a “real-world” situation that is viewed as a governed by business logic and goals – rather than the engineering logic employed for IT system requirements. The intention is to improve how we understand the need for change – and the systemic impacts of making changes – through an iterative learning process based on Vickers’ concept of Appreciative Systems (Vickers, 1968; Checkland, 2000b).

    Geoffrey Vickers observed the diversity of norms, relationships, and experiential perspectives among those involved in, or affected by, a system of human-activity such as that found in business work-organizations. He argued that organizational change analysts needed methods for analysis that explored how to reconcile these perspectives, developing the concept of an “appreciative system,” the set of iterative interactions by which members of an organization explore, interpret, and make collective sense of their shared organizational reality (Vickers, 1968).

    The Concept of an Appreciative System
    The Concept of an Appreciative System Source: Checkland and Casar (1986), via Checkland (2000b)

    Vickers conceptualized organizational work as a stream, or flux, or events and ideas that were interpreted by participants in the organization by means of local “standards,” reflecting shared interpretation schema and sociocultural values (Checkland and Casar, 1986). Interpretations of new events and ideas are subject to the experiential learning that resulted from prior encounters with similar phenomena; these will vary across stakeholders, depending on how they interpret the purpose of the system of work-activity. To achieve substantive change, we need to understand and reconcile these multiple purposes, integrating requirements for change across the multiple system perspectives espoused by various stakeholders. These are separated out into distinct perspectives, which model subsets of activity that are related to a specific purpose or group of participants in the problem situation (Checkland, 1979, 2000b).

    Diagram showing investigation of a complex, real-world situation vs constructing models that represent the real world
    Real-World Analysis Vs. Systems Thinking About the Real World

    While both real-world analysis and systems thinking about the real world aim to produce representations of complex situations, the key difference lies in their focus: real-world analysis primarily examines data from actual scenarios to identify patterns of human-activity, relationships between actors, and issues that affect performance, whereas systems thinking takes a broader view by considering the interconnectedness of elements within a system, analyzing how they interact and influence each other to understand the big picture – and to engage in debate about how it may be improved.

    The concept of appreciative design underpins Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), an approach devised by Dr. Peter Checkland of Lancaster University in the UK, to capture and make sense of complex change requirements across multiple goals for change and the multiple rationales that underpin any organizational system of work-activity. SSM is now a highly-regarded approach to managing complex change, especially suited to the untangling of “wicked problems” (Rittel, 1972). Its contribution is to separate the analysis of “soft systems” of human-activity – what people do in their work and the logic that makes sense of that activity – from the “hard system” of IT and engineering logic that usually underpins system requirements.

    Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)

    The development of integrative system thinking methods and analysis techniques to solve ill-structured, “soft” problems is Checkland’s (1979) contribution to the fields of change management and systems analysis. Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) provides a method for participatory design centered on human-centered information systems. The analysis tools suggested by the method — which is really a family of methods, rather than a single method in the sense of modeling techniques — permit change-analysts, consultants and researchers to surface and negotiate feasible aspects of change, to explore and reconcile alternative viewpoints, and to anticipate (to some extent) the knock-on effects of changing one part of a complex system of work on other parts of this system.

    Problems are ultimately subjective: we select things to include and things to exclude from our problem analysis (the “system boundary”). But real-world problems are wicked problems, consisting of interrelated sub-problems that cannot be disentangled — and therefore cannot be defined objectively (Rittel, 1972). The best we can do is to define problems that are related to the various purposes that participants pursue, in performing their work. By solving one problem, we often make another problem worse, or complicate matters in some way. Systemic thinking attempts to understand the interrelatedness of problems and goals by separating them out.

    In understanding different sets of activities and the problems pertaining to those activities as conceptually-separated models, we understand also the complexity of the whole “system” of work and the interrelatedness of things – at least, to some extent. It is important to understand that, given the evolving nature of organizational work, a great deal of the value of this approach lies in the collective learning achieved by involving actors in the situation in analyzing changes, and that this approach in inquiry is, in principle, never ending. It is best conducted with and by problem-situation participants (Checkland, 2000b).

    Summary

    To summarize, appreciative design is an approach where emergent perspectives on what a “system” of work should achieve and how that work should be performed are modeled to produce actionable changes to the system that can be evaluated around agreed standards of performance and that preserve desired relationships between human actors and between elements of work-activity and their outcomes. This approach to modeling work-systems influenced the development of Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland, 2000b), a method to operationalize the representation and negotiation of systems of purposeful human-activity around which desirable and feasible changes can be identified and implemented.

    References

    Checkland, P. (1979)  Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Chichester UK. Latest edition includes a 30-year retrospective. ISBN: 0-471-98606-2.

    Checkland P., Casar A. (1986) Vickers’ concept of an appreciative system: A systemic account. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis 13: 3-17

    Checkland, P. (2000a) New maps of knowledge. Some animadversions (friendly) on: science (reductionist), social science (hermeneutic), research (unmanageable) and universities (unmanaged). Systems Research and Behavioural Science, 17(S1), pages S59-S75. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/75502924/abstract

    Checkland, P. (2000b). Soft systems methodology: a thirty year retrospective. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 17: S11-S58.

    Checkland, P., Poulter, J. (2006) Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and its Use, for Practitioners, Teachers and Students. John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Chichester UK. ISBN: 0-470-02554-9.

    Rittel, H. W. J. (1972). Second Generation Design Methods. Design Methods Group 5th Anniversary Report: 5-10. DMG Occasional Paper 1. Reprinted in N. Cross (Ed.) 1984. Developments in Design Methodology, J. Wiley & Sons, Chichester: 317-327.: Reprinted in N. Cross (ed.), Developments in Design Methodology, J. Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1984, pp. 317-327.

    Vickers G. (1968) Value Systems and Social Process. Tavistock, London UK.

  • Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration

    I was musing about the differences between these three concepts. They are not explained clearly in any resource I could find (although many people take a stab at this), so I thought I’d try bending my brain around the problem. The three types of collectivity appear goal-oriented (as in, sharing a common purpose), but there are big differences between the ways in which group members interact – and the reasons for these types of interaction.

    Cooperation is when people share ideas about how to work, or share effort to complete the work towards a shared goal, which is understood in common. People work together to complete a task that would be much more difficult to complete individually. Cooperation often involves deciding how to divide the work between individuals in a group for an optimal outcome – for example, in software or organizational change projects. Work may be divided laterally (each person takes a separate slice of the work towards a deliverable), vertically (each person takes a separate deliverable), or performed collectively, where people share the effort required to achieve a goal (for example, analyzing a business process that is too diverse – involving too many stakeholders – for one person to explore in a reasonable amount of time).

    Coordination is the organization of work-tasks across individuals to achieve a complex goal that requires analysis (breakdown into subtasks) before it can be addressed. People work together towards a common goal within an agreed timeframe, even if they don’t understand all the tasks required at the start. They organize their activities around a schema, which provides a model of the parts of the work to be done. They divide their labor on the basis of this schema, with individuals or sub-groups completing each part, which is assembled into a whole once all relevant parts have been completed. They may collaborate to perform shared subtasks.

    CCC2

    A Work Breakdown Schema (WBS) Used For Coordination of Work

    Coordination may be organized around interim deliverables, which are completed individually from subsets of the work-schema, then assembled once all the parts are complete. The underpinning concept to coordinated work activity is that of a plan – a plan of work, or a plan of how the parts of the whole are organized. This is used to guide the coordination of work, across individuals and across groups. For example, in traditional software project management, work is coordinated around a work breakdown structure (WBS).

    Collaboration is the pooling of effort, to achieve a joint goal, which everyone in the group of coordinated workers may not understand in the same way (so this is not a shared goal – subgoals may emerge through the processes of discussion and experimentation over how to perform the work). People work together, taking different parts of a task, to achieve a goal that, if not understood in common at the start of the process, will probably be understood in the same way by the end. Collaboration requires trust (that other people will work towards a common goal), but it is more adaptive than coordinated work – instead of agreeing a model of the task in advance, collaborators develop a shared model of the task deliverables as they collaborate on the task. Working together increases the amount of shared understanding between people, which allows them to improvise and adapt the plan of work to contingencies that arise. So both goals and work-practices evolve as shared practice increases shared understanding between collaborators. Software developers, working on agile software projects, collaborate in analyzing how to coordinate their team’s work around a feature-breakdown then coordinate team work around each person implementing the next feature in the backlog. Finally, they collaborate around integrating the feature components into a coherent prototype system.

    Coordination schema, where sub-goals are merged to achieve an integrated outcome

    Collaboration schema, where sub-goals are explored and defined independently, then merged to achieve an integrated outcome

    Collaboration is organized around sub-components (or sub-goals) of the planned outcome that are defined separately. Each sub-component emerges through discussion and experimentation, so the parts are managed autonomously by delegating them to different people. It is only at the integration stage that the shape of the whole solution can be understood.

  • About The Site

    The Improvising Design site and improv-design blog are maintained by Dr. Susan Gasson, Associate Professor Emerita of Information Science & Technology at Drexel University, Philadelphia PA.  It is driven by a fascination with how we approach the co-design of business and IT systems, especially how we solve wicked problems. Wicked problems consist of a series of interrelated problems. They cannot be defined objectively because how they are defined depends on the eye of the beholder (which issues, processes, technologies, and people are included and which are not). So we don’t know how to gauge design progress because we can’t define the design problem until we have solved it. Simple, isn’t it?
    Wicked problems are human problems. Even though they tend to involve information technology, they are wicked because they are subjective. Get five people in a room and they will define at least 10 critical problems between them – all of which will be related in some way. My research interest lies in how we get those five people on the same page, to agree problems and design solutions, especially when these involve organizational learning, innovation and change.

    Contact Details

    Email: sgasson@drexel.edu
    Threads: https://www.threads.net/@frigga_motherofbordercollies
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