Abstracting and Engaging: Two Modes of Systems Thinking Education

Abstract

T his paper presents two modes of systems thinking education to help make sense of previous and future experiences in this field as well as in soft operational research in general. Using Abbott's ideas on professional knowledge I present these modes as based on either (1) abstracting or (2) engaging. The former emphasises the value of systems thinking in helping people understand abstractions to deal with complex situations. The latter focuses on using abstractions to facilitate students' engagement with complex situations in areas outside operational research including sustainability and project management. I present each mode based on my experience in a higher education setting in the UK, and I highlight key elements and possibilities for these modes that could inform future developments in systems thinking and operational research education.

Systemic Creativities in Sustainability and Social Innovation Education

“…We built and analysed the above cases using three main strategies: 1) Designing and conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with educators in UNU and PM; 2) Drawing and presenting a rich picture and systems model for each of the cases with information collected through the interviews (Checkland 1981); and 3) Iterating over the above data in order to reduce potential biases (Eisenhardt 1989) and help us generate further insights as to how educators' creativities could be better understood and nurtured.…”

“…We clarified and validated the content of the interviews by drawing rich pictures of each of our cases. The Rich Picture has its origins in soft systems methodology or SSM (Checkland 1981;Stanton and McIlroy 2012). It is a representation or expression technique whose main purpose is to provide a comprehensive description of a situation to help its actors make sense of and learn about it as perceived by themselves and others.…”

“…It is a representation or expression technique whose main purpose is to provide a comprehensive description of a situation to help its actors make sense of and learn about it as perceived by themselves and others. Rich pictures are recognized to be particularly interesting to provide easily interpretable and preliminary depictions of complex systems or situations (Checkland 1981). The description provided by rich pictures is inherently flexible, thus allowing researchers to iterate and integrate information from a variety of sources (Monk and Howard 1998;Stanton and McIlroy 2012), as well as gain a broader view of a situation.…”

On Novice Facilitators Doing Research—Research in Problem Structuring Methods as Autoethnography

“…Furthermore, PSM scholars have described the issues concerning teaching novices how to use PSMs and facilitate workshops, and suggested means to address those issues (e.g. Ackermann, 2011;Carreras and Kaur, 2011;Córdoba-Pachón, 2011;Hindle, 2011). However, literature so far, apart from conceptual descriptions (e.g.…”

“…Scholars have identified solutions for teaching PSMs to novices and engaging them in learning environments, such as modules, case study approaches, experiments and simulations, group discussions and exercises (e.g. Ackermann, ; Carreras and Kaur, ; Córdoba‐Pachón, ; Hindle, ), and transferring facilitation expertise to novices through ‘scripts’ (Ackermann et al, , ; Tavella and Papadopulos, ).…”