Problem Structuring

16Setting the Agenda

‘the “urge to know” and the “urge to do” are different things.’

(Checkland, 1981, p. 24)

The motivation for the emergence of a Soft Operational Research (OR) and the development of problem structuring methods (PSMs) was always problem oriented – the belief, at least amongst some within OR, that it needed to retain its policy relevance, its applicability to social issues, with methodologies that were suitable for addressing wicked/messy/swampy problems. The first section of the book examined this motivation in detail and re-stated the problems of practice that were symptomatic of situational logics at play and the tendency to ‘opt-out’ from dealing with the wickedness of planning, strategising, and transforming in favour of a focus on the wide variety of optimising approaches applicable to problems that had already been tamed. According to Checkland (1983), the discipline was in danger of becoming practitioner-free – if OR was becoming nothing more than the art of matching ready-made solutions to a well-known list of problems, then what was the relevance of the OR practitioner as a go-to consultant? In charting the emergence of Soft OR as a new paradigm in OR it was clear, using Abbott’s notion of the fractal disciplinary landscape, that the characteristics of the new PSMs were such that the Hard/Soft OR split was an inevitable consequence of dichotomous choices over both the objects of study in OR, i.e. wicked/messy/swampy problems, and the methodologies ...