Jurgen Appelo recently blogged a list of top 15 systems thinking books, and spurred me into finishing this post on systems thinking resources, with an emphasis on Socio-Technical Systems. It is not really a return booklist, which may come later. Of his books, I would advocate Gerry Weinberg (very strongly), Checkland, Gall, and Ackoff. Some of the books on his list were purchasing mistakes by me, and others I have not read.
The real reason for the post is that we have had about sixty years of Socio-Technical Systems and systems thinking. Anniversaries are sometimes hard to pin to specific events, and wikipedia says that Socio-Technical Systems (STS) is a phrase that was coined in the 1960s. I won’t argue but it is 60 years since the key investigation by Trist and Bamforth into coal mining.
The classic paper by Trist on the first 30 years of STS is available on-line. It is interesting to note how well the principles of work design and how to analyse a system have stood the test of time:
- An initial scanning is made of all the main aspects – technical and social- of the selected target system – that is, department or plant to be studied.
- The unit operations – that is, the transformations (changes of state) of the material or product that take place in the target system – are then identified, whether carried out by men or machines.
- An attempt is made to discover the key variances and their interrelations. A variance is key if it significantly affects (1) either the quantity or quality of production, and (2) either the operating or social costs of production.
- A table of variance control is then drawn up to ascertain how far the key variances are controlled by the social system – the workers, supervisors, and managers concerned. Investigation is made of what variances are imported or exported across the social-system boundary.
- A separate inquiry is made into social-system members’ perception of their roles and of role possibilities as well as constraining factors.
- Attention then shifts to neighboring systems, beginning with the support or maintenance system.
- Attention continues to the boundary-crossing systems on the input and output side – that is, supplier and user systems.
- The target system and its immediate neighbors are then considered in the context of the general management system of the organization as regards the effects of policies or development plans of either a technical or social nature.
- Recycling occurs at any stage, eventually culminating in design proposals for the target and/or neighboring systems.
The STS approach used in the Volvo plants at Kalmar and Uddevalla has been compared to the Toyota Production System, say at NUMMI e.g. here and here (pdf) . A difference between the two is the emphasis on learning at a group level vs. at an organizational level. For most people, however, the similarities are more important than the differences.
The STS story continues:
The Tavistock Institute is alive and well.
The A.K. Rice Institute celebrated 40 years last year and has some useful resources.
Ken Eason and Lisl Klein at the Bayswater institute have papers and books that continue the STS approach, including this review (.pdf).
To summarize; STS and related systems thinking works, has much to offer our current working and technical environment, and is supported by a solid body of open source resources.I
Useful links (in no particular order) include:
A presentation on Smart Work, Making it Happen.
A paper (.pdf) on fifty years of systems thinking for management
A learning Society in Scotland
Strategos material on STS
Paul Pangaro
John Hunter’s Curious Cat resources
A paper by William Hunter on doing more with less in the public sector
Complexity Digest
International Society for the Systems Sciences
UK Systems Society
Derek Hitchins
Open University Systems Thinking resources and courses such as T214
SystemsWiki
Institute for the Study of Complex Systems
Complex Systems Roadmaps
and of course our friends at Cognitive Edge
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