New type of OR approach

As a result of the perceived crisis, there was a growing movement of people who wanted to address these identified shortcomings in OR and define ways to address or manage these social problems. This challenge was neatly summarised in a widely cited analogy by Schon (1983 p.42) “In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern. Shall the practitioner stay on the high, hard ground where he can practice rigorously, as he understands rigor, but where he is constrained to deal with problems of relatively little social importance? Or shall he descend to the swamp where he can engage the most important and challenging problems if he is willing to forsake technical rigor?”. This groundswell of opinion led to some people rejecting the early definitions and underpinning positivistic assumptions of OR based on the quantitative ‘scientific method’ such as that of Goodeve (1948).

Dando & Bennett (1981) ask if the questioning and subsequent rejection of the ‘scientific method’ base on purely quantitative models by some constituted a

Kuhnian revolution. A Kuhnian revolution is where the dominant philosophical paradigm is rejected in favour of a new paradigm with more explanatory power of phenomena within the world (Kuhn, 1962). While Dando & Bennett do not make such a claim at a philosophical level, they suggest that a fundamental assumption of OR was challenged and could play out in a similar fashion to the rejection of a Kuhnian paradigm revolution. They argue that by using quantitative methods to solve problems, “O.R. has traditionally proceeded on the assumption that a particular set of answers could be given to such questions? Perhaps not definitively but at least with sufficient confidence to allow work to go ahead in practice with few qualms. For a significant part of the community, this no longer seems to be the case: hence the ‘crisis’.” (Dando & Bennett, 1981 p.99). This call was echoed by Schon (1995), who asked if OR needed a new epistemology to understand the new types of problems.

In response to their own rejection of quantitative approaches, several scholars proposed and developed new ways of thinking about problems. Once such early proposal in the US was from Russell Ackoff. Ackoff (1979a, 1979b) suggested two ages of thinking about problems, the ‘machine age’ and the ‘systems age’. In machine-age thinking, for a person to understand something they should employ reductionism where they take that thing apart and seek understanding of its constituent parts; this is aligned with the quantitative approaches of traditional OR. This assumes a deterministic concept of the universe where cause and effect relationships can be understood and relied upon to remain true. However, Ackoff (1979b) suggests fundamental flaws with this way of thinking and questions it as an appropriate lens by which to view the world. First, “if we can only understand something by understanding its parts, and if we can only understand its parts by taking them apart, how can we gain ultimate or complete understanding of anything?” (p.95). Second, we must realize the systems being studied are wholes

which lose their essential properties when taken apart; therefore, the wholes cannot be understood by this type of analysis. To rectify failings of the machine age, Ackoff proposed moving to the systems age, this is aligned to the rejection of quantitative OR. Ackoff (1979b p.96) described three steps involved in systems age thinking. “First, a thing to be understood is conceptualized as a part of one or more larger wholes, not as a whole to be taken apart. Then understanding of the larger containing system is sought. Finally, the system to be understood is explained in terms of its role or function in the containing system.” Here, we see Ackoff advocating a move away from the quantitative techniques that assume objectivity and optimality and saying that these assumptions do not reflect reality, and that it is not productive to seek an optimal solution to a mess (Ackoff, 1977). Instead, Ackoff argued that OR should pursue systems thinking techniques to examine the planning and design of systems.

In the UK, the research community pursuing such ideas was larger than that in the US; several practitioners and academics took up the challenge of developing OR approaches to try and help with the pressing social problems that quantitative OR struggled to manage. Rosenhead (1989) edited ‘Rational Analysis for a Problematic World’ as the first book to collate these approaches. The book brought together five qualitative approaches: strategic options development analysis (SODA) (Eden & Ackermann, 1998; Eden & Sims, 1979); soft systems methodology (SSM) (Checkland & Scholes, 1990); strategic choice approach (SCA) (Friend & Hickling, 1987); robustness analysis (Rosenhead, 1978) and drama theory (Bryant, 1997). The developers of each of these approaches each contributed two chapters to the book, one focusing on the theoretical underpinnings and development of their approach and the second an example of the approach in practice. The approaches were collectively known as problem structuring methods (PSMs); they were developed independently from each other beginning in the 1960s and were in their

early form from the 1980s onwards (Mingers & Rosenhead, 2004). The grouping together of these approaches has not been questioned by OR academics, which suggests that there is acceptance that they warrant a typological grouping. However, because of the reactive development context seen in PSMs, the extent to which they share common philosophical, theoretical, and methodological assumptions has not been established.

The development of OR could be characterised as opportunistic; this is true for the initial development of quantitative OR in the 1930s, with pioneers using their knowledge of mathematics and physics to help with problems such as the placement of radar across the coast of Britain, as described by Williams (1968). It is also true for qualitative OR, where a focus on new types of problems opened the door for new methodologies to make progress with these problems. PSMs allowed a new type of analysis in a context where pervious certainties were becoming the exception rather than the rule (Rosenhead, 2006). However, the difference between the development context of quantitative OR and PSMs was that the quantitative approaches all aspired to conform to a common set of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological rules. For OR to be accepted by War planning decision makers, it needed to conform to the existing paradigm of decision making described as the ‘scientific method’. The positivistic philosophy was held as the standard for research and scientific enquiry, and only approaches that conformed to these set of ideals would be accepted as useful for the basis of decisions. By the 1960s, the search for alternative problem solving approaches lead to the development of the methodologies we now call PSMs. Individual developers (for example, Checkland, Eden, and Friend) were each responding to a specific need they had identified through their own practical experience. For example, in his account of the development of ‘Soft Systems Thinking’, Checkland (1981) describes how the development of hard systems thinking into soft systems thinking was implemented

through the application and modification of existing hard system techniques to ‘soft’ problems. “The course followed was not a theoretical pathway but the result of a particular set of experiences in actual problem situations” (p.150). As each developer responded to their own ‘particular set of experiences’, they carved and formed the basis for the established PSMs contained in ‘Rational Analysis for a Problematic World’ (Rosenhead, 1989b). This approach to development across PSMs does not present a case of development based on shared philosophical assumptions, but a siloed approach to research where each developer identifies their own assumptions regarding the underpinning philosophy of their approach. For example, Checkland & Scholes (1999) describe the human activity system as the basis of the system for SSM, while Eden & Ackermann (2004a) describe how SODA is based on personal construct theory. The gap in knowledge that the philosophical differences of these approaches were not considered during the development of PSMs is explored in this thesis.