Soft systems thinking, soft systems practice and the evolution of systemic development

In retrospect, it is difficult to overstate the impacts that soft systems thinking, soft systems practices as well as SSM have had on the evolution of systemic approaches to development at Hawkesbury Agricultural College (later incorporated into Western Sydney University). Launched in 1981, a radical curriculum for undergraduate students of agriculture had been designed by the Hawkesbury faculty without familiarity of the work of Checkland and his colleagues at the University of Lancaster. The Hawkesbury program was based on experiential learning as the central pedagogical process with the study of agricultural systems as the ‘hard’ academic content. A major conceptual paradox had however, arisen with the lack of understanding of how the experiential process could be methodologically integrated with the agro-ecological systems curriculum content. It was learning of Checkland’s emphasis on a ‘shift in systemicity from the world to the process of inquiry into that world’ and the conceptualisation of SSM as a ‘learning system’ that provided the keys to confronting and escaping the limitations of the conundrum. In this article, three of the key architects and leaders of the Hawkesbury systems initiatives, reflect and expand on the significance of the ‘shift in systemicity’ not just to undergraduate education but also, and over the ensuing years reaching to the present, to national and international discourses about, and critical praxes for systemic development writ large.