Systemic AND Systematic change - working together

Looking at systems views of managing change today, I strayed into a discussion on systemic vs systematic change which links strongly to my previous observations on Leandro Herrero’s work. I had struggled with the contrasting of systemic and systematic as opposite ends of the spectrum, perhaps as a non-overlapping dichotomy, particularly when authors (like Ison [1]) decry the systematic, project-based view of managing change. Although this has its limitations, particularly when driven by targets, it can deliver successful change in well-defined situations. We use projects to successfully design and build aeroplanes that do not fall from the sky (at least not often), despite the thousands of components that need to operate together.

Helen Wilding asked whether there could be a theory of systemic change (based on learning) versus systematic change (based on optimising). However, she highlighted one of Checkland’s papers [2] that gave a different view on this. Contrasting hard (systematic) and soft (systemic) systems approaches, he made the assertion that the hard systems approach is a subset of soft systems. When systems are (relatively) simple, the soft systems approach can be condensed to a simpler target-driven hard systems approach, which can be successfully achieved with a systematic project.

So am I suggesting that building a plane is simple! Not really, but I am suggesting that it is complicated rather than complex. The complexity occurs when a system has emergent behaviour, that could not have been predicted from its component parts. And emergence particularly arises from including people within the system.

Checkland and Herrero both seem to support the idea that systemic and systematic is not an either/or question for managing complex change situations – both are required as a combination of soft and hard systems approaches.


[1] Ison, R., 2010, Systems Practice: how to act in a climate-change world, Springer Publications, London, 224-229.

[2] Checkland, P., 1985, "From Optimizing to Learning: A Development of Systems Thinking for the 1990s.", The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 36(9), 757–767.