Introduction to the Special Issue: Teaching Soft O.R., Problem Structuring Methods, and Multimethodology

The topic of this special issue needs a different sort of introduction, especially to a U.S. readership. This is because the issue is about the teaching of problem structuring methods (PSMs) and soft O.R., both topics that are not well known within the United States In much of the rest of the world—especially in Britain but also in Europe and many other countries— these approaches are increasingly known, taught, and used. Indeed, the current President of the United Kingdom Operational Research Society says that in Britain “methodologies for problem structuring and techniques suited to help the understanding of those involved have been part of what has been taught in postgraduate O.R. courses for many years and continue to evolve” (Eglese 2011, p. 25). We discuss below possible reasons for the limited take-up so far of PSMs and soft O.R. in the United States. We therefore need to start by setting out the generally understood meaning of the terms “problem structuring methods” and “soft O.R.” We will start with the former, which is more sharply defined. PSMs are a family of methods that developed, at first independently, out of a long drawn-out crisis of dissatisfaction with the ability of the traditional mathematical methods of O.R. to give modellers access to the more strategic problems and issues of the organisations they worked in or wished to help. C. West Churchman (1967) was one of the first to focus attention on this difficulty. In an editorial in Management Science in 1967 he brought Rittel’s concept of “wicked problems” to wide attention. These are “social problems which are ill formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing” (Churchman 1967, p. 141). Much later, Schon (1987) called these the problems of the “swamp” (as opposed to the problems of the high ground). Strategic problems usually have a significant dose of “wickedness” in their makeup. It gradually became clear over the 1970s and 1980s that problems of this kind presented a range of challenges to traditional O.R. Our powerful preexisting analytic methods could only begin to bite once a clear problem had been agreed upon. But there were no methods beyond generalised platitudes for reaching that agreement (see the brief introductory chapters of almost any standard text). It was worse than that, however. The general O.R. approach, since its origins in World War II, was to develop a model of relevant factors, and of their interaction, that would enable better (or even best) decisions to be made. However, in the more complex situations highlighted by Churchman (1967) and Schon (1987) and others, there is no single model to aim for. Each participant in the wicked problem (we may call them stakeholders) has his or her own partial perspective on the situation. No one perspective is the basis for the “right” model, but all of them are relevant. The question that PSMs aim to help with is: How can models based on the range of different perceptions and positions in a problematic situation help the participants in that situation to resolve what actions they might agree to take? There is a range of methods within the PSM family. Each has its own specialised function. The most widely used are as follows. • Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) is a general-purpose, problem identification method that uses cognitive mapping as a modelling device. The concepts that individuals use to make sense of their problematic situation, and the causal