Checkland, Peter Bernard (1930–)

Peter Checkland's years at ICI were spent successively as technical officer, team leader, section leader and group manager in ICI Fibres. During the later stages of this career, as his managerial responsibilities increased, he looked for assistance to the literature that went under the label of management science. He was horrified to find that most of what he read was irrelevant to his job. As he was later to formulate it (influenced by Vickers, 1965, 1970) management science was dominated by a ‘goal‐seeking’ paradigm exemplified in the work of the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (1947). Checkland regarded this as an inadequate formulation in terms of the actual practice of management which is much more about ‘relationship maintaining.’ A growing fascination with such matters, together with an interest in the application of systems ideas, led him to leave ICI and to join the first ‘Systems’ department in the UK, the postgraduate Department of Systems Engineering (later Systems then Systems and Information Management) established at Lancaster University (with a grant from ICI) by the late Professor Gwilym Jenkins. In 1969, led by Checkland, the research began from which was to emerge SSM, his main contribution to the field of business and management. SSM is a methodology, setting out principles for the use of methods, which enables intervention in ill‐structured problem situations where relationship maintaining is as least as important as goal‐seeking and answering questions about ‘what is required’ is as significant as determining ‘how to do it’. The success of SSM led to a paradigm revolution in systems thinking which liberated the discipline from the intellectual straitjacket in which it had been locked and, at the same time, made it relevant to managers. A virtuous circle of interaction between ideas and experience became possible and was fully exploited by Checkland and his co‐workers at Lancaster. The establishment of this action research programme ensured that lessons could be learned from experience and incorporated into SSM, that reflection could take place on the philosophical underpinnings of the methodology, and refinements could be made to supportive methods and techniques. Today SSM is used by both academics and practitioners, is important well beyond the confines of the systems discipline and has spread its influence to many countries outside the UK.