My father, Peter Checkland, who has died aged 95, was the originator of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), a revolutionary approach to complex management problems.
After 14 years as a research manager at ICI, he joined the department of systems engineering at Lancaster University in the late 1960s. At the time, systems engineering was dominated by what is now called the “hard” approach, which stipulated that organisational problems should be treated as if they were engineering problems, amenable to mathematical modelling and “scientific management”.
Peter’s insight was that managerial problems involve unpredictable human beings whose interactions and decisions arise out of their previous experiences. He therefore developed SSM as a way of seeking to understand a complex problem from all sides, creating a “rich picture” that can be used to tease out alternative worldviews, varying intentions and goals, and relevant sources of power. The idea is not to “solve” a complex problem, but to enable what Peter called “action to improve” the situation.
He wrote four books on SSM, and many practitioners across the globe credit SSM with revolutionising their managerial approach.
Peter was born in Birmingham to Norman, a grocer’s assistant, and Doris (nee Hiscox), a housewife. After attending George Dixon’s grammar school in Edgbaston, where he was head boy and captain of rugby and cricket, he went to St John’s College Oxford, where he read chemistry, then worked in research for ICI.
He joined Lancaster University in 1969 as professor of systems engineering and later became head of the department of systems, staying there for the rest of his career until retirement in 1997.
Alongside his academic work, Peter was a lover of jazz, and such was his expertise that the department of music at Lancaster asked him to present lunchtime lectures for students. Rock climbing was his other passion, and while he accepted his skills were relatively modest, his encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of British mountaineering led to articles published in Rocksport, Mountain and the Climber magazines.
In 2013 Lancaster University gave him an honorary fellowship, which was presented to him by the mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington. At a dinner afterwards Peter was delighted to sit next to Chris, and spent the whole evening talking to him about rock climbing.
Peter married Glenys Partridge, whom he had met in 1955 when they were head boy and head girl of their local schools. She died in 1990, and he is survived by their children, me and Kris, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
