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Leafcutters building a system
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‘System’ - a collection of elements connected to form a whole.
Systems Thinking holds the ideas of emergence and hierarchy, communication and control.
Systems practice uses these ideas to design and manage complex processes and constructions for the benefit of individuals, organisations and society.
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Trustees
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The UKSS is managed by a board of trustees:
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Past President of the UKSS, currently Vice President, trustee and long serving member of the UKSS Board. Frank is also the editor in chief of Systemist which he has edited since 1984. He is an active member of the Systems community and has attended every UKSS conference since they began. He is a former President of the Academy for Information Systems and is Professor of Systems and Information Systems at the University of Portsmouth and an active member of the Centre for Innovation and Inclusion through Information Systems (CIIIS – www.ciiis.port.ac.uk) which is concerned with the use of Systems ideas in Information Systems development.
Contact: frank.stowell@port.ac.uk
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Dr. Joanne Tippett is a researcher at the University of Manchester, in the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology. Her work focuses on the need to animate planning for sustainability and to maximise the value of participation in planning. This has included developing DesignWays, a toolkit for enabling community and stakeholder participation in planning. Working with organisations in urban and rural regeneration, education and business sustainability, in Southern Africa, Europe and USA, the development of DesignWays was a conscious attempt to embed living systems metaphors into a participatory protocol for ecologically informed design. See www.sunstainable.org.
Contact: jo@holocene.net
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Jim Scholes is a Director of Strategos, a strategy consultancy, and a Visiting Professor of Management Science at Lancaster University Management School. An experienced practitioner of strategy and systems thinking, Jim has worked with public and private sector organisations in Europe the US and Asia. Prior to his consulting and academic activities Jim worked in a variety of management roles in UK Government and the private sector. He has spoken at several international conferences and authored articles on business strategy and systems thinking including: Soft Systems Methodology in Action, co-author Prof PB Checkland, Wiley 1990; Techniques in Soft Systems Practice, co-author Prof PB Checkland Journal of Applied System Analysis 1990; The Quest for New Wealth, co-author Prof G Hamel, Leader to Leader Journal, The Drucker Foundation, April 1997, Reprinted in Leader to Leader, Enduring Insights on Leadership, Editors Hesselbein and Cohen, Jossey-Bass 1999; Using SSM in Practice, Systemic Practice and Action Research, December 2000 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers; The Search for CEO-ness, Human Resources Decisions International, 2002, Sterling Publications; Steps to Implementation European Business Forum (issue 21) April 2005; and Why it’s tough at the top for the 21st Century CEO:Power, Knowledge and Dissent, co-author Prof K Grint, European Business Journal May 2005.
Contact: jscholes@stratgo.co.uk
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Sue Holwell has been a member of the Open Systems Research Group at the Open University since 2002. There she teaches postgraduate and undergraduate courses in information systems and systems thinking. Prior to that she lectured at Cranfield University and Lancaster University. She has been an active action researcher for many years, collaborating with Peter Checkland, including on this programme of research. She is co-author, with Checkland, of Information, Systems and Information Systems and has published about action research, soft systems methodology and information systems. Before joining academia she worked for 20 years in IS/IT in the Australian Public Service.
Contact: s.e.holwell@open.ac.uk
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Ian has degrees in Mathematics, Operational Research and Responsibility and Business Practice. He was forecasting manager for Rank Xerox until he co-founded a software development company, which was sold in 1999. He is now the voluntary Director of the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems - a think tank and research institute that seeks to understand what makes natural and cultural systems sustainable. He also looks after the UKSS website.
Contact: ian@schumacherinstitute.org.uk
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