Notes
1 Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair, “Mastering System Change,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, vol. 16, no. 4, 2018.
2 Werner Ulrich, “Some difficulties of ecological thinking, considered from a critical systems perspective: A plea for critical holism,” Systems Practice, vol. 6, no. 6, 1993.
3 Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” The New York Times, April 26, 2010.
4 C. West Churchman, The Systems Approach, New York: Delta/Dell Publishing, 1968.
5 Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp, Systems Thinkers, London: Springer, 2009.
6 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, New York: Braziller, 1968.
7 Michael C. Jackson and Paul Keys, “Towards a System of Systems Methodologies,” Journal of the Operational Research Society, vol. 35, no. 6, 1984.
8 Russell L. Ackoff, Ackoff’s Best: His Classic Writings on Management, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
9 Michael C. Jackson, Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers, Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2003.
10 Seelos and Mair, “Mastering System Change.”
11 Ibid.
12 The four dimensions are described in much more detail in Seelos and Mair, Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How Effective Social Enterprises Do It, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017.
13 Donileen Loseke, Thinking About Social Problems, New Brunswick, Canada: Transaction Publishers, 2008; Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse, Constructing Social Problems, New Brunswick, Canada: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
14 Peter Checkland has created several practical tools and frameworks to facilitate this work; see also tools and frameworks created by Michael C. Jackson and by Werner Ulrich on critical and emancipatory system approaches.
15 Robert K. Merton, “The Sociology of Social Problems,” in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet, eds., Contemporary Social Problems, 4th ed., New York: Harcourt, 1976.
16 Seelos and Mair, Innovation and Scaling for Impact.
17 Seelos and Mair, “Mastering System Change.”