In Chapter One I said that the shift from individual and group-based action research was being triggered by calls for systemic learning processes to address large-scale political and policy change. It is also a response to the challenges posed by complexity and non-linearity. It is to these issues that we now turn. Once we have established why systemic thinking is so important, we can draw out its implications for the action research process. My approach is not to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all of the different variants of systems theory, and then apply my favoured approach to action research, but rather to use stories to illustrate how systems ideas help us to conceptualise and work with complex issues. From a theoretical perspective I take a similar position to Flood (1999), who argues that systems theorists such as von Bertalanffy, Beer, Ackoff, Checkland and Churchman offer a range of different insights into systemic thinking that are all useful.

Systemic thinking

Systemic thinking means ‘taking into account the whole’, and seeks meaning in the complex patterning of interrelationships between people and groups of people. Put another way, ‘systemic thinking requires people to look at sets of interacting activities’ (Packham and Sriskandarajah, 2005). This highlights dynamics that are not always visible through the scrutiny of individual interactions. This is crucial because outcomes (positive or negative) will often have more to do with the interrelationship between interacting interventions than the effect of any individual action. Action rarely impacts in a linear way (Burns, 2006a).

Looking at things systemically is useful because it helps us to make connections that we would not otherwise make. Having said this, it is always important to remember that we can only ever see a part of the whole (Churchman, 1970; Ulrich, 1983; Midgley, 2000). This is the paradox of whole systems thinking (Ulrich 1990; Pratt et al 1999; Atwood et al 2003).