William Steinhurst wrote: (SD0231)
"Its amazing how much light a little history can shed on a semantic debate!
I am often startled and disappointed that so many disciplines fail to teach
the historical evolution of their theories and practices."
To a point, I would agree that there is value in understanding the evolution
of a field of endeavor. But as I believe some in the SD community would
agree, there is a risk of generating some unintended consequences if too much
of that is done (in our field).
Until the late 1980s, it seems as if SD was regarded as the domain of the
chosen few. People considering its use may have been led to believe that
without a PhD in something, they just couldnt do it. Maybe too much
emphasis was placed on the historical evolution, the complexity, the
technical nuances, etc. The real message of SDs value was lost amidist all
of this. I suspect that that attitude -- perhaps perpetuated by some
practitioners -- turned a lot of would-be SD disciples away. Since one of
our objective in this community is to make SD as useable, accessible, and
practical as we can, for as wide an audience as we can, we need to make sure
that digging up too much historical stuff -- though intellectually appealing,
AND often necessary -- doesnt have the unintended consequence of turning off
people newly atttempting to apply SD.
A terrific discussion of this, along with suggestions for making Systems
Thinking more accessible to folks, appears in Barry Richmonds (HPS) article
"Lets Just Get On With It" (available at the HPS Internet Site).
Just my $ 0.02.
Paul Kucera
PKucera@aol.com