Peter Checkland obituary

The brief

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…