Insights into Appreciation and Learning Systems

Abstract

[. . .] I grew to manhood before the FirstWorldWar in an England that took stability for granted and regarded order – national and international – both as a self-regulating process of betterment called progress and also as a field for human design directed to the same end. These two not wholly consistent ideas applied in the political-social, the financial-economic, and the scientific-technological fields; all these fields are regarded as benign partners, the first still the most prized.

Editor’s Note: Geoffrey Vickers developed a set of concepts around the process of ‘appreciation’ in the sense of ‘appreciating a situation’. Vickers wrote about appreciation over many years, with the purpose of making sense of his many public and private sector experiences of appreciating situations both alone, and with others, for instance in board room and committee meetings. In so doing he revealed much about what occurs in group processes of interaction. Vickers also wrote about other topics of relevance to social learning systems, including how humans affect and are affected by our contexts; institutional and personal roles in relation to our expectations and bringing about change; communication, and the principles of regulation of systems. His insights into appreciation and social learning systems are distributed across his writing. This chapter therefore comprises six edited extracts, five are from Vickers’ work, from a range of different sources. The original footnotes have not been included. One extract is a diagram from Peter Checkland and Alejandro Casar that is an interpretation of Vickers’ appreciative systems model. The chapter starts on a personal note that explains some of the author’s context.

Source: The sources of the extracts in this chapter are indicated at the end of each extract and in the references.