Chapter 5: Hardness and softness

As we said in Chapter 4, any thinking about how to reach success must involve thinking about people. Infrastructure systems necessarily involve people. In this chapter we will see that all hard systems are embedded in soft ‘people’ systems.

The success targets for this chapter are that, after reading it and thinking about it, you will be able to:

In Chapter 4, we said that the leverage to solve wicked and messy problems will come from systems-thinking. The foundations of the approach were laid in the axioms and corollaries of Chapter 2 and the ideas of process, holons and connectivity. In this and the next two chapters we need to build more superstructure on those foundations. In this chapter we want to distinguish between hard and soft systems, and develop our understanding to the stage where we can see how the two can be combined into one system of thought. We want to do this because we will show that the distinction between hard and soft systems has outlived its usefulness. This is because we humans are intimately part of the physical world we live in and all hard systems models are embedded in soft systems.