AUTHOR
Peszkowski, Robert; Pettersson, Markus

DATE
2000-06-09

DEPARTMENT
Business Administration and Social Sciences / Informatics and Systems Sciences

SUMMARY
The purpose of this report is to make parts of Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) more practically usable, with the help of previous research in Group Psychology. CSH was developed by social systems scientist Werner Ulrich, but has since its introduction in 1984 not been widely applied. We believe that the theory has admirable objectives, as it tries to ensure that changes made to systems are ethically correct, not affecting anyone negatively. However, its practical usability is dubious, as Ulrich builds all his work on philosophy, leaving out sometimes obvious practical problems, such as the psychological dynamics involved in group discussions. Studying group dynamics, conducting interviews and taking into account previous studies in this subject, we have come to the conclusion that the perceivable problems with Critical Systems Heuristics are best solved with structural changes to its layout. The three main ideas in our proposition are; the introduction of a co-ordinator, who should lead the project from its very beginning and until a viable design has been created, an earlier involvement of the actors that might suffer from the side effects of the design, and finally to help structure the work, we propose guidelines to the practical application of CSH.

ISSN 1404-5508 / ISRN LTU-SHU-EX--00/125--SE / NR 2000:125