There is nothing that an author who has tried to produce new ideas values more than having another take those ideas and develop them even further. Jamshid Gharajedaghi has done just this to my work. But he has done a great deal more. He has made significant additions of his own. The tradition out of which his work has come and that from which mine has arisen are very different, but these two traditions intersected a number of years ago and have merged to give his work a freshness and originality that I envy. It may be helpful to the reader to share some of the history from which Jamshid's and my joint efforts have emerged.

I began graduate work in the philosophy of sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 where I came under the influence of the “grand old man” of the department, the eminent philosopher E.A. Singer, Jr. Because of the informality of the department he created I began to collaborate with two younger members of the faculty, both of whom were former students of Singer, Thomas A. Cown and C. West Churchman.

Three aspects of Singer's philosophy had a particularly strong influence on me. First, that the practice of philosophy, its application, was necessary for the development of philosophy itself. Second, that effective work on “real” problems required an interdisciplinary approach. Third, that the social area needed more work than any of the other domains of science and that this was the most difficult.

We developed a concept of a research group that would enable us to practice philosophy in the social domain by dealing with real problems. The organization we designed was called “The Institute of Experimental Method.” With the participation of a number of other graduate students in philosophy and a few other members of the faculty we started this institute on a completely informal basis.

In June of 1946 I accepted an appointment to the Philosophy Department of (then) Wayne University in Detroit. I did so because the dean of the college had shown enthusiasm for the idea of establishing an Institute of Applied Philosophy and offered to support an effort to create it. In the following year Churchman also accepted a full-time appointment in philosophy. Meanwhile, Cowan had immigrated to the Law School of Wayne from Nebraska to which he had gone when he left Penn in 1946. The other two members of the philosophy department of Wayne viewed our efforts to establish an Institute of Applied Philosophy as prostitution of this ancient pursuit. A “fight” broke out over this issue, one that involved a large part of the faculty, administration, and student body at Wayne. My position in that department became untenable.

In the spring of 1951 Churchman and I accepted appointments to (then) Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland because Case was committed to establishing an activity in Operations Research and Churchman and I had come to believe we could probably work better under this name than under the cloak of academic philosophy. By the end of 1952 we had formal approval, but not without faculty opposition, for the first doctoral program in Operations Research. From then on the Group and the program grew rapidly and flourished. Case became a mecca to which pilgrimages of operations researchers from around the world came. In 1958, Churchman, for personal reasons, migrated to the University of California at Berkeley where he established a similar activity. Academic Operations Research activities began to proliferate and flourish, many of them modeled on those at Case.

In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints.

First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.

For these reasons, five of us on the OR faculty designed a new program which we wanted to provide as an option to students entering the program. In addition to myself, there was Eric Trist, Hasan Ozbekhan, Thomas Saaty, and James Emshoff. We were able to initiate a new experimental program and administrative entity in The Wharton School called the Social Systems Sciences. It came to be known as “S Cubed.” This program along with its research arm, the Busch Center, now hosts the largest doctoral program in the school.

The graduate and research programs are directed at producing professionals who were capable of planning for, doing research on, and designing social systems, systems in which people play the major role. It is dedicated to the development and use of theories of social systems and professional practice, and the practice of such theories. It is also committed to the development of methodology and conceptual systems, which enable us to design and manage social systems more effectively.

In 1968 I made my first trip to lran on a mission for the UN. I met Jamshid during that visit. He was then employed by IBM. On one of my subsequent visits I found that he had assumed the direction of the Industrial Management Institute and had integrated the research and academic principles of S³ with its own program developed locally. We started a personal and institutional collaboration. He sent a number of his staff to us for graduate work and we engaged in several joint projects. We tried to entice him to Penn as a visiting professor but he was unwilling to leave his remarkable institute. I could not blame him. In his position I would have acted as he did. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for us, the revolution in lran changed all that. That upheaval virtually destroyed his institute and his opportunities for carrying out his work. He left Iran with the help of our invitation and immediately joined us. Shortly after, I was able to transfer the direction of the Busch Center to him.

His joining us was a major event in my life. An investigator into a serious and complex subject welcomes a convergence of a broad stream of ideas, experience, and hard work of a distinctively different cultural origin. This book is a record of collaboration between the system of systems thought stemming originally from the works of Edgar A. Singer, T. Cowan, C. West Churchman, and myself working primarily in the cultural milieu of the western world and the author of this book working for many years in the apparently quite dissimilar situation of an ancient eastern culture. An apparent miracle happened. What was originally thought of as a fundamentally disparate source of alien views on the nature of systems organization turned easily and naturally into a joint effort. The fundamental nature of systems organization was at once perceived to be a unity in diversity. When Professor Gharajedaghi joined the Social Systems Science department of the Wharton School and assumed the direction of its research, the Busch Center, he began a two-pronged activity of research into the nature of systems organization and applied research and application. In a series of his writings on systems theory it became evident quite early that the two streams of thought were not only basically compatible but also had the happy effect of enriching each other. The evidence of this fortunate coalescence of a different cultural rapprochement is the present work.

Jamshid is not only an invaluable friend and colleague, he is also a constant source of inspiration. Therefore I was delighted by the invitation to open this book, which enables me to invite you to share in the inspiration he has provided me.