Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 772–775 r 2006 Operational Research Society Ltd.
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Viewpoint
Labels, methodologies and strategic decision support
Journal of the Operational Research Society (2006) 57, 772–775.
doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602089
Many years ago, I was a member of an OR team which was
taken to task by a senior Scottish civil servant over our use
in an interim project report of the phrase ‘our methodology’.
As a classical scholar, he insisted that ‘methodology’ meant
the study of methods, and as such admitted of neither
possessive adjective, nor indefinite article nor plural form.
Times change. These days, our willingness to entertain a
plurality of beliefs allows us to talk freely of a philosophy; an
ideology; a (school of) psychology; or indeed a methodology,
in contradistinction to others of a similar kind. Yet ‘method-
ology’ is still a word that I feel uncomfortable in introducing
into my own practice of strategic decision support; and I
shudder to think how the seven-syllable neologism multi-
methodology (Mingers and Gill, 1997) might be received
should I dare to introduce it in discussions with clients,
whether they be senior managers or community groups.
Before drafting this viewpoint, I have had the benefit of
reading the stimulating viewpoints contributed to this issue
by both Peter Checkland and Colin Eden with Fran
Ackermann. I tend to agree with Colin and Fran that it
would help if we stopped talking about problem structuring
methods (PSM). Yet I do recognize that this phrase, the
main credit for which I see as due to Jonathan Rosenhead
(1989), has served a useful purpose within our particular
community—the OR community—at a particular period in
its history, as an acceptable substitute for the even more
dubious label ‘soft OR’.
For the phrase soft OR describes a tendency within
OR, which is anything but a soft option in the challen-
ges it presents to those of us who seek to engage with
decision-makers in responsive and flexible ways. At least
the use of the more formal-sounding collective label of
PSM has helped us in establishing a critical mass of
support for a body of methods which, on their own, might
have found it more difficult to claim places on crowded
academic syllabi, or indeed on the repertoires of busy
OR consultants.
I am aware too that we pioneers of the three schools that
are here labelled SODA, SC and SSM have always agonized
over the choice of short labels for our own specific
approaches. Peter Checkland has recently spoken of his
increasing frustration over the way people have persisted in
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misinterpreting his use of the core concept of system; while
Colin Eden and his associates have introduced several
successive descriptors for the approach that they have
pioneered, starting with cognitive mapping and moving
through COPE and SODA to journey-making. I shall have
more to say in a moment about my own increasing
difficulties with the labelling of the strategic choice approach
(SCA); it is enough for me to say at this stage that I prefer to
use the acronym SCA rather than SC, to distinguish this
particular approach from the many different senses in which
senior managers tend to use the phrase strategic choice in
their everyday discourse.
What I now hope is that some of our 21st century
successors will feel motivated to devise fresh labels that may
find more immediate resonance with those they seek to help.
I myself have found myself drawn lately towards a concept
of developmental decision-making (Friend, 1995). This
concept I see as associated with an already well-established
if little recognized practice of developmental decision support;
and also with an emergent body of theory that deserves more
attention from researchers, with a scope potentially far wider
than that of classical decision theory as normally taught to
students.
My intention is to introduce this phrase developmental
decision support merely as a generic term, with the potential
to generate some interesting controversies. What I suggest is
that we can try using such language among ourselves to
describe some, but not all, approaches in the field of PSM’s;
rather than see it as the sort of user-friendly descriptor that
any of us might consider using to describe our own practices.
So I believe we must look to the aspiring gurus of the future
to pick up the search for more fitting labels for our generic
field—as well as for our more specific approaches within its
ambit.
Similarities and differences
Colin and Fran have chosen to stress the similarities between
our approaches, and they have said little with which I would
wish to disagree. However, I am also convinced that there
are many things that we and future researchers can still learn
from their differences—not least from their different origins
and the differing orientations that stem from these. So I shall
now offer some reflections on the distinctive features
associated with the past, present and possible future
trajectory of the approach we now call SCA.

A trajectory for the strategic choice approach
So what would I project for the future, or futures, of the
strategic choice approach, from my position as one who has
been closely and continuously engaged in its development over
the past four decades? The story of its origins and early years
has already been put on record not only for OR practitioners
(Friend et al, 1988), but also for social scientists (Friend, 1997;
Friend et al, 1998); and for the urban planning community
(Burns, 2004; Faludi, 2004). Yet many OR readers are likely
to have read only briefer accounts, side by side with similar
accounts of other PSM (Rosenhead and Mingers, 2001).
My first point is that the origins of the strategic choice
approach are firmly located in the UK operational research
community of the 1960s, yet there were many influences on its
early development from outside OR. The story starts with the
formation in 1963 of a new Institute for Operational Research
(IOR), as a joint initiative of the Councils of the Operational
Research Society and the Tavistock Institute of Human
Relations. Both are charitable institutions, constituted as
companies not-for-profit, set up in order to sustain the
momentum of breakthroughs forged by British scientists who
came together to address the exigencies of the 1939–1945
world war. The aspirations set for the new IOR involved
extending the realm of application of OR towards broader
policy issues, in close association with social scientists; and
also developing a new momentum of research in OR, at a time
when OR as an academic discipline was still in its infancy.
The first substantial publication on what is often now
labelled SCA appeared in 1969 (Friend and Jessop, 1977).
What this book presented, on the strength of four years of
research on policy-making in Coventry City Council, was an
untested blueprint for ‘an’ appropriate technology for
strategic choice—using the adjective ‘appropriate’ in the
sense of intermediate technology (Schumacher, 1999)—
rather than as something that we could boldly entitle ‘the’
strategic choice approach.
That book attempted to bring together within a coherent
framework several methodological breakthroughs from
IOR’s applied project work of the mid-1960s in local
government, health and the construction industry. These
breakthroughs included the combinatorial design method of
Analysis of Interconnected Decision Areas (Luckman, 1967);
an original yet practical set of ideas on OR for multi-
organisations (Stringer, 1967); and a tripartite UE/UV/UR
classification of uncertainty which I had developed with Neil
Jessop in the course of the city government project itself.
To this confection, we were able to add a dynamic
dimension by drawing on some new thinking about
robustness in sequential decision-making that was first
presented by Rosenhead and co-workers while working with
Ackoff in the United States (Gupta and Rosenhead, 1968).
It was this missing link of the robustness concept that was to
pave the way, a little later, to what I regard as the most
distinctive attribute of SCA; its capacity, especially in group
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decision workshops, to engage directly, and in real time, with
the shifting and temporarily interwoven agendas of decision-
makers, with agreement on an appropriate balance between
flexibility and commitment at each stage. (In talking of
agendas as a plural, I must again crave the forgiveness of my
Scottish civil servant of blessed memory.)
Although all the original architects of SCA had their
disciplinary roots in OR, their philosophy was much
influenced by their social science colleagues in other Tavi-
stock units (Burns, 2004). Equally important however was
the influence of the many practising decision-makers—
managers, professionals and politicians—with whom they
interacted closely in their early field projects. Throughout
the 1970s, town planning professionals in particular became
deeply involved not only as users but as co-designers of the
developing ‘toolbox’ of SCA. Indeed the closest and most
creative of my many collaborators during that decade, Allen
Hickling, joined IOR with a background in urban planning
and design, having been exposed to the charismatic influence
of Russell Ackoff on a recent master’s course.
So it was that, during the 1970s, experience in applying
the strategic choice approach, as an interactive toolkit
for guiding collaborative work on strategic decisions, spread
more rapidly among planners and related public service
professionals—in Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands as well
as in Britain—than it did within the OR community itself.
Problem structuring methods emerge from the mist
It was not until the 1980s that SCA began to become
recognized in Britain for its claims to a place within a new
sub-discipline of ‘soft OR’—later to become re-conceptua-
lized as the repertoire of PSM.
There were two primary influences on this development.
One was an informal club of scientists from some of the then
leading academic schools of OR, including Bath, Sussex,
Aston and what is now Sheffield Hallam, who—with Allen
Hickling and myself from the non-university based ‘IOR
School’—used to gather twice a year between 1983 and 1989,
for two or three day meetings to explore each others’
methods. The most visible product of all this social and
intellectual bonding was a set of ‘state of the art’ papers
presented to a conference in Toronto in 1989, to which
several North American management scientists also con-
tributed (Eden and Radford, 1990).
The other and more widely known influence on the
emergence of a critical mass of PSM was Jonathan Rosen-
head, who in the late 1980s took on the daunting task of
editing a book in which six of the leading approaches were
presented, each accompanied by an account of a practical
application. That book (Rosenhead, 1989) and its successor
(Rosenhead and Mingers, 2001), both including some
reflective editorial comment, are primarily responsible for
the wider spread of awareness of PSM during the 1990s and
774 Journal of the Operational Research Society Vol. 57, No. 7
early 2000s, especially among younger OR people in
Britain—but increasingly also in other European countries
and, albeit more selectively, in other continents. However,
the early history of the SCA—as indeed of SSM and
SODA—serves as a reminder that the generic category of
PSM’s is not one that has been in evidence ever since the
pioneer years in the development of the specific approaches
concerned.
Reconceptualizing while facilitating
A new chapter in the third edition of the core textbook on
the strategic choice approach (Friend and Hickling, 2005)
brings together 15 short contributions from 21 users in seven
countries. These together demonstrate that the SCA cannot
now be regarded as the preserve of the OR community
alone. As also presented in this third edition, most of Allen
Hickling’s consulting in the 1990s involved not only
facilitating strategic choice workshops but also drawing on
the same principles to design more ambitious and extensive
programmes of stakeholder dialogue, introducing compati-
ble methods from other toolkits as seemed appropriate.
Many of these programmes have been addressed to
seemingly intractable strategic issues of environmental
policy, in national and sometimes trans-national settings.
At a more modest yet in many respects an equally
worthwhile scale, the 1980s saw a few pioneering applica-
tions of strategic choice methods in local community
development (Friend, 2004); and these have since been
followed by some significant local applications in developing
countries (White, 1994; Phahlamohlaka and Friend, 2004).
In Venezuela, a Spanish edition of Planning under Pressure
was recently published (Friend and Hickling with Vila, 2002)
with policy support from a national government with radical
aspirations for change. In that country, recent practical
applications of SCA have ranged from strategies for
distributing national oil revenues to address social and
economic development priorities; to decision support for
poor communities in hillside barrios struggling to recover
after catastrophic mudslides. Progress at both these scales
was recently reported at the inaugural meeting of the OR
Society’s PSM study group at Warwick (Vila and Benaiges,
2005).
Such challenging experiences of facilitation in turn open
up new challenges of re-conceptualization for the reflective
facilitator—whether she or he be making use of particular
toolboxes of decision support such as SCA as currently
presented, or introducing more mixed PSM.
In a recent symposium reviewing the contributions of
myself and the so-called ‘IOR School’ to the development of
planning theory (2004), all the authors—from Europe and
the USA—seem to agree that our most significant contribu-
tion has been to link the world of planning theory to
the world of planning practice. For researchers based in
academic schools of urban and regional planning through-
out the world, such a linkage seems to be viewed as quite
unusual, if not unique.
Yet to those of us who have been working at the cutting
edge of OR, this linkage between practice and theory should
come as no surprise. For if we cannot re-conceptualize while
we are doing our best to support decision-makers, we shall
surely have forfeited our right to claim the mantle of the
wartime OR pioneers.
Among newcomers who may join in fashioning futures for
what we currently call PSM, I can imagine that our current
labels such as SCA and PSM might soon be superseded. This
troubles me little so long as their histories are not forgotten.
Some users recently exposed to SCA have already tried
replacing that label with others; recent examples include
IBIS and SAP (for Strategic Action Planning) (Friend and
Hickling, 2005, p 282)—though they must beware of other
prime claimants to initials such as these.
It is this challenge of re-conceptualizing while facilitating
that, in my belief, lies at the heart of the challenge to new
generations of carrying forward a thriving practice of
operational research deeper into our troubled 21st century.
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