C. West Churchman Quotes

A systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another.

Analysis of the mathematical form and underlying principles of games was made by von Neumann " as early as 1928. In this early work von Neumann was not so much interested in executive-type problems as he was in the logical foundations of quantum mechanics. It was not until 1944, when von Neumann and Morgenstern published their now well known Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, that the mathematical treatment of games "took fire."

For the scientist a model is also a way in which the human though processes can be amplified. This method often takes the form of models that can be programmed into computers. At no point, however, the scientist intend to loose control of the situation because off the computer does some of his thinking for him. The scientist controls the basic assumptions and the computer only derives some of the more complicated implications.

A system may actually exist as a natural aggregation of component parts found in Nature, or it may be a man-contrived aggregation – a way of looking at a problem which results from a deliberate decision to assume that a set of elements are related and constitute such a thing called ‘a system.

This text is oriented toward human organizations since this has been the emphasis in the practice of O.R. in business and industry.

However a systems problem is solved—by a planner, scientist, politician, antiplanner, or whomever—the solution is wrong, even dangerously wrong. There is bound to be deception in any approach to the system.

To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all of its life. Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters.

If the story of my early years with Russ sound like they were years of battle, then the sound is correct.

It is sheer nonsense to expect that any human being has yet been able to attain such insight into the problems of society that he can really identify the central problems and determine how they should be solved. The systems in which we live are far too complicated as yet for our intellectual powers and technology to understand.

Design, properly viewed, is an enormous liberation of the intellectual spirit, for it challenges this spirit to an unbounded speculation about possibilities.

An objective of O.R. as it emerged from this evolution of industrial organization, is to provide managers of the organizations with a scientific basis for solving problems involving the interaction of the components of the organization in the best interest of the organization as a whole. A decision which is best for the organization as a whole is called optimum decision.

Deception, in turn , suggests morality: the morality of deceiving people into thinking something is so when it is not.[...] The moral principle is this: whoever attempts to tame a part of a wicked problem, but not the whole, is morally wrong.

The complete analysis of the methods of scientific inference shows that the theory of inference in science demands the use of ethical judgments

Inquiry is the creation of knowledge or understanding; it is the reaching out of a human being beyond himself to a perception of what he may be or could be, or what the world could be or ought to be.

[Scientists whose work has no clear, practical implications would want to make their decisions considering such things as:] the relative worth of (1) more observations, (2) greater scope of his conceptual model, (3) simplicity, (4) precision of language, (5) accuracy of the probability assignment.