AN UPDATED REVIEW ON THE CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL RICH PICTURE BUILDING EXERCISES (RPBEs) IN P.B. CHECKLAND’S SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY (SSM)

1516

AMERICAN RESEARCH THOUGHTS ISSN: 2392 – 876X Available online at: www.researchthoughts.us

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1425133

Volume 1 │ Issue 7 │ May 2015

Impact Factor: 2.0178 (UIF)

AN UPDATED REVIEW ON THE

CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL

RICH PICTURE BUILDING EXERCISES (RPBEs)

IN P.B. CHECKLAND’S SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY

(SSM)

Joseph Kim-Keung Ho

Independent Trainer, Hong Kong, China

Abstract: The topic of rich picture building exercise (RPBE) comes from the Soft Systems

Methodology (SSM) of P.B. Checkland in the early 80s. Since then, it has been studied and reported

in the academic literature. The recent academic works inspires the writer to review this topic and

argues that the mainstream study on RPBE can be considered as a conventional RPBE. The paper

then points out that there is also an unconventional RPBE which has been neglected in the academic

community. It reasons that the unconventional RPBE is also useful to express the problem situation,

which is what stage 2 of the conventional SSM is all about. The unconventional RPBE can be

conducted either solely or as a complementary exercise with the conventional RPBE. A number of

RPBE options are identified in the discussion. The paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical

development of the RPBE.

Key Words: Problem situation; Relationship-managing organization; Rich picture building

exercise (RPBE) options; Soft Complexity; System Complexity model; Soft Systems

Methodology (SSM)

INTRODUCTION

The topic of rich picture building has been discussed since the first publication of P.B.

Checkland’s seminal work on the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1981).

In the 90s, the rich picture building exercise (RPBE) has also been explained by other

writers’ works on Soft Systems Methodology, such as Checkland and Scholes (1990),

http://www.researchthoughts.us/

Joseph Kim-Keung Ho- AN UPDATED REVIEW ON THE CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL RICH

PICTURE BUILDING EXERCISES (RPBEs) IN P.B. CHECKLAND’S SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY (SSM)

1517 AMERICAN RESEARCH THOUGHTS- Volume 1 │ Issue 7│2015

Flood and Jackson (1991) and Bell and Wood-Harper (1998). In the present day,

teaching materials on RPBE can be found on the Internet, e.g., Open University (2015),

Gore (2009) and Oakden (2015). The research interest with the RPBE arises recently with

a number of newly published academic works on the RPBE, i.e., Bell and Morse (2013a;

2013b), Berg (2015), Berg and Pooley (2013), Pain (2015), Walker et al. (2014) and Horan

(2000). Specifically, the recent works on the RPBE cover the following topics:

Walker et al. (2014): The RPBE can be employed to evaluate project delivery.

Berg (2015): The work examines (i) how the RPBE can be employed to more

comprehensively identify user requirements for an information system project in

a complex situation and (ii) how to facilitate a collaborative group to conduct the

RPBE.

Bell and Morse (2013a) studies the ‚group processes‛ and ‚diverse use of

pictures‛ involved in the RPBE.

Bell and Morse (2013b) applies the RPBE to help a group of participants to

perform ‚problem identification and action planning‛.

Berg and Pooley (2013) examines a set of generic ‚distinguishable icons and

shapes for the RPBE, which reveals ‚a natural intrinsic grammar‛ within rich

pictures.

These recent works on the RPBE stimulate the writer to conduct an updated literature

review on the RPBE to contribute intellectually to this topic.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE CONVENTIONAL RICH PICTURE BUILDING EXERCISE

A rich picture is ‚a simplistic pictorial representation of the problem as perceived by

those embroiled within the ‚problem situation‛.‛ (Walker et al, 2014). It heeds the

wisdom of the adage that ‚a picture tells a thousand words‛. With regard to the

conventional mode of SSM, which has seven stages, the rich picture building exercise

(RPBE) is a technique employed in stage 2 (‚Problem situation expressed‛). This stage

follows logically from SSM stage 1 (‚Problem situation considered problematic‛)

(Checkland and Scholes, 1999). The RPBE follows a number of steps (Ho, 2012):

Step 1: Formulate a problem theme.

Step 2: On a piece of paper, do the following:

Step 2.1: Draw the main stakeholders and clearly label them.




Step 2.2: Relate the stakeholders to (i) intangible structures, e.g., organization

charts or different forms of grouping and (ii) tangible structures, e.g., buildings

and equipment.

Step 2.3: Relate the stakeholders and structures to relevant processes, e.g.,

communication processes, workflow processes and business processes, etc.

Step 2.4: Write down the main concerns of various stakeholders and use the

‚eye‛ symbols to indicate the directions of attention of stakeholders, if required.

Step 2.5: Write down the main conflicts between stakeholders with the symbols of

‚swords‛.

The following diagram (re: Figure 1) is an illustrative example of a rich picture on the

theme of part-time teaching as an entertainer on accounting taken from Ho (2007),

which (i) examines the teaching activity of part-time accounting students preparing for

professional examination primarily from a teacher-cum-entertainer’s perspective and

(ii) explores opportunities for employing hybrid learning methods in this education

sector.




From the rich picture of Figure 1, the main rich picture elements can be identified as

follows:

Element 1: Stakeholders and their concerns:

Teachers as entertainers; their concerns are: (i) It is unpleasant to try to make

frequent quotations of past exam questions in lecturing, and (ii) How to make the

teaching process enjoyable and make a reasonable income from this job?

Profit-making accounting educational institutes; their concerns are: (i) How to

enroll more students to our courses, and (ii) How to gain market share in the

accounting education sector?

Other higher educational institutes/ universities; their concern is: How to recruit

accounting students to study for our programmes?

Accounting students; their concern is: How to pass the professional

examinations, given the tremendous day-time workload and the substantial

exam materials to master in a short period of time?

Students studying for other business disciplines; their concern is: Studying for

professional accounting exam is tough for me!

Employers; their concern is: How to make sure that the employees will be

dedicated to their daily work?

ACCA (a professional accounting body); its concerns are: (i) How to build up a

competent group of members with a satisfactory size of membership worldwide

and (ii) How to ensure that our professional qualification is recognized

worldwide as a good accounting qualification?

IT vendors; their concern is: How to sell user-friendly IT-based solutions for

hybrid learning to the education sector?

Element 2: Directions of attention *the ‚eye‛ symbols+:

IT vendors pay attention to opportunities of selling IT-based solutions for hybrid

learning to the marketplace.

Employers pay attention to how accounting students’ part-time study can affect

their daily work performance.

Other higher educational institutes/ universities pay attention to the competitive

activities from profit-making accounting educational institutes in the

marketplace.




Other professional accounting bodies pay attention to how ACCA’s activities

affect their own member recruitment performance.

Students studying for other business disciplines pay attention to accounting

students’ professional exam performance to gauge the accounting exam

difficulties.

Element 3: Tangible structures:

Examples are: (i) the Internet, (ii) Buildings with classrooms, and (iii) ACCA

website.

Element 4: Intangible structures:

No explicit examples; one can say that accounting students are student members

of ACCA, so they belong to one professional group, which is an intangible

structure.

Element 5: Processes:

Examples include: (i) teachers and accounting students travel to classrooms, (ii)

ACCA builds and maintains its website to serve its members, and (iii) the ACCA

website delivers online services to its members.

Element 6: Conflicts *the ‚swords’ symbols+:

Examples of conflicts and disagreements are those between: (i) teachers and

accounting students, (ii) employers and their employees who are accounting

students, and (iii) teachers and profit-making accounting educational institutes.

The RPBE is similar to a brainstorming sesson (Flood and Carson, 1988). It is intended

not only to express ‚emotion, human and soft issues‛ (Walker et al., 2014) and the

stakeholder-participants’ ‚subconscious‛ and ‚conflicted understandings‛ (Bell and

Morse, 2013a) of the problem situation but also, more importantly, to portray the

situation’s soft complexity, i.e., as a number of interacting elements as well as

differences in perceptions and conflicts among various stakeholders. Due to soft

complexity, it is not imediately clear what can be done to improve the situation. Such

soft complexity is considered to be prevalent in organizations that are perceived to be a

relationship-managing organization (Ho, 2015) (re: the appendix). The nature and extent




of soft complexity as manifested in the rich picture constructed for the problem

situation can be further clarified by means of the System Complexity Model of Hoi (Ho,

1986; Ho, 2014a; Ho and Sculli, 1995). Subsequently, the rich picture informs the

generation of insightful ideas which are relevant for producing ‚systemically desirable

and culturally feasible change‛ (Checkland and Scholes, 1990) to impove the situation

in a never-ending collective learning process that makes use of systems thinking.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL RICH PICTURE BUILDING

EXERCISE

Other than the conventional RPBE, it has been suggested by Ho in 1986 that there are

other diagrammatic ways to express the problem situation besides using the pictorial

cartoon format. Writings on such an unconventional RPBE are Ho (1986), Ho and

Jackson (1987) and Ho and Sculli (1994). These published works have been around for

30 years but have been ignored by the academic community. The unconventional RPBE

is prepared to make use of various management concepts and instruments, such as

Mintzberg’s (1983) organization model of ‚structure in fives‛, Ansoff’s (1984) strategic

management rating forms and Eden et al.’s (1983) cognitive mapping, to express the

problem situation in diagrammatic forms. The rationale for doing so is explained by Ho

and Jackson (1987) as follows:

‚Checkland suggests building a rich picture by examining a problem situation for

elements of structure… and process… and looking at the relationship between the two –

the climate… Checkland does not go into detail on how to study the relationship

between structure, process, climate and environment. Two other theorists can be used to

enrich Checkland’s thinking here. Henry Mintzberg’s approach …to describing

organizations provides a way to study the interaction of structure, process, climate and

environment…. Also, it can be argued that Igor Ansoff’s approach …is helpful…

According to Ansoff… the more turbulent the external environment, the more

aggressive the process be… ‛

A case study application of this unconventional RPBE is Ho (1986), which was

subsequently reported in Ho and Jackson (1987) and its underlying rationale was

i The System Complexity Model is made up of the following components: (i) the nature of the system under

consideration, (ii) a particular system under consideration, (iii) the analyst’s/ decision-maker’s ability to cope

with complexity, (iv) the analyst(s)/ decision-maker(s) with specific objectives and resources, (v) ability to

observe and intervene, and, finally, (vi) real world situation (Ho, 2014a).




further elaborated on by Ho and Sculli (1994). Table 1 compares the conventional and

unconventional RPBE in a summarized way, based on Checkland and Scholes (1990),

Ho and Sculli (1994), Ho (1996; 2014b; 2015) and Ho and Jackson (1987).

The conventional RPBE The unconventional RPBE

Applied in stage 2 of the conventional Soft

Systems Methodology (Checkand and Scholes,

1990).

Applied in stage 2 of the conventional Soft

Systems Methodology (Checkand and Scholes,

1990).

Use cartoons and pictures (Checkand and

Scholes, 1990).

Use management models, rating forms and

cognitive maps (Ho, 1996; Ho and Jackson,

1987; Ho and Sculli, 1994)ii to produce

diagrams as rich pictures.

Avoid systems language in the diagram (Ho

and Sculli, 1984).

Does not avoid systems language and

academic jargons in the diagrams (Ho and

Sculli, 1984).

In line with the soft systems version of the

relationship-managing organization notion

(Ho, 2014b). Also see the appendix.

In line with the hard systems, soft systems,

emancipator systems and post-modern

versions of the relationship-managing

organization notion (Ho, 2014b; 2015).

Table 1: A comparison of the conventional and unconventional RPBE

Both the conventional and unconventional RPBEs involve using diagrams and pictures

of all sorts. For Bell and Morse (2013b), using diagrams and pictures as ‚a means to aid

the thinking process is now a well-trodden path‛. Nevertheless, until now, this writer

has been the primary proponent of the unconventional RPBE for stage 2 of the SSM in

the academic community. All the recent works on the RPBE, e.g., Bell and Morse (2013a;

2013b), Berg (2015), Berg and Pooley (2013) and Walker et al. (2014), have all directed

their attention to the conventional RPBE. It can also be said that the academic

community is unfamiliar with the works on the unconventional RPBE though they have

been around for many years. This is, in this writer’s view, not a satisfactory situation

because the unconventional RPBE is also useful, by depicting the inter-relatedness of

structures, processes, climate and the environment of a problem situation with

management and other social science theories (Ho and Jackson, 1987). It can be

ii It is possible that certain problem situations do not involve strategic management or organizational design

issues. In this case, the unconventional RPBE is quite willing to apply other concepts and approaches to portray

the structures, processes and the environment of the problem situation. Cognitive mapping remains useful for

exploring these problem situations.




employed to portray a complex problem situation either by itself or as a complementary

exercise with the conventional RPBE. Table 2 makes explicit the options available for

RPBE when both the conventional and unconventional RPBEs are recognized.

Group-based learning Individual-based learning

The conventional RPBE Option 1 Option 2

The unconventional RPBE Option 3 Option 4

Table 2: Options available for the rich picture building exercise

Referring to Table 2, the RPBE can be conducted by a group of participants as a

brainstorming session or by an analyst as an individual learning endeavour. This is

indicated in the column labels of ‚Group-based learning‛ and ‚Individual-based

learning‛. Sometimes, due to cultural and political reasons, it is not feasible to for a

researcher to conduct a SSM/group-based collaborative learning process (i.e., group-

based learning); nevertheless, the researcher is still able to employ SSM, including the

RPBE, as a personal self-reflection tool, to facilitate an individual-based learning. Table

2 also covers the two types of RPBE, i.e., the conventional and the unconventional

RPBE. With these two dimensions (group-based/ individual-based;

conventional/unconventional), the following six RPBE options are distinguished:

Option 1: Use the conventional RPBE for group-based learning

Option 2: Use the conventional RPBE for individual-based learning

Option 3: Use the unconventional RPBE for group-based learning

Option 4: Use the unconventional RPBE for individual-based learning

Option 5: Use options 1 and 3 together for group-based learning

Option 6: Use options 2 and 4 together for individual-based learning

The mainstream systems thinking literature on the RPBE primarily studies option 1

while the writings on the unconventional RPBE, e.g., Ho (1986) and Ho and Jackson

(1987), mainly focus on options 3 and 4. Now, Table 2 reveals additional RPBE options

that can be investigated in future research works and offers choices for RPBE

practitioners.




CONCLUDING REMARKS

The substantial content about the conventional RPBE in the academic literature and on

the Internet indicates that it has been a popular topic in both the academic world and

the world of management practices. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that the

unconventional RPBE has been neglected by the academic community - it actually has

practical value in expressing a problem situation, which is the main task of stage 2 in

the conventional SSM and is complementary to the conventional RPBE. In other words,

the unconventional RPBE is able to enrich the whole RPBE. Furthermore, studying the

unconventional RPBE can improve our knowledge of the conventional RPBE, because

the two RPBEs are quite different in their practices and draw on different sources of

ideas. By examining both the conventional and unconventional RPBEs, this paper

creates a broader space of imagination to make theoretical development on the RPBE

topic.

BIBLOGRAPHY:

1. Ansoff, H.I. 1984. Implanting Strategic Management. Prentice/ Hall International.

Englewood Cliffs. New Jersey.

2. Bell, S. and S. Morse. 2013a. ‚How People Use Rich Pictures to Help Them Think

and Act‛ Systemic Practice and Action Research 26. Springer: 331-348.

3. Bell, S. and S. Morse. 2013b. ‚Rich Pictures: A Means to Explore the ‘Sustainable

Mind’?‛ Sustainable Development 21. Wiley: 30-47.

4. Bell, S. and T. Wood-Harper. 1998. Rapid Information Systems Development: a non-

specialist’s guide to analysis and design in an imperfect world 2/e. The McGraw-Hill

Companies. London.

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Action Research 28. Springer: 67-77.

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Chichester.




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structured approach to their identification and management. Pergamon press. Oxford.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7CTREXtFuk

http://systems.open.ac.uk/materials/T552/

http://www.sswm.info/content/rich-pictures




APPENDIX

Underlying worldviews of the four versions of relationship-managing organization

(RMO)

RMO (Hard Systems

version) [RMO-hsv]

RMO (Soft Systems

version) [RMO-ssv]

RMO (Emancipatory

Systems version)

[RMO-esv]

RMO (Postmodern

Systems version

[RMO-psv]

Primary

organizational

concerns

Efficiency, efficacy,

viability, effectiveness

Primary

organizational

concerns

Effectiveness,

elegance

Primary

organizational

concerns

Empowerment,

emancipation, ethics

Primary

organizational

concerns

Exception, emotion

engagement, fun,

ethics

Related theories of

management

The traditional model

Human relations

model

Related theories of

management

Human resources

model

Related theories of

management

Human resources

model

Related theories of

management

Critical postmodern

organization theory

Organizational

metaphors

Machines, organisms

Organizational

metaphors

Organisms, brains

cultures,

communities,

Organizational

metaphors

Psychic prisons,

political systems,

coercive systems

Organizational

metaphors

Carnivals

Re: Ho (2015)

AN UPDATED REVIEW ON THE CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL RICH PICTURE BUILDING EXERCISES (RPBEs) IN P.B. CHECKLAND’S SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY (SSM)

Education

unconventional rpbe

number of rpbe options

conventional ssm

rich pictures

recent academic works

published academic works

recent works

complementary exercise