Critical Systems Thinking: Dr. Mike C Jackson (Part 1)

Today’s post features my conversation with Dr. Michael C. Jackson, discussing his professional journey and the evolution of Systems Thinking.

Mike is Emeritus Professor at the University of Hull and the author of several books including the recently published Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner's Guide - he is nothing short of a rock star in the world of Systems Thinking.

As a Silicon Valley insider rebelling against mainstream management practices, it was an absolute honor for me to host Dr. Michael C. Jackson on the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast.

This episode is EPIC (no pun intended 🙂) - a MUST WATCH Silicon Valley executives!

Members of the Cyb3rSyn Community can watch/discuss the podcast episode on the www.cyb3rsynlabs.com portal or the mobile app (iOS and Android). The video is also on YouTube here 👇🏾

In this episode, Mike reflects on his personal connections with legendary figures like Russell Ackoff, Peter Checkland and others, illustrating how their mentorship shaped his worldview.

He explains that his motivation for writing stems from a desire to reunify a fractured discipline, moving beyond warring factions of cyberneticians and systems engineers toward a pluralistic approach. The conversation explores the history of systems thinking, acknowledging past failures in social engineering while highlighting its modern relevance in navigating complex organizational challenges.

Mike also emphasizes the necessity of linking theory and practice through action research to prevent systems ideas from becoming superficial management fads. He also makes the case that a systems perspective is essential to ensure technology serves as a humanistic friend rather than a mechanistic tool of oppression.

Here are the key insights and my reflections…

Systems Thinking had a massive cultural impact in the 1960s and 1970s. It was utilized in the Apollo program to put a man on the moon, it drove Donella Meadows' early environmental movement work in Limits to Growth, and it was the foundation of Stafford Beer's famous Project Cybersyn for the Allende government in Chile.

However, Mike noticed that after this golden era, the discipline went into decline because it fractured into isolated, warring factions: the cyberneticians, the systems engineers, the soft systems thinkers, and the system dynamicists.

Mike’s foundational goal - and the genesis of Critical Systems Thinking- was to reconstitute the discipline. Instead of viewing these different methodologies as warring factions, he sought to bring them together so practitioners could see the immense strength in their diversity and use them in a pluralistic combination.

I still feel that there is still work to do on this front - we still see such warring arguments and back-and-forth between the people belonging to the different schools of Systems Thinking and Complexity. I’m committed to seek synthesis of these ideas and will remain a proponent of multi-methodological and pluralistic approaches. Mike’s works and motivation is an inspiration from this perspective.

For technologists, it is easy to assume that every problem can be solved with top-down engineering. But Mike reminded us why systems thinking deservedly got a "bad rap" a generation ago: practitioners tried applying hard systems engineering to messy, complex social domains.

The most horrifying example of this was the Vietnam War. As he put it, when you try to judge whether you are winning a war using pure systems engineering and mechanistic metrics, you end up doing nothing but counting body bags.

Alternatively, Mike highlighted Peter Checkland's realization during the Anglo-French Concorde project. A traditional systems engineer might walk into that project thinking the goal is simply to build a supersonic jet efficiently. But Checkland realized the project wasn't really about the jet; it was about navigating messy politics and Anglo-French international relations. When dealing with human stakeholders who hold drastically different opinions about what should be done, hard engineering fails, and you must adopt alternative lenses—like societal, environmental, or purposeful perspectives.

Today, the awareness of Systems Thinking is experiencing a massive resurgence because traditional, reductionist ways of acting are clearly failing us, making our global problems worse. However, I expressed my fear to Mike that it might just become the next "Agile" - a fad (despite its well-intentioned origins) reduced to charlatan methodology by opportunistic consultants.

Mike agreed that without a foundational education rooted in the history of the trans-discipline, people will just reinvent the wheel. The antidote to this is Action Research, championed by thinkers like Kurt Lewin and Peter Checkland. As he put it, theory on its own is useless because it floats off into the clouds, while practice on its own just devolves into shallow consultancy. We need a virtuous circle where we take a theory, try it out in practice, learn from the scar tissues we accumulate, and use those lessons to refine the theory and change the world.

As a Silicon Valley insider, I wanted Mike's take on AI and our tech-obsessed culture. Mike's perspective was profoundly refreshing: AI can absolutely be a friend. AI is spectacular at mining vast amounts of data to monitor weak signals, building models, and helping us reach goals efficiently.

However, the true danger isn't AI itself; it is the overarching rationalistic and mechanistic worldview that dominates tech hubs like Silicon Valley. Drawing on Heidegger, Mike warned against treating the entire world - including nature and other human beings - as a "standing reserve" to be used and controlled for undefined purposes. When we obsess over optimization, we lose our relationships with each other, with nature, and with our own spiritual potential as human beings.

Instead of crushing humanity with mechanistic thinking, I call for a "bull run in humanities". Systems Thinking provides the broader perspective required to ensure that AI and new technologies actually benefit people.

Mike left us with a powerful, haunting quote from Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo:

"Just make sure that your next scientific invention is met with joy rather than a universal cry of horror".

That’s it for this week.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the podcast next week where we’ll discuss more about the upcoming Systems Thinking Systems Practice Conference and Mike’s latest book.

For premium-tier customers, here is a table of handy links to the books/papers referenced in the conversation: