Creative Problem Solving: Total Systems Intervention - Hardcover

Flood, Robert L.; Jackson, Michael C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471930520 ISBN 13: 9780471930525

Publisher: Wiley, 1991

Synopsis

This book is about helping managers and decision makers to choose and use the most appropriate problem solving approaches available for managing the complexity and diversity of the difficulties that they face. By describing and analysing a range of different approaches, it investigates the strengths and weaknesses of each and provides its own approach for the complementary and integrated use of different system methodologies.

About this title

From the Publisher

Offers an approach to creative problem-solving which will enrich the way managers and decision makers perceive the diversity of problems they face. Considers currently existing systems-based methodologies for solving these problems and organizes them according to the ``ideal-type'' problem situations that they are most relevant to. Presents a unified ``Total Systems Intervention'' approach, which encourages highly creative thinking about the nature of the problem before a decision is made.

From the Back Cover

Creative Problem Solving · Total Systems Intervention · Robert L. Flood and Michael C. Jackson Department of Management Systems and Sciences, University of Hull, UK In the modern world organisations are faced with innumerable and multifaceted issues which cannot be captured in the minds of a few experts and solved with the aid of some super-method. It would be equally wrong to revert to a trial and error approach. We need to retain rigorous and formalised thinking, while admitting the need for a range of problem solving methodologies. The future prospects of management science will be much enhanced if (a) the diversity of issues confronting managers is accepted, (b) work on developing a rich variety of problem solving methodologies is undertaken, and (c) we continually ask the question: "What kind of issue can be ‘managed’ with which sort of methodology?" This volume, Creative Problem Solving: Total Systems Intervention, amounts to the bringing together of a huge human effort in the area of the management sciences. Each particular methodology that we have presented in this book is the realisation of years of work by many people, and the management and organisation theory to which we refer goes back nearly a century and has employed armies of researchers. Total systems intervention stands at the top of this mountain of effort and is able to offer an overview of the management-oriented disciplines which enables managers and decision makers to gain a command over how to employ them as a whole.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0471930520
• ISBN 13: 9780471930525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268