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Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

by Joy Garfield and Amrik Singh

As the future leaders of a society that is increasingly complex and challenging higher education students need a good grasp of social, political, economic and environmental issues and need to feel equipped to propose reasonable recommendations. This can seem a daunting prospect for anyone, let alone higher education students who may have little or no prior experience of working in these areas. Students need to understand the world view of the stakeholders and the what, how and whys of the situation being explored. What is the problem situation, how will we understand it, and why are we trying to understand it? Here we describe an approach successfully used in our postgraduate teaching at Aston Business School, UK.

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1986) has been successfully used in many different contexts for complex problem-solving. With its seven-stage structure it provides a framework for structuring/framing wicked problems by initially thinking about what is happening in the real world from the point of view of different stakeholders. An idealised world without any constraints is then explored from different stakeholder perspectives so that different wants/needs for a new system can be considered. Students are encouraged to use empathetic discourse to understand the multiple perspectives of the stakeholders in the problem situation. The comparison between the real world and idealised worlds allows for an eventual accommodation of future ways forward.

Soft Systems Methodology is currently used to teach complex problem solving to postgraduate students at Aston. The module team have developed a group-based approach that has been found to produce a deeper understanding of concepts and yield better overall results, particularly given that students are mostly international postgraduate students. For most of the students their first language is not English, and they are new to complex problem-solving.

Teaching sessions are structured around the different stages of the Soft Systems Methodology. Group work is used so that students support one another in their learning of the concepts and then apply these individually to their chosen assessment topic. The UK criminal justice system is taken as an in-class example and students are asked to think about a particular complex area to focus on, eg overcrowding in prisons in a particular city. Terminology can be particularly complex and hard to grasp if your first language is not native English, so the language used to explain concepts is kept simple and a number of areas of scaffolding are used to help to support the learning.

The first task related to SSM involves students identifying the stakeholders and their power/interest in the complex situation. Students are then taught the concepts of a rich picture and they draw a rich picture as a group for their chosen problem situation using white board paper (example below). The rich picture itself enables students to understand the real world, stakeholder issues, conflicts, and relationships together with who interacts with the problem from outside of its boundary.  Students present their rich pictures to the wider group for formative feedback.

This helps with constructive feedback and a deeper understanding of the complex issue. The rich pictures may seem simple, but simplifying a complex problem is complex in itself! This helps students to understand and tease apart the complexities of the problem situation. The rich picture depicts the problem situation better than just making notes alone.

For the realisation of the idealised world, students put themselves in the shoes of the stakeholder.  This involves empathetic discourse whereby students interview one another about what they would want for a system, without taking into consideration any constraints from different stakeholder perspectives. Students are then able to expand these statements as a group to take into consideration the different aspects. From this, students construct a model which helps depict the transformation activities that the stakeholders wish to conduct to reach their desired output.

By gaining a better understanding of the real world from drawing the rich picture and thinking about an idealised world and possible transformation activities, students can then gain an understanding for the changes going forward.

Topics chosen by students for their assessment have included: housing refugees in the UK; online exams or in person exams at university; homelessness; impact of the pandemic on tourism; child marriages in India; a start up in France to reduce plastic packaging; finding the appropriate route for a railway between two cities in Germany. These are all complex and ambiguous problems that need to be understood before any potential solutions are made.

During the module students develop confidence in the application of SSM and come to a true understanding of the process of accommodating different stakeholder perspectives – especially when consensus is not always possible. What we understand from this journey is that there is no ‘one shoe fits all’ solution when understanding complex ambiguous problems.

Empathy enriches the SSM process by ensuring the human side of systems is as important as the technical side. It helps to create solutions that work not just in theory but in real, messy, human-centric environments. Empathetic discourse is very valuable to understand the voice of the stakeholders. What we have learned from the delivery of the module is that when complex ambiguous problems are human centric, then the solutions are human centric also.

Checkland, P (1986) Systems thinking, systems practice Chichester: Wiley

Dr Joy Garfield is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Learning and Teaching for an academic department at Aston Business School, Aston University, UK.  Her subject discipline area is information systems, particularly systems modelling and complex problem solving. With just over 20 years of experience in academia, she has worked at a number of UK universities. Joy is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and is currently an external examiner at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster. 

Dr Amrik Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University, UK. He has over 15 years of academic experience in Higher Education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Advance HE, SFHEA. His teaching areas includes operations management, effective management consultancy, and business operations excellence. 


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Risk-based quality regulation – drivers and dynamics in Australian higher education

by Joseph David Blacklock, Jeanette Baird and Bjørn Stensaker

Risk-based’ models for higher education quality regulation have been increasingly popular in higher education globally. At the same time there is limited knowledge of how risk-based regulation can be implemented effectively.

Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) started to implement risk-based regulation in 2011, aiming at an approach balancing regulatory necessity, risk and proportionate regulation. Our recent published study analyses TEQSA’s evolution between 2011 and 2024 to contribute to an emerging body of research on the practice of risk-based regulation in higher education.

The challenges of risk-based regulation

Risk-based approaches are seen as a way to create more effective and efficient regulation, targeting resources to the areas or institutions of greatest risk. However, it is widely acknowledged that sector-specificities, political economy and social context exert a significant influence on the practice of risk-based regulation (Black and Baldwin, 2010). Choices made by the regulator also affect its stakeholders and its perceived effectiveness – consider, for example, whose ideas about risk are privileged. Balancing the expectations of these stakeholders, along with their federal mandate, has required much in the way of compromise.

The evolution of TEQSA’s approaches

Our study uses a conceptual framework suggested by Hood et al (2001) for comparative analyses of regimes of risk regulation that charts aspects respectively of context and content. With this as a starting point we end up with two theoretical constructs of ‘hyper-regulation’ and ‘dynamic regulation’ as a way to analyse the development of TEQSA over time. These opposing concepts of regulatory approach represent both theoretical and empirical executions of the risk-based model within higher education.

From extensive document analysis, independent third-party analysis, and Delphi interviews, we identify three phases to TEQSA’s approach:

  • 2011-2013, marked by practices similar to ‘hyper-regulation’, including suspicion of institutions, burdensome requests for information and a perception that there was little ‘risk-based’ discrimination in use
  • 2014-2018, marked by the use of more indicators of ‘dynamic regulation’, including reduced evidence requirements for low-risk providers, sensitivity to the motivational postures of providers (Braithwaite et al. 1994), and more provider self-assurance
  • 2019-2024, marked by a broader approach to the identification of risks, greater attention to systemic risks, and more visible engagement with Federal Government policy, as well as the disruption of the pandemic.

Across these three periods, we map a series of contextual and content factors to chart those that have remained more constant and those that have varied more widely over time.

Of course, we do not suggest that TEQSA’s actions fit precisely into these timeframes, nor do we suggest that its actions have been guided by a wholly consistent regulatory philosophy in each phase. After the early and very visible adjustment of TEQSA’s approach, there has been an ongoing series of smaller changes, influenced also by the available resources, the views of successive TEQSA commissioners and the wider higher education landscape as a whole.

Lessons learned

Our analysis, building on ideas and perspectives from Hood, Rothstein and Baldwin offers a comparatively simple yet informative taxonomy for future empirical research.

TEQSA’s start-up phase, in which a hyper-regulatory approach was used, can be linked to a contextual need of the Federal Government at the time to support Australia’s international education industry, leading to the rather dominant judicial framing of its role. However, TEQSA’s initial regulatory stance failed to take account of the largely compliant regulatory posture of the universities that enrol around 90% of higher education students in Australia, and of the strength of this interest group. The new agency was understandably nervous about Government perceptions of its performance, however, a broader initial charting of stakeholder risk perspectives could have provided better guardrails. Similarly, a wider questioning of the sources of risk in TEQSA’s first and second phases could have highlighted more systemic risks.

A further lesson for new risk-based regulators is to ensure that the regulator itself has a strong understanding of risks in the sector, to guide its analyses, and can readily obtain the data to generate robust risk assessments.

Our study illustrates that risk-based regulation in practice is as negotiable as any other regulatory instrument. The ebb and flow of TEQSA’s engagement with the Federal Government and other stakeholders provides the context. As predicted by various authors, constant vigilance and regular recalibration are needed by the regulator as the external risk landscape changes and the wider interests of government and stakeholders dictate. The extent to which there is political tolerance for any ‘failure’ of a risk-based regulator is often unstated and always variable.

Joseph David Blacklock is a graduate of the University of Oslo’s Master’s of Higher Education degree, with a special interest in risk-based regulation and government instruments for managing quality within higher education.

Jeanette Baird consults on tertiary education quality assurance and strategy in Australia and internationally. She is Adjunct Professor of Higher Education at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea and an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.

Bjørn Stensaker is a professor of higher education at University of Oslo, specializing in studies of policy, reform and change in higher education. He has published widely on these issues in a range of academic journals and other outlets.

This blog is based on our article in Policy Reviews in Higher Education (online 29 April 2025):

Blacklock, JD, Baird, J & Stensaker, B (2025) ‘Evolutionary stages in risk-based quality regulation in Australian higher education 2011–2024’ Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1–23.