C. West Churchman Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

The individuation process, as the way of development and maturation of the psyche, does not follow a straight line, nor does it always lead onwards and upwards. The course it follows is rather stadial, consisting of progress and regress, flux and stagnation in alternating sequence. Only when we glance back over a long stretch of the way can we notice the development. If we wish to mark out the way somehow or other, it can equally well be considered a spiral, the same problems and motifs occurring again and again on different levels.

C. West Churchman
The idea of a 'system approach' is both quite popular and quite unpopular. It's popular because it sounds good to say that the whole system is being considered, but it's quite unpopular because it sounds either like a lot of nonsense or else downright dangerous – so much evil can be created under the guise of serving the whole.

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

C. West Churchman
It would be a good thing, if the systems planner's germination was moral outrage and not just a mild felt need. In other words, I do not think we should view the major problems of the world today with calm objectivity. We shouldn't first ask ourselves for a precise and operational definition of malnutrition. We should begin with 'kids are starving in great numbers, damn it all!

C. West Churchman
The concern of OR with finding an optimum decision, policy, or design is one of its essential characteristics. It does not seek merely to define a better solution to a problem than the one in use; it seeks the best solution... [It] can be characterized as the application of scientific methods, techniques, and tools to problems involving the operations of systems so as to provide those in control of the operations with optimum solutions to the problems.

C. West Churchman
For the goal planner, reality stops at the boundaries of the problem. For the objective- planner, it stops at the boundaries set by feasibility and to some extent by responsibility. For the ideal-planner, there are no "real" boundaries.

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

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

C. West Churchman
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."

C. West Churchman
The scientist has to have a way of thinking about the environment of a system that is richer and more subtle than a mere looking at for boundaries. He does this by noting that, when we say that something lies 'outside' the system, we mean that system can do relatively little about its characteristics or its behavior. Environment, in effect, makes up the things and people that are 'fixed' or 'given', from the system's point of view.

C. West Churchman
No science has ever been born on a specific day. Each science emerges out of a convergence of an increased interest in some class of problems and the development of scientific methods, techniques, and tools which are adequate to solve these problems. Operations Research (O. R.) is no exception. Its roots are as old as science and the management function. It's name dates back only to 1940.

C. West Churchman
Suppose we consider, not the rationality of holism, but its spirituality. Holism traditionally says that a collection of beings may have a collective property that cannot be inferred from the properties of its members.

C. West Churchman
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.

C. West Churchman
I am often inclined to put the implementation questions first, ie, "Can anything be changed?" Should the implementation question not accompany the whole process from its very beginning to its very end?

C. West Churchman
This text grew from the lecture material for the "Short Course in Operations Research" which has been offered annually (since 1952) by Case Institute of Technology.

C. West Churchman
Everybody's daily life consists of problems arising from what you decided yesterday. Managers understand that. Mathematicians want to solve a theorem, publish the results and walk away clean. Managers never walk away clean. The real world is a very dirty place.
Clarity is supposed to be the objective of science. I disagree. I think the objective of science is confusion, because confusions carries you into problems.

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

C. West Churchman
If the chance of error alone were the sole basis for evaluating methods of inference, we would never reach a decision, but would merely keep increasing the sample size indefinitely.

C. West Churchman
To know that we are measuring real change we need to have a strong theoretical base.

C. West Churchman
In general, we can say that the larger the system becomes, the more the parts interact, the more difficult it is to understand environmental constraints, the more obscure becomes the problem of what resources should be made available, and deepest of all, the more difficult becomes the problem of the legitimate values of the system.

C. West Churchman
It's not as though we can expect that next year or a decade from now someone will find the correct systems approach and all deception will disappear. This, in my opinion, is not in the nature of systems. What is in the nature of systems is a continuing perception and deception, a continuing re-viewing of the world, of the whole system, and of its components. The essence of the systems approach, therefore, is confusion as well as enlightenment. The two are inseparable aspects of human living.

C. West Churchman
How can we design improvement in large systems without understanding the whole system, and if the answer is that we cannot, how is it possible to understand the whole system?

C. West Churchman
We have overwhelming evidence that available information plus analysis does not lead to knowledge. The management science team can properly analyse a situation and present recommendations to the manager, but no change occurs. The situation is so familiar to those of us who try to practice management science that I hardly need to describe the cases.

C. West Churchman
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.

C. West Churchman
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.

C. West Churchman