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Author: search.filters.author.Herron, Rebecca J. M.

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    Item type:Publication,
    Declaring Worldviews in SSM for Sustainability & Community Learning
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2026)
    Weaver, Miles W.
    ;
    Herron, Rebecca J. M.
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    Pokorna, Kamila
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    Salinas-Navarro, David Ernesto  
    ;
    Vilalta-Perdomo, Eliseo
    For over fifty years, Soft Systems ideas and the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) have played a pivotal role in understanding various problem situations and initiating action. Often tackling the grandest challenges of our time, SSM will retain continued relevance in helping decision-makers address sustainability challenges within organisations and their communities. In this paper, we are concerned with the meaningful co-creation of sustainable value through community-based learning using SSM. More specifically, recognising that a sustainability paradigm, characterised by the need to create a just and safe space for humanity to thrive within the means of a living planet (as called for by Raworth, 2017), is often marginalised or overlooked. This paradigm presents us with an ethical imperative, complex and messy challenges/issues, and a set of ideals (articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) that are significantly off track. This paper employs a variation of the Delphi method, drawing on the authors’ collective interest and experience in applying SSM in communities, to propose a double-loop learning cycle to explore the underlying assumptions of our worldviews and mental models within communities. We suggest that an SSM learning cycle can be enhanced by initiating conversations on relevant models for sustainability (such as Doughnut Economics, UN SDGs, and the principles for a Circular Economy), to find common ground for triggering new learning. This idea is contextualised and proposed as the value(s)-action gap phenomenon, which can help explain the difference between an individual, an organisation, and/or a community's intention(s) and their actual action(s).In doing so, find common ground, shift to higher levels of systems consciousness from an ego-centric to an ecosystem level of awareness, engage communities, and take an intergenerational perspective. We suggest that incorporating a double-loop learning cycle into SSM can support organisations and their communities in putting shared values into meaningful action. ©The authors ©Springer.
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    Item type:Publication,
    The resonance of Mike Jackson's work with the use of systems ideas in community operational research
    (John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2024)
    Herron, Rebecca J. M.
    ;
    Mendiwelso Bendek, Zoraida
    ;
    Vilalta-Perdomo, Eliseo
    ;
    Weaver, Miles W.
    ;
    Salinas-Navarro, David Ernesto  
    The body of work of Mike Jackson covers several major themes in OR/Systems Thinking and articulates key aspects of Critical Systems Thinking; with an interest throughout in applications to complex social challenges. In this paper, as a direct response to this Festschrift, and acknowledging his contribution to Community OR, five active UK-based researchers have engaged in their own process of community-based learning in order to articulate the ways Jackson's work resonates with their contemporary research and practice. The researchers used a variation of the Delphi method to reflect first on the ways that the body of work of Jackson resonated with their practice and research agendas. This produced a framework of ideas. Examples from the UK and overseas are then provided to illustrate these points. Ultimately, the researchers used these experiences and reflections to produce a series of statements for developing Community OR practice (and theory)—reflecting and extending Jackson's work. ©The authors ©John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
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