Problematique and the Club of
By
Ken Bausch, PhD
Institute for 21st Century Agoras
The origins of the Club of
Rome can be traced to a
Earlier that year, Hasan had
delivered a long paper in the Bellagio conference in Italy titled “The
General Theory of Planning,” which was later published in a book edited
by Erich Jantsch (1969) titled Perspectives on Planning. During his participation in the Bellagio
conference, Hasan had met Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist and
philanthropist. Hasan had a good
friend and collaborator Aleco Christakis who had a history of involvement with
Constantine Doxiadis, the Ekistics movement, and the Delos Dialogues.
The triumvirate decided to
name this initiative The Club of
Subsequently, Aurelio,
Hasan, and Aleco, aided by Erich Jantsch, put together the first
conceptualization of the global Problematique in the monumental first
proposal of the Club of Rome titled “The Predicament of Mankind”
(1970). With Aurelio making the
connections and paying the freight, Aleco trotted the globe from
The Predicament of Mankind, (for a review of the proposal visit http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/loversofdemocracy/Predicament.PTI.pdf
), was put together under the towering leadership of Hasan Ozbekhan, probably
one of the best systems thinkers of the 20th century. It described very eloquently the
predicament of mankind. It identified
approximately 50 Continuous Critical Problems (CCPs), which on account of their
strong interactions should not be addressed in a piecemeal fashion. Such problems as the ”pollution
problem,” the “inner city problem,” the “poverty
problem” the “starvation problem” the “nuclear
proliferation problem,” the “population growth problem,” and
so on, are strongly interconnected contributing to the emergence of a new
entity called in the proposal the global Problematique. The concept and the name Problematique
appeared for the first time in the Club of Rome (CoR) proposal. The proposal recognized and described
the futility of addressing these problems in a piecemeal fashion, instead of
addressing them as a system of problems. It proceeded to conceptualize and
articulate very elegantly a philosophical, methodological, and institutional
framework for penetrating and resolving the global Problematique.
Because no appropriate
methodology was available in the early 70s for addressing the complexity and
multidimensionality of the Problematique, the framework presented in the
proposal was more like an architectural design than an engineering
blueprint. Some readers of the
proposal considered it an outstanding conceptual breakthrough, but others, especially
the systems engineers of the 60s, found it lacking in methodological
specificity and rigor.
The perceived lack of
methodological rigor of the proposal contributed significantly in the decision
of the Executive Committee of CoR to award, in the summer of 1971, a major
grant to the systems dynamics group of MIT. This group, under the leadership of Jay
Forester who was an electrical engineer by training and was a professor at the Sloan School of
Management at MIT, had been working on developing the systems dynamics approach
to the observation, explanation, and prediction of the dynamics of social
systems. Forester had already
applied the method to industrial and urban dynamics in the 60s, so it was easy
for him to persuade the Executive Committee that it was appropriate to apply
the method to world dynamics.
The Executive Committee decided to sponsor the project on the
development of the world dynamics model.
The major outcome of this project was the production of the “world
model” using the methodology of systems dynamics. The work and findings of this project
culminated with the publication of the very popular book Limits to Growth in
1972 (Meadows, et al., 1972). The
controversial nature of the findings reported in this book gave a lot of
publicity and notoriety to the CoR.
When the
Executive Committee made this grant award to MIT to develop the world model,
Hasan and Aleco resigned from the Club. They both felt that the systems dynamics
methodology, which was used for deriving an extrapolated future for the world
system to the year 2150, compromised the original intent of the CoR proposal
which was to discover and use a
methodology capable of engaging the stakeholders in a dialogical process with
sensitivity to their cultural situation and the praxis of their lives. They felt that the system dynamics
approach was perpetuating a paradigm of scientific elitism and social
engineering in designing social systems, instead of legitimizing the wisdom of
the people by engaging stakeholder in a dialogue for designing their
futures. Hasan joined the
Aleco working with John
Warfield and many other colleagues, initially at the Academy for Contemporary
Problems in Columbus, Ohio, and later in other academic institutions, has spent
approximately 35 years of research, development, and testing in the arena to
invent and apply the model and methodology that rendered the original
architecture of the Club of Rome proposal usable and applicable in the field of
practice.
The fruit of that research
and practice is the Structured Dialogic Design Process (SDDP), which is set out
in the book Harnessing Collective Wisdom
and Power www.harnessingcollectivewisdom.com.
References
Christakis, A. N. (1988).
The Club of Rome revisited in: General
Systems. W. J. Reckmeyer (ed.),
International Society for the Systems Sciences, Vol. XXXI, pp. 35-38,
Christakis, A.N. and
Bausch, K.B. (2006). Harnessing Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future.
Doxiadis. C. A., (1968). Ekistics: An Introduction to the
Science of Human Settlements, Hutchinson of
Meadows D. H., Meadows D., and
Özbekhan, H. (1969). Towards a general theory of planning. In
Peccei A. (1969 ). The Chasm Ahead,