Appreciative System
= methodological concept from George Vickers
Description
Terry Cooke-Davies:
"An appreciative system has three movements. First, you extract impressions from the ongoing flux of events — the river of experience in which you are always already swimming. Second, you process those impressions through your accumulated experience and judgement — everything you have learned, felt, been shaped by, across a whole life of participation in the world. Third, you return the processed understanding to action, which changes the flux, which generates new impressions, which starts the cycle again.
The word “appreciative” carries double weight. It means both “to perceive the value of” and “to increase in value.” An appreciative system does not just process information. It develops the capacity to perceive what matters. Each cycle through the loop — experience, processing, action, new experience — enriches the system itself. You become better at noticing. Better at judging. Better at responding. Not by accumulating more data, but by deepening your relationship with what is actually there.
This is quite different from optimising for pre-specified goals.
Vickers’ colleague Peter Checkland, who did more than anyone to develop these ideas into a usable methodology, drew a simple diagram of the appreciative system. It has five nodes in a cycle: real-world experience leads to interpretation, which is shaped by standards, norms, and values, which in turn shapes judgement, which leads to action, which changes the real-world experience. The cycle continues. The standards sit at the centre, both shaping and being shaped by everything else.
Checkland called this “an epistemology for making sense of the groundless social process.” The word “groundless” is important. Vickers understood that there is no fixed external point from which the system can be observed or controlled. You are always inside your own process, always participating in the flux you are trying to make sense of. This is not a deficiency. It is the condition of all living cognition."