Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

14 Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing

The systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another

(Churchman 1979b, p. 231)

14.1 Prologue

Two important Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing (SAST) interventions have involved the US Bureau of Census. Both sought to help resolve messy public policy issues. The first in 1979, documented by Mason and Mitroff (1981) and Barabba and Mitroff (2014), was concerned with the possible adjustment of the inevitable undercount in the 1980 census. The second conducted in 2005, and reported in Barabba and Mitroff (2014), was around the very contemporary issue of the rights of individuals to privacy.

The problem of whether the Bureau should adjust its 1980 population count or not was highlighted on January 14th of that year in Time magazine:

Counting Americans every ten years would seem to be a noncontroversial enterprise, but the 1980 US census has become immersed in politics up to its last decimal point. A growing number of people are worried about the accuracy of the tally because so much – political power as well as the distribution of billion dollars in federal funds – is riding on the outcome.

Census data are used in the United States for, among other things, reapportioning seats in the House of Representatives and allocating back to states, cities, and communities, for various mandated programs and grants, billions of dollars collected by the Federal government through general taxation. ...