Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

20 Critical Systems Thinking and Multimethodology

The fundamental tenet of multimethodology is the importance of combining together methods or sometimes methodologies in dealing with real‐world situations, whether the purpose is pure research or a practical intervention …. The first argument in favour of multimethodology is that the real world is complex and multi‐dimensional, while particular research or intervention methodologies focus only on specific aspects …. The second … is that research and intervention is not a discrete event but a process that has phases (or, rather, different types of activities) that will predominate at different times …. A third argument … is that it encourages triangulation of research and generates more interesting and stimulating results

(Mingers 2014, p. 184 et seq)

20.1 Introduction

Put as simply as possible, the idea of multimethodology (MM) is to use a combination of methodologies (possibly from different paradigms) and methods together in a single intervention. During the 1980s, as was noted in the previous chapter, interest in pluralism and MM escalated in a number of academic areas – for example, in organization theory (Reed 1985), systems thinking (Jackson and Keys 1984; Jackson 1987a), and information systems (IS) (Hirschheim 1985; Lyytinen and Klein 1985; Wood‐Harper et al. 1985; Avison and Wood‐Harper 1990; Walsham 1991; Walsham and Han 1991). Practitioners were also increasingly combining different methods in their work. ...