Past president of the Society for General Systems Research (now the International Society for the Systems Sciences), 1982.
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Warfield's development of Interactive Management (IM) enable people involved with complex systems to build useful and usable models of systems under consideration. IM comprises of:
tools to generate and clarify ideas about the systems under consideration; and > powerful modeling tools to enable 'structuring' (i.e. organizing) the ideas generated into simple graphical models that show the relationships between the factors of the system under consideration. These modeling tools are Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) and Field Representation Method.
These contributions of Warfield's make it possible for us to create pictures showing our perceptions about the systems we need to consider, in such a way that we can actively work on them, discuss them with far greater clarity than is possible in 'conventional prose'. Warfield's developments actually define an extension to our language, that I call prose + structural graphics - this enables us actually to develop and create systems that could be significantly more effective than most of the systems we have in organizations and in society around us.
This is practical system design in the real sense.
