Source: Werner Ulrich: “The quest for competence in systemic research and practice,”
Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2001, pp. 3-28.
This prepublication version © 2000 by W. Ulrich - All rights reserved.
Non-commercial distribution and citation of the prepublication version are permitted on the condition
that proper reference is given to the published version © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
To allow accurate citation, original page breaks are indicated in the text in brackets,
whereby [|| N ] means that at this place, page N is beginning in the original version.
ISSN 1092-7026
The Quest for Competence in
Systemic Research and Practice
Werner Ulrich
*
University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, Lincoln, UK
How can we develop competence in research and professional practice? This essay
tries to answer the question from the perspective of critical systems thinking, that is,
through an approach that aims to promote reflective research and practice. The
paper originated in discussions on the nature of research, with research students and
professionals from different fields – among these the domains of business and
public management, operational research and management science, social planning
and evaluation research, public health, poverty research, social work and social
policy, environmental research, city and regional planning, adult education and
civic studies. With its publication the author hopes to encourage a wide readership
of research students, researchers, and professionals in these and other fields of
practice who wish to clarify their personal notion of competence. The essay
addresses them in a direct and personal way.
Keywords professional competence; professionalism; reflective practice; research; systems
research; critical systems practice; critical systems thinking; critical systems heuristics
________________
*
Correspondence to: Werner Ulrich, Sichelweg 41, CH-3098 Schliern, Switzerland.
E-mail: wulrich@gmx.ch.
Ulrich / The Quest for Competence
2
INTRODUCTION
‘We understand only when we understand the question to which something is the answer.’
(Gadamer, 1975, p. 356, with reference to Collingwood, 1946). Hence, if we want to under-
stand what it means to be 'competent' in any field of study, we need first to ask what sort of
question we are trying to answer through such competence. With special regard to systems
thinking, what is the fundamental question to which systemic research and practice should
respond? That is, if systems thinking is (part of) the answer, what is the question?
In the search for this question it should be clear that systems thinking is of interest more
as a means for promoting personal competence in various fields of study than as a field of
study for its own sake. The primary concern is competence, not systems. Furthermore, it
should be equally clear that increasing one's competence requires a sustained personal effort
at learning and growth. Since every reader is a unique person with different skills, interests,
and talents, it is obvious that needs for personal learning and growth will differ. Some readers
will wish to deepen their expertise as (future) researchers or professionals, for example by
acquiring some specific skills in research methodology and systems thinking. Others may feel
a need to strengthen their capabilities for more general purposes. Perhaps you, the reader,
[||4] already feel confident about your professional training and experience but would like to
become a more reflective professional, or even a more mature person in general. The quest
for competence is a very personal undertaking indeed. As a reader, you should thus not
expect this essay to offer you a specific formulation of your fundamental question, that is, the
question that might guide you in your personal quest for competence. I cannot formulate this
question for you, only at best help you in finding your own central theme. My goal, therefore,
is merely to guide you toward a few possible topics for reflection, towards meaningful
questions to ask yourself.
The paper also offers some considerations as to how you might deal with these topics,
but please bear in mind that the purpose is simply to turn your attention to some questions
that you might find relevant and not to give you the answers; that is to say, I do not claim that
the considerations I offer are the only possible ones or even the only valid ones. I offer them
as examples only. Their choice appears relevant to me at this particular moment in my
academic and personal journey; even if some of them should prove helpful to you at the
specific moment you have reached in your own journey, you will need to pursue your quest
for competence in your own unique way. Nobody has a monopoly or a natural advantage in
knowing what are the right considerations for you. Everybody is entitled to have differing
views on what the quest for competence means. Contrary to academic custom, the game for
once is not to be right but only to be true to yourself.
As a last preliminary remark, a note concerning style. In the discussions with research
students and professionals which inspired this paper, I found that research students often see
questions and difficulties that established professionals tend to lose sight of as they become
used to research conventions and routine procedures in their fields, and I have therefore
chosen to address my readers as 'research students'. But of course the paper aims to reach
established researchers and professionals, too. If you consider yourself one of these two, you
may wish to read 'research student' as meaning 'student of competence' – for students of
competence, I take it, we all remain throughout our lives.
Ulrich / The Quest for Competence
3
THE BURDEN OF BECOMING A ‘RESEARCHER’
As research students you are supposed to do ‘research’. Through a research project and a
dissertation you have to prove that you are prepared to treat an agreed-upon topic in a
scholarly manner, in other words, that you are a competent researcher.
Not surprisingly then, you are eager to learn how to be a competent researcher. But I
suspect that few of you are quite sure what precisely is expected of you. Hence the job of
‘becoming a competent researcher’ is likely to sound like a tall order, one that makes you feel
a little uncomfortable, to say the least. What do you have to do to establish yourself as a
‘competent’ researcher?
From what you have been told by your professors, you have probably gathered that being
a competent researcher has something to do with being able to choose and apply methods.
Methods, you have understood, should be appropriate to the problem you are dealing with
and should help you to produce findings and conclusions that you can explain and justify in
methodological terms. That is to say, you should be able to demonstrate how your findings
and conclusions result from the application of chosen methods and why methods and results
are all valid.
Of course that makes you worry about which methods you should apply and how to
justify your choices. It really seems to be an issue of choice rather than theory. There are so
many different methods! The choice appears to some extent arbitrary. What does it mean to
be a competent researcher, in view of this apparent arbitrariness? You may have turned to the
epistemological literature for find help, but what you have found is likely to have confused
you even more. The prescriptions given there certainly seem abstract and remote from
practice, apart from the fact that the diverse prescriptions often enough appear to conflict with
one another.
As a second difficulty, once you have chosen a methodology and start to apply it, you
will at times feel a strong sense of uncertainty as to how to apply it correctly. Methods are
supposed to give you guidance in advancing step by step. You expect them to give you some
security as to [||5] whether you are approaching your research task in an adequate way, so as
to find interesting and valid answers to your research questions. Instead, what you experience
is confrontation with problems and doubts. There seem to be more questions than answers,
and whenever you dare to formulate an answer, there again seems to be a surprising degree of
choice and arbitrariness. Whatever answers you formulate seem to be as much a matter of
choice as the method you have used and how exactly you have used it.
Given this burden of personal choice and interpretation, you may wonder how you are
supposed to know whether your observations and conjectures are the right ones. How can you
develop confidence in their quality? How can you ever make a compelling argument
concerning their validity? And if you hope that in time, as you gradually learn to master your
chosen method, you will also learn how to judge the quality of your observations, as well as to
justify the validity of your conclusions, yet a third intimidating issue may surface: how can
you ever carry the burden of responsibility concerning the actual consequences that your
research might have if it is taken seriously by other people, for example by people in an
organization whose problems you study, if they accept your findings or conclusions and
implement them in practice?
Ulrich / The Quest for Competence
4
As a fourth and last difficulty that I want to mention here, your major problem may well
be to define ‘the problem’ of your research, that is, the issue to which you are supposed to
apply methods in a competent fashion. This is indeed a crucial issue, but here again the
epistemological and the methodological literature is rarely of help. Its prescriptions seem so
remote from practice. Moreover, it is questionable whether we should let our methods define
the problem. A definition of a research problem should tell us something essential about the
object of research; that is, it should be more a function of live, social practice (including the
practice of research, if the issue is research itself) than a function of the methods you happen
to know. I will come back to this issue of the ‘primacy of practice’ in a later section.
A lot of questions to worry about, indeed! But didn’t we just say that without questions
there is no understanding? So take your questions and worries as a good sign that you are on
your way toward understanding. Let us explore together where this way might lead you. One
thing seems certain: if you do not try to understand where you want to go, you are not likely to
arrive there!
THE DEATH OF THE EXPERT
1
Sometimes it is easier to say what our goal is not, rather than what it is. Are there aspects or
implications of ‘competence’ that you might wish to exclude from your understanding of
competence in research? Certainly.
For instance, in what way do you aim to be an ‘expert’ on systems methodologies (or any
other set of methodologies), and in what way do you not want to become an ‘expert’? To be
‘competent’ in some field of knowledge means to be an expert, doesn’t it? The role that
experts play in our society is so prominent and seemingly ever more important that many of
their assumed roles immediately come to our mind. To mention just three: experts seem to be
able to make common cause with almost any purpose; most of the time (except when they are
talking about something we happen to be experts in) experts put us in the situation of being
‘lay people’ or non-experts (i.e., incompetent?); experts frequently cease to reflect on what
they are doing and claiming. So what role would you rather not play as a competent
researcher? In what way would you rather not claim expertise, that is, limit your claims to
expertise? Where do you see dangers of ceasing to be self-critical?
Ceasing to be self-critical, with the consequent risk of claiming too much, is unfor-
tunately very easy. So many aspects of ‘expertise’ or ‘competence’ call for self-critical
handling! Basically, we [||6] do not want to obscure or even disregard the limitations of our
methods – ‘methods’ in the widest possible sense of any systematically considered way to
proceed – on which our competence depends. The limitations of a method are among its most
important characteristics, for if we are not competent in respecting these limitations, we are
not using the method in a competent manner at all. From a critical point of view, no human
method should ever be assumed to be sufficient for dealing with all aspects of a problem; only
________________
1
White and Taket (1994) have used this phrase before me. They are among the few authors who consider
their personal professional practice in this way, and I am therefore pleased to call the reader’s attention to
their discussion. My discussion here is independent of theirs, though, since at the time of writing the present
essay I was not aware of their work.
Ulrich / The Quest for Competence
5
gods (perhaps) know omnipotent methods. Hence, one of the first questions we should ask
about every method concerns its limitations. Technically speaking, the limitations of a method
may be said to be contained in the theoretical and methodological assumptions that underpin
any reliance on it. Some of these may be integral to the specific method we use, in the sense
of being built into that method; others may arise rather through the imperfect way we use it or
the inappropriate purpose for which we use it.
Perhaps an even more basic assumption is that the expert, by virtue of his/her expertise,
has a proper grasp of the situation to which s/he wants to apply his/her expertise, so that s/he
can properly decide what method is appropriate and hence this choice can then ensure valid
findings and conclusions. Experts often seem to take such assumptions for granted, or else
tend to cover them behind a façade of busy routine.
To the extent that we are insensible to these assumptions, they threaten to become
sources of deception. We ourselves may be deceived as researchers, but inadvertently we
may also deceive those who invest their confidence in our competence. There need not be any
deliberate intention to deceive others on the part of the researcher; it may simply be his
routine which stops him from revealing to himself and to other concerned persons the specific
assumptions that flow into every concrete application of methods. Even so, this is probably
not what you would like to understand by ‘competence’.
The earlier-mentioned questions and doubts that plague many a research student are then
perhaps a healthy symptom that your research competencies have not yet reached the stage of
routine where this lack of reflection threatens. This danger is more of a threat to established
researchers who have already become recognized as experts in their field. Although some
degree of routine is certainly desirable, we should not confuse it with competence. Routine
implies economy, not competence.
When experts forget this distinction, they risk suffering the silent death of the expert. It
seems to me at times that in our contemporary society, the death of the expert has taken on
epidemic dimensions! We are facing an illness that has remained largely unrecognized or
incorrectly diagnosed, perhaps because it causes an almost invisible death, one that often
enough is hidden by the vigorous and impressive behaviour patterns of those who have
developed the disease.
There is a second cause of the death of the expert that we must consider. Even if a
researcher remains thoroughly aware of the methodological and theoretical underpinning of
his or her competence and makes an appropriate effort to make it explicit, does that mean that
the research findings provide a valid ground for practical conclusions? This is often assumed
to be the case, but repeated assumption does not make a belief valid. A sound theoretical and
methodological grounding of research – at least in the usual understanding of ‘theory’ and
‘methodology’ – implies at best the empirical (i.e., descriptive) but not the normative (i.e.,
prescriptive) validity of the findings. Well-grounded research may tell us what we can and
cannot do, but this is different from what we should do on normative grounds.
When it comes to this sort of issue, the researcher has no advantage over other people.
Competence in research then gains another meaning, namely, that of the self-limitation of the
researcher. No method, no skill, no kind of expertise answers all the questions that its
application raises. One of the most important aspects of one's research competence is
therefore to understand the questions that it does not answer. But the number of questions
