We Remember

I am writing to pass on the sad news that John Friend, who was a Visiting Professor with our Centre for Systems Studies until relatively recently, has passed away at the age of 92. He died peacefully yesterday lunchtime. 

 

Many of you will know John as the person who developed Strategic Choice, which was one of a small handful of approaches that stimulated a paradigm change in operational research in the 1970s and 1980s. When John first proposed Strategic Choice, it was after several years of careful observation of policymaking in Coventry Council, including many dialogues between policymakers and researchers. He set out to improve policy processes based on enhancing what people already do, rather than trying to impose something entirely new, which enabled significant take-up of the approach. This was a new innovation back in 1973 – and even today, people rarely take as much care as John did to engage with policymakers before they propose policy-process enhancements.

 

John came to us as a Visiting Professor after a long correspondence with me in my role of co-editor of the 2004 Community Operational Research book. I had asked John to write a chapter, and he initially had doubts because I had put “OR and Systems Thinking” in the subtitle. John had started his career in the OR group at the Tavistock Institute, and he was critical of the work of Emery and Trist (who were also based there) for taking a systems approach. He said that, if you take an open systems perspective, it encourages you to only look at stable, formally-constituted organizations, and then you miss the potential for working with transitory alliances collaborating across organizational boundaries, or with communities who have no formal organizations at all. His belief at that time was that OR should resist taking a systems approach. I agreed with him that the open systems ideas from the 60s and 70s were problematic in this way, but argued that we had successfully dealt with the problem through our understanding of boundary critique. I will never forget John’s open-minded attitude in this exchange, even though he had strong feelings about open systems theory: we came to a joint realization that what he called “working with selectivity” and what I called “boundary critique” were pointing in the same direction, and as a result he not only wrote a chapter for our book (which was focused on working with selectivity), but also accepted the invitation from our Centre for Systems Studies to be a Visiting Professor here. 

 

John was a great critical friend to our research group, and will be sadly missed.

 

Best wishes,

Gerald

 

I am heartbroken to inform you that my wonderful, loving and brilliant husband Steven passed away on July 29, 2021.  He fought the brave fight against metastatic uveal melanoma but there is no cure for this rare and aggressive disease.

As I searched his computer for names of professional and academic contacts, I came across a file that entitled "upon my untimely demise death" (created in January 2020, long before his cancer diagnosis!) with some contact information and a request to send this to you:

 

I knew Jim Simms from isss conferences and had many discussions with him, he was an extremely nice person   !!!!!!!

I am sad to hear his passing and sympathies to his relatives

janos korn