Declaring Worldviews in SSM for Sustainability & Community Learning

Miles W. Weaver; Rebecca J. M. Herron; Kamila Pokorna; David E. Salinas Navarro; Eliseo Vilalta-Perdomo

doi:10.1007/s11213-025-09749-8

Declaring Worldviews in SSM for Sustainability & Community Learning

Miles W. Weaver
, Rebecca J. M. Herron
, Kamila Pokorna
, David E. Salinas Navarro
, Eliseo Vilalta-Perdomo

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Abstract

For over fifty years, Soft Systems ideas and the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) have played a pivotal role in understanding various problem situations and initiating action. Often tackling the grandest challenges of our time, SSM will retain continued relevance in helping decision-makers address sustainability challenges within organisations and their communities. In this paper, we are concerned with the meaningful co-creation of sustainable value through community-based learning using SSM. More specifically, recognising that a sustainability paradigm, characterised by the need to create a just and safe space for humanity to thrive within the means of a living planet (as called for by Raworth, 2017), is often marginalised or overlooked. This paradigm presents us with an ethical imperative, complex and messy challenges/issues, and a set of ideals (articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) that are significantly off track. This paper employs a variation of the Delphi method, drawing on the authors’ collective interest and experience in applying SSM in communities, to propose a double-loop learning cycle to explore the underlying assumptions of our worldviews and mental models within communities. We suggest that an SSM learning cycle can be enhanced by initiating conversations on relevant models for sustainability (such as Doughnut Economics, UN SDGs, and the principles for a Circular Economy), to find common ground for triggering new learning. This idea is contextualised and proposed as the value(s)-action gap phenomenon, which can help explain the difference between an individual, an organisation, and/or a community's intention(s) and their actual action(s).In doing so, find common ground, shift to higher levels of systems consciousness from an ego-centric to an ecosystem level of awareness, engage communities, and take an intergenerational perspective. We suggest that incorporating a double-loop learning cycle into SSM can support organisations and their communities in putting shared values into meaningful action.

Original language	English
Article number	2
Number of pages	23
Journal	Systemic Practice and Action Research
Volume	39
Early online date	8 Jan 2026
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-025-09749-8
Publication status	Published - 8 Jan 2026

Bibliographical note

Copyright © The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Funding

Vignette 3 was made possible with funding from a Knowledge Transfer Partnership, supported by Innovate UK (funded by the Technology Strategy Board and the Scottish Funding Council) and the Voluntary Action Fund (Scotland). Partnership Number: 9740. The third author’s contribution was supported by the European Union and the Czech Republic’s state budget under Project Materials and Technologies for sustainable development [number CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004631]; and the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic under Project CirkArena [number CZ.10.03.01/00/22_003/0000045].

Keywords

Community OR
Learning
Soft Systems Methodology
Sustainability
Systems Thinking

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10.1007/s11213-025-09749-8Licence: CC BY 4.0

Declaring Worldviews in SSM for Sustainability & Community Learning
Copyright © The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Final published version, 1.23 MBLicence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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Declaring Worldviews in SSM for Sustainability & Community Learning

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

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