Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

As the future leaders of a society that is increasingly complex and challenging higher education students need a good grasp of social, political, economic and environmental issues and need to feel equipped to propose reasonable recommendations. This can seem a daunting prospect for anyone, let alone higher education students who may have little or no prior experience of working in these areas. Students need to understand the world view of the stakeholders and the what, how and whys of the situation being explored. What is the problem situation, how will we understand it, and why are we trying to understand it? Here we describe an approach successfully used in our postgraduate teaching at Aston Business School, UK.