A Systems Pilgrimage: Paul Jowitt’s contributions to this Journal (1984-2022)
Paul Jowitt became Joint Editor of this Journal from 1985, when he joined Colin Brown following the death of his friend, mentor and PhD supervisor Ian (John) Munro. His editorship, alone and jointly, continued till his resignation in 2022. He contributed many articles since the journal’s founding in 1983. This collection contains what he wrote, together with a piece by Colin Brown marking Paul’s award in 2011 of a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
The collection of Paul’s papers shows how his system thinking changed over time. His thinking changed radically, importantly, even to the extent that it was a pilgrimage of thought and action.
Initially he concentrated on technical quantitative methods parallelling operations research techniques. But so often, this approach missed the underlying point of what systems approaches were trying to do. There were two difficulties. Complex quantitative techniques seemed to apply only to relatively simple models. More fundamentally, the large and increasingly complex problems of the real world demanded a different approach – a different discipline – from the deductive logic of applied mathematics. But what was the underpinning systems discipline? What was needed in practice, for actually doing things, rather than academic theory?
All too few journals addressed the logical underpinnings of practice. Paul began to shift his emphasis from techniques to problems – to some of the great and complex problems facing the world. He was challenging us, and rightly.
In both in his writings and his editorial policies, driving us to think ahead, Paul makes the objective clear. We need the right skills, the right understanding, and perhaps above all, the right ways of thinking.
Guest editors
Prof. David G. Elms(Civil and Natural Resources Engineering, University of Canterbury)