xvi when Herbert Simon (1947) published Administrative
Behavior, he critiqued the prevailing notion of the "principles" of management, which he debunked as "proverbs,"
masquerading as science... Simon finally came to extol the prospects of computerized models of decision making and
the potential for artificial intelligence applications to management with such unbounded enthusiasm as to suggest
the near removal of human beings from these practices altogether.
xvi-xvii For Vickers, as we outline below, the making of judgments is a necessary
element of all human action, including professional practice.
xvii Following World War II, writers such as Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertallanfy [sic],
Ross Ashby, and later, Gregory Bateson, introduced the broader intellectual community to a set of ideas about systems
and their control that had its origins in various technical areas... Vickers, like many, was deeply influenced by
the early work on systems and came to make a particularly valuable contribution to this work, largely through his concept
of the "appreciative system."
xix The exercise of appreciative judgment, the central theme in this book, has
three components. The first is the making of reality judgments: those judgments concerning what is or is
not the case - ranging from basic cause-and-effect beliefs to more subtle and complex "facts." The second
facet is the making of value judgments: those concerning what ought or ought not be the case - including imperatives,
wants and desires, prudential or self-interested considerations, and individual and collective goals and norms. The
third is the making of instrumental judgments: those concerning the best means available to reduce the mismatch between is
and ought - including the personal resources of time, attention, intellect, passion, money, and power, along with
those social resources that can be marshaled and applied (by influence or command) through communication, coalition, and access
to social institutions.
xx For Vickers, human action (as distinct from reaction, instinct, or reflex) inextricably
entails all three forms of judgment; it is a product of judging what is, what ought to be, and what can be done to
reduce the difference by selecting specific means from the set of possible actions at hand.
xxi-xxii Other features of appreciative systems explored in The Art of Judgment include
the following:
1. The ability to find pattern in complexity and to shift our choice of pattern according to varying
criteria and interests...
2. An artful selectivity in deciding what features of a situation are most important, in keeping
with shifting interests, values, and concerns...
3. The ability to "read the situation," which is particularly pronounced in first-rate
management. This includes judgments about how much to simplify the complexity of the environment and in what ways
xxii-xxiii In human culture... the selection of the normative criteria by which we govern ourselves... is
wholly and singularly up to us, delimited only by the constraints of nature that define the domain
p.6 He [Vickers] was to define the appreciative setting as a readiness to notice some aspects
of reality and not others.
p.11 Vickers immediately saw the relevance of systems thinking to government and administration,
and it seemed to him "that these ideas were ideas that everybody, governors and administrators, should be excited about"
(G. Vickers, 1982c). It surprised him to find that this was not the case. Technologists, on the other hand,
embraced the ideas with enthusiasm.
p.14 The professional, he [Vickers] believed, seeks knowledge where he or she can find it and generates
it himself or herself if no academic discipline is interested or able to meet the need
p.14-15 Vickers set out to understand motivation, not in terms of goal seeking, a concept
derived from energy systems, but in terms of norm holding, a concept derived from information systems...
He was replacing both the goal-seeking and the cybernetic (goal-seeking-with-feedback) models by
one in which... activity consisted in maintaining relationships over time... The process is a cyclical one: The appreciative
setting - a set of readinesses to notice and to value - both conditions new experience and is modified by it.
p.15-16 Vickers... wrote sixteen years later to the young American scholar Guy Adams,
Ever since I published The Art of Judgment in 1965 I have not read a practical book about administration
which took seriously the primacy of human motivation, still less one which questioned the rational model of action which insisted
that no action at human level was possible unless it was explicable as the pursuit of a purpose. The attack on rationality
and purpose or rather the effort to place these in relation to more subtle forms of human regulation is a mammoth task.
p.21-22 [Forward by Kenneth E. Boulding] Wisdom is easier to recognize than to define,
and one recognizes it in every chapter of this classic volume... Vickers' experience taught him that the real world
is an endless dynamic flux, that all goals are transient, that equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination,
even though a useful one, and that our images of facts and of evaluations are inextricably mixed and are formed mainly
in an interactive learning process he calls "appreciation." ... human judgment and decision is indeed an art, a process
of such complexity that it cannot be completely described by science.
p.25 Even the dogs may eat of the crumbs which fall from the rich man’s
table; and in these days, when the rich in knowledge eat such specialized food at such separate tables, only the dogs
have a chance of a balanced diet. [JLJ - a clever argument that systems thinking is a tool or mechanism for obtaining
wisdom useful in difficult or obscure situations]
p.28 Judgment, it seems, is an ultimate category, which can be approved or condemned by a further exercise
of the same ability.
p.28 Everyone with experience of decision making knows that the more closely we explore alternative
courses of action, the more clearly we become aware of limitations of various kinds that restrict the courses open to us.
p.29 It follows that good judgment can be recognized only over a substantial time span.
p.30 This is the field that this book seeks to explore. Its primary aim is to describe,
analyze, and understand the processes of judgment and decision, as they are encountered in business and public administration
and particularly those exercises that we regard as contributing to the making of "policy."
p.30 I have often been surprised to find that ideas I found difficult to grasp when I first met them in
some scientific presentation spring to life of themselves when some familiar aspect of practical life is looked at with a
fresh eye.
p.41 Thus the activity of the local authority consists in maintaining through time a complex pattern
of relationships in accordance with standards or within limits that have somehow come to be set as governing relations.
p.45 The system in jeopardy sheds first the relations least essential to its survival.
p.45-46 I have described policy making as the setting of governing relations or norms rather than
in the more usual terms as the setting of goals, objectives or ends. The difference is not merely verbal; I regard
it as fundamental. I believe that great confusion results from the common assumption that all course holding can be
reduced to the pursuit of an endless succession of goals. Some of the blame must be taken
by the psychologists who have made "goal seeking" the paradigm of rational behavior... an enhanced capacity to appreciate
relations in time is clearly one of the distinguishing marks of our species. The most outstanding feature of regulation
as practiced by governing bodies in industry or government is the trouble taken to observe the major variables as flows in
the dimension of time.
p.47-48 Neglect of the norm-holding aspect of activity has produced that curious figment of the psychology
textbooks, the purpose-ridden man... The purpose-ridden man's only "rational" activity is to seek goals; but since
each goal is attained once for all, it disappears on attainment, leaving him "purposeless" and incapable of rational activity
unless and until he finds another. "Satisfaction" is impossible to the purpose-ridden man or at least forms no part of his
rational activity. He is allowed only a momentary "relief from tension."... However "successful" he may be, however
long he lives, some new "goal" flutters for ever just beyond his grasp.
This view I believe to be fallacious. It derives partly from the fallacy... that men desire
objects. They do not. The objects of our desires and aversions are not objects but relations. No one "wants an apple". He
may want to eat it, sell it, paint it, admire it, conceivable even merely to possess it - a common type of continuing relation
- in any case to establish or change some relation with it. The goals we seek are changes in our relations or in our opportunities
for relating; but the bulk of our activity consists in the "relating" itself.
p.48 This book, without denying that men sometimes seek goals (in the sense already given)
stresses a different and I believe more fundamental and more neglected aspect of our activities, the maintenance of
relationships in time; and this is what I understand by regulation... it is generally agreed, I believe, that even
where conventional explanations in terms of goal seeking are appropriate, they mask the perhaps much greater amount of behavior
that should be described as threat avoiding. This is equally true of norm holding. For it is a feature of most dynamic
systems that if the relations to be regulated deviate from the norm beyond a critical threshold, they suffer radical, self-exciting,
and often irreversible change.
p.51 Thus the desired relation is maintained through time by a circular process... In the first segment
the actual course of affairs (or rather its relevant aspects) is compared with the norm, and information is gathered about
the relation between the two. In the second segment, action (or inaction) is chosen as a response.
p.52 Man-made regulators are usually designed to maintain a given relation by means of a given repertory
of responses - a relation, moreover, that the repertory of responses, if skillfully used, is expected to be able to maintain.
p.54 This book, then, being chiefly concerned with policy making, will focus attention
primarily on... the evolution and modification of the course, the norm, the standard, the governing relation that is inherent
in every policy and the selection and ascertainment of the facts relevant to it... I need first a word to describe
it... I will call it appreciation, following the ordinary usage in which we speak of "appreciating
a situation." Reviews of policy are usually preceded by such appreciations... An appreciation involves making
judgments of fact about the "state of the system," both internally and in its external relations. I will call these reality
judgments... It also involves making judgments about the significance of these facts to the appreciator... These judgments
I will call value judgments. Reality judgments and value judgments are inseparable constituents of appreciation; they
correspond with those observations of fact and comparison with norm that form the first segment of any regulative cycle...
facts are relevant only in relation to some judgment of value, and judgments of value are operative only in relation to some
configuration of fact.
p.55 Judgments of value give meaning to judgments of reality
p.56 Policy making and execution... describe phases in the regulative cycle, rather than different kinds
of decision or decision maker.... Each solution proposed by executive judgment is appraised, not merely as a solution
to the problem that evoked it but also for its impact on other problems that it may make easier or harder of solution.
p.82-83 Appreciation manifests itself in the exercise through time of mutually related judgments [of] reality
and value... Such judgments disclose what can best be described as a set of readiness to distinguish some aspects of the situation
rather than others and to classify and value these in this way rather than in that. I will describe these readinesses as an
appreciative system... such readinesses are precious; for without them, we could not see or value or respond to anything
in any way.
p.86 The value judgments of men and societies cannot be proved correct or incorrect; they can only
be approved as right or condemned as wrong by the exercise of another value judgment.
p.89 What I have called reality judgment begins with the selection of what is relevant;
and this relevance is a matter of valuation. It involves predictions based on alternative suppositions; and
insofar as the likelihood of these alternatives can be affected by the agent, they provide material for instrumental
judgment. I have already stressed that the three labels denote three aspects of one mental activity.
p.91-92 The power... to make what I have called reality judgments, is strange and would be startling if
it were not so familiar... The skills involved in forming reality judgments include skills in originating hypotheses...
Its basic use is to supply a predictive picture of what is going to happen next... This power and need to make and
respond to a representation of the future is characteristic of all human behavior... it seems to have attained in man a new
dimension of significance.
p.97-98 In the unpredictable area of life where "wisdom lies in masterful administration of the
unforeseen," rigidity is to be feared and flexibility is to be prized... Unpredictable change demands flexibility. Change
both massive and unpredictable... poses the most basic policy choice of all, the choice of what to regard as regulable.
p.99 The rate of change in a system and the degree to which change is predictable set limits to the extent
to which the system can be regulated.
p.105 The power to rearrange in imagination the constituents of some familiar object of attention, so as
to see them in a changed relationship and another context is one of the skills of instrumental judgment.
p.112 It is through the effort to assimilate information that the recipient develops his conceptual organization
and his appreciative skill.
p.115 Among the facts of life that present themselves to our reality judgment, none is more conspicuous
than the fact that our fellows make value judgments and the value judgments that they in fact make. The most convenient
approach to the value judgment is therefore to approach it first as a matter of fact.
p.131 "What matters most now?" is a question constantly renewed, in circumstances constantly changing.
Its answers must be related to the needs of the minute yet must not be mutually self-defeating in the longer term. It is a
valuational choice, based on a subtle appreciation of the effect that changes of priority will spread through the system.
p.138 Professor Waddington (1960) has provided a very useful and general definition of an organization.
Groups of elementary constituents [who] may be entering into close relationships with each other build up
complex entities, which then enter into further causal relations with each other as units. It is this fact of the
integration of groups of constituents into complexes which in certain respects act as units which is spoken of as an organization.
p.203 In other words, the decision situation is in varying degrees a learning situation.
The state of the deciding mind, when it reaches its decision, is not the state at which it started, and the change
is not merely the result of the decision
p.211 An appreciative system is necessarily selective
p.212 A potential fact had become a potential act.
