Research design in complex social and organizational settings is a systemic practice in which boundaries, purposes, stakeholder relations, and methodological choices co-evolve. Yet mainstream research-design frameworks often represent these choices as nested or sequential, while systems methodologies are positioned inconsistently as philosophies, approaches, methodologies, or techniques. This article develops a reflexive architecture for systemic research design through a critical integrative synthesis of the research onion, the system of systems methodologies (SoSM), critical systems thinking, systemic intervention, multimethodology, boundary critique, and critical systems practice. The architecture repositions the research onion from a nested representation to five co-equal and recursively connected design domains; treats systemic practice as a cross-domain identity rather than an additional layer; and positions the SoSM as an external resource for comparison, critique, and methodological configuration rather than deterministic selection. Its evaluative core is reflexive coherence, operationalized through five criteria: boundary transparency, participation adequacy, methodological complementarity, consequence sensitivity, and documented redesign. Recursive review is neither infinite nor mechanically scored: design may be provisionally stabilized when these criteria have been explicitly examined, material tensions are defensible, and further revision is unlikely to yield a substantively better configuration relative to the inquiry’s purpose and constraints. The article therefore contributes more than a call for researcher reflexivity: it offers a meso-level architecture for sustaining coherence, legitimacy, and purposeful action as systemic research designs evolve. The claims remain conceptual and require comparative empirical testing in action research.
Agile software development and Scrum are the most successful ways to develop software projects. Despite the general success of the agile approach, software projects and Scrum teams still fail due to impediments related to inadequate adoption and use of the Scrum method in agile teams. We conducted a case study on a Scrum team that utilizes Scrum in the business insurance industry in the Czech Republic. Scrum teams can be considered soft systems due to their complex nature that involves human elements, social interaction, and multiple individual perspectives, and open systems due to their interaction and collaboration with other teams and systems within an organization. We used Soft System Methodology to analyze the adoption and use of Scrum method in the team. We inspected the problematic situation in the team, created root definitions of the problematic areas, and proposed action steps to improve the situation. Based on the case study, we identified insights from this team’s experience that can help other Scrum teams improve their practice and team collaboration.
Death literacy has been widely promoted within the compassionate communities movement as a way to counter the sequestration of death, dying, and grief. However, it is still largely conceptualized as a knowledge-based capacity centered on education and cognitive awareness. This article argues that death literacy is enacted and sedimented through affective practice within organizational settings. Drawing on a cooperative inquiry with volunteers and staff in a Hong Kong compassionate community organization, the study traces how repertoires of respect, quietness, collaboration, and resonance are enacted, recognized, and accumulated across cycles of interaction. Through iterative cycles of action and reflection, the inquiry generated conditions through which participants could collectively recognize, articulate, and reconfigure these affective repertoires, making them available for collective learning and organizational reflection. These repertoires, formed through relational and affective engagement, gradually contributed to an emerging organizational orientation toward dying and bereavement. By shifting analyses of death literacy beyond a purely cognitive resource, the article reconceptualizes death literacy as an embodied, relational, and practice-based process collectively produced and sedimented through cycles of cooperative inquiry.
Systems approaches are becoming widely recognised for their potential to address the complexity of food systems’ challenges and lead needed transformations. However, there is limited attention on how systems thinking is being applied across food systems research, for what purposes, and with what impact. Based on four research questions, this paper presents the results of a systematic review of articles that describe and categorise the application of systems thinking approaches to food systems research for which a systems model – employing a graph-based representation - has been created and made use of for diagnosing problems. The review covered a range of food-related challenges employing a wide diversity of systems approaches across 35 case studies. This diversity demonstrates an impressive diversity of approaches to implementing a systems thinking process of food systems model creation, with or without stakeholder involvement. In terms of impact, only two case studies sought evidence of demonstrable action to implement solutions identified in the food system as a result of their case study; only one of which provided evidence of such an action having taken place. None sought or found evidence of system transformation. This suggests that knowledge production (including systems identification and solution identification), rather than effecting change to solve wicked problems, has been the ultimate focus of the majority of case studies reviewed. In conclusion, our review has failed to find substantial evidence, documented in the selected food systems articles, that systems thinking processes (in which graphical representations of the system are produced to analyse system challenges and identify interventions) have led to substantive actions to solve those challenges, or to system transformation.
This article argues that knowledge in intervention should not be conceptualized as a set of static types, but as a dynamic orientation that must shift in relation to changing situational dynamics. Under conditions of complexity, intervention falters when epistemic orientation remains anchored in predictive and analytic expectations of control rather than moving toward adaptive, relational engagement. The core competence of complex intervention is therefore not the accumulation of expertise, but the cultivation of epistemic mobility. The article develops epistemic inertia and epistemic mobility as analytical lenses and discusses their implications for systemic practitioners operating under conditions of distributed causality and uncertainty. Epistemic mobility refers to the capacity within intervention to reconfigure how knowledge is mobilized as relational dynamics evolve. It involves recognizing when predictive and analytic reasoning are misaligned with emergent dynamics and transitioning toward adaptive, relational, and exploratory engagement without relinquishing accountability or coherence. Epistemic mobility thus concerns the alignment of knowing with the evolving dynamics of the situation rather than the accumulation of additional information. Epistemic inertia refers to the persistence of stabilized knowledge orientations despite shifts in situational dynamics. It occurs when predictive, decompositional, and control-oriented modes of knowing continue to guide intervention under conditions that require adaptive and relational engagement.
