VISIONING THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS : EVOLUTIONARY AND DISCONTINUOUS LEAP APPROACHES

Designing a system begins with creating a vision of it to guide the efforts that bring it to life. User-design of social systems involves the stakeholders or users of an enterprise in the collaborative visioning of their enterprise as a purposeful system. Such a process is called idealized systems design when user-designers are guided by deeply meaningful and inspiring shared values to create the most attractive and ideal vision of which they are capable. Two approaches to visioning will be compared and contrasted: evolutionary and discontinuous-leap approaches. In evolutionary approaches, such as appreciative inquiry, users explore ‘the best of what is’ in order to vision ‘what could be’. By contrast, discontinuous-leap approaches ask users to suspend or transcend existing reality to free their creative imaginations from the constraints of ‘what is’ in order to dream of ‘what could be’. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.