[On day when I was in (virtual) attendance at a service for Oliver Westall (my dad’s best and lifelong friend: https://portal.lancaster.ac.uk/intranet/news/article/oliver-martin-westall-acss-frhists and evidently a truly good man) at Lancaster University, it can as a shock to hear of the death of Peter Checkland]

Søren Kerndrup gives a lovely and very fitting tribute here: In Memoriam: Peter Checkland (1930–2026)

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Here is Checkland himself, appropriately at the OR Society, from 2081:

A nice tribute to (more than) 50 years of Soft Systems Methodology (also OR Society):

https://www.theorsociety.com/ORS/ORS/Publications/Magazines/IOR/July-2025/SSM_Checkland.aspx

Systems explained, by Checkland also fittingly, on the OU website):

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/leadership-management/systems-explained-peter-checkland

A nice short summary of his ‘journey’:

His piece Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective

A piece I came across he wrote in 2021 [another echo of a world that is leaving us: my dad was a big Trad jazz man]

And other references here on syscoi.com – surprisingly tangential but perhaps illustrating his ‘background status’ in recent years, despite enormous influence [similarly, he has never been central to my personal thinking or practice – not explicitly, though implicitly hugely important]