Paul Jowitt started writing for Civil Engineering Systems (CES) in 1984. It was the first volume of a new journal brought together by Ian (John) Munro and Colin Brown. They were excited by the promise of systems engineering methods and thought applied to civil engineering. At first the focus was on technique – the sorts of problem dealt with by operations research (OR). They thought the systems ideas in OR could apply to civil engineering, even perhaps to revolutionising the way civil engineers went about their business. Their instincts were right, but at that stage those of us moving in the systems direction were not clear in what we were doing. We groped forward as new ideas appeared, but it was many years before we understood that what we were doing was deeply revolutionary.
Paul was Ian’s PhD student. The resulting 1977 thesis is a formidable piece of work. Its conclusion said, ‘The Thesis had two components, firstly to construct a rationale for decision-making in civil engineering systems and secondly to show that the operation of this rationale possesses the added benefit of giving insights into system behaviour’. It also said the work was basically about producing a ‘logical framework for probabilistic reasoning and its subsequent combination with a consistent theory of value, and specifically addressed to the civil engineering profession’. Some of Paul’s section headings give an idea of his uncompromising need for precision, such as ‘The Calculi of Inductive Reasoning of Jaynes and Cox’, ‘The Principle of Maximum Entropy – the Jaynes Formulation’, ‘the Churchman-Ackoff Technique’ and so on.
He also said, ‘Systems techniques in civil engineering have not been as rewarding as they could have been’. This was insightful. Note the emphasis on ‘techniques’. This is how we thought about systems at the time. But it was a matter of techniques in search of an application. It took a while before we – those that Paul at one point called ‘The Systems Boys’, which included himself – understood we had it the wrong way round. Applications, the needs of the real world, had to come first, and had to lead our thinking. Ideas were more than algebra.
The first volume of the CES Journal appeared in 1984. It contained two of Paul’s papers. The first, ‘Estimating utilities from incomplete information’, was a nice crisp technical argument on the choice of utility functions in decision theory. It was an operations research approach, and a technique looking for a problem. For the second, ‘A Von Neumann-Morgenstern interpretation of the weighting factors in a valuewise-independent utility function’, the title says it all. It addressed a technical question regarding the choice of weighting factors in a multi-objective decision problem. Again, it was a sound technique-oriented paper, but Paul was beginning to push against the limitations of technique-oriented approaches to decision-making. Decisions are central to engineering, but in complex situations there was much yet to be understood.
His third contribution, in Volume 3, 1985, was a book review of Multi-Objective Decision Making. Here, saying, ‘This book conveys an initial impression of a collection of papers representing solutions seeking a problem and not vice versa’, Paul begins to see the limitations of hard-systems approaches.
Next, in Volume 4, 1987, he contributed an overview and a paper in what was probably the first Special Issue in the CES Journal. First came an introduction to a set of papers from a one-day meeting on ‘Expert systems in Civil Engineering’. Paul said the contributions showed ‘ … there was a wide variety of jargon and a broad variation in expertise in expert systems’. It could be thought of as ‘ … a dialogue, an examination of what is possible’. It can be seen, thirty years later, that many of the possibilities turned out to be dead ends. The future of the systems approach was not to be in quantitative techniques. And expert systems, being primarily rule-based, were superseded by more sophisticated knowledge-based methods of artificial intelligence. Paul’s second contribution was a paper, ‘Expert systems in river basin management’, written with W.O. Jenkins. It had a narrow focus on rule-based decision making.
The next paper, published in Volume 9, 1991 and co-authored with Chengchao Xu, was ‘Demand forecasting for water distribution systems’. It was a hard-system detailed analysis for identifying an optimal control approach to demand forecasting for water distribution systems. It was narrowly interesting and well-written, with its recommendations being used subsequently in an English water supply system. It would not change the world, though.
CES Volume 11, 1994 produced another book review, of Entropy & Energy Dissipation in Water Resources, by Singh and Fiorentino. I enjoy the way he writes. This is real Paul Jowitt. He starts, ‘A rather imposing title, and one to which one is either drawn or put off’. And then the conclusion: ‘Entropy? What is it? Oh, it’s just something that measures disorder. Well, yes, it does have this tendency to increase. Don’t worry about it. Just concentrate on decreasing it locally’. Lovely! But it is important to realise that even then Paul was looking outside the constraints of normally-accepted academic publishing.
‘Embedded retaining wall design procedures’ was a paper in Volume 12, 1995, co-authored with J. Oliphant and K. Ohno. It was a technical paper using a fuzzy-set approach to look at several approximate methods. It compared them with observations and concluded, worryingly to my mind, that there is more uncertainty in parameter (model) assumptions than in material variations.
Paul’s next contribution was a three-line editorial written with Colin Brown regarding a set of essays on the Reflective Systems Practitioners (Volume 13, 1996). The trouble is, that reflective practice is something that practitioners need to do but which university-based systems researchers did not yet fully accept as something researchers should legitimately research and write about. It is about an emphasis on practice rather than theory. Doing is very different from knowing intellectually. Try riding a bike for the first time only knowing theoretically how to do it. The distinction is central to the systems thinking enterprise. It is also central to the aims and rationale of this journal, and why, to my mind, it differs from all others in engineering systems research.
Volume 18, 2000 contained ‘A Bayesian estimation of the effect of forced ventilation on a pool fire in a tunnel’, written with R. O. Carvel and A.N. Beard. It was a long fire-engineering paper concerned with the effect of different ventilation regimes on the heat release rate of a tunnel fire. It was hard-systems stuff – fine but technically-focussed.
Next came ‘Decision mapping: understanding decision making processes’ written with F. J.-C. Bouchart and D. Blackwood (Volume 19, 2002). This proposed a mapping technique allowing existing decision-making processes and information flows to be identified and analysed. The map simply provided a structure to the decision-making process that is conducive to thinking. It was a technique for improving ease and quality of information flow. It was focussed on a systems approach, but nevertheless it still followed the fashion of the time in that it was a ‘technical’ paper whose focus was technique rather than vision.
There was a gap of eight years till Paul’s next CEES paper, ‘A systems journey – with the Systems Boys’ (Volume 27, 2010). Not only did it lay down a deepening of the meaning and direction of systems thinking, but it was a major change in Paul’s writing. It became less technical and more focussed on broad and real issues and soft systems approaches. It was more fun to read. It was an important and far-seeing statement of where we were at the time of its writing in terms of systems thinking. It was a piece cheering us on our way, so to speak, and saying that we were travelling a significant road within a landscape where relatively few could see its importance. Central to the whole was a return to Reflective Practice. Paul included a comment written by Donald Schon in his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner – How Professionals Think in Action, that ‘in the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy, confusing problems defy technical solution. The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern’. In other words, bravura analytic techniques may be the meat of researchers, but the problems – the models – they can deal with are not the gnarly ones of reality. Exactly. This was precisely Paul’s point. He was saying practice – how you do it – is central to sound systems work.
At this stage, Paul’s activities had ranged far beyond the confines of academia. He was active in the world at large through his involvement with the Institution of Civil Engineers, eventually becoming its President. He became increasingly involved in major problems of the world, with a strong convincement that engineering could solve many of them. For his work in this direction the Queen gave him the notable honour of becoming a Commander of the British Empire – a CBE. The CEES Journal published a well-wrought piece by Colin Brown, congratulating him, which we include in this collection (Volume 28, 2011).
Paul’s next contribution was an editorial introducing a Special Issue on ‘Systems thinking and reflective practice … ’ (Volume 29, 2012) He ended it by saying: ‘This Special Issue is something of a landmark: a whole issue devoted to the concepts of systems and the philosophy and practice of civil engineering in the wider world. The Big Picture. It is an issue which fulfils the ambitions of the founding editors and the current editorial team. I hope it will stimulate similar contributions in the future’. The piece was a challenge. Paul was saying that this is what we should be doing. Not just writing about systems and systems thinking, but being out there in the world, using our abilities and experience to tackle its increasingly complex problems and mobilising our (as David Blockley might have put it) practical wisdom. Developing it and sharing it, through reflective practice. It was a sermon, but by no means Paul’s last.
Next came a sort of crossover paper. ‘Decisions, decisions … ’ (Volume 30, 2013). It dealt with decisions where something had to be done, an option had to be chosen or developed. Where a major project was concerned, the context was likely to be hugely complex – not just physically but also economically, politically, environmentally and so on. There are many actors, many criteria and a raft of principles, ethical and otherwise. A great deal of work has been done on, for instance, multi-criteria decision-making and choice of relevant value. Paul ran through the issues. He showed that quantitative valuing is inadequate. It was irrational. He concluded that ‘It would be far better for decisions of significance if the options were kept open, the evidence presented, and the preferred option determined by debate and consent. The numbers game is best confined to problems of low significance!’ I totally agree. But to many decision makers this would be heresy. Paul then talked of sustainability, and of the need for system-level decision-making for large scale infrastructure. Again I agree. But it seems to me that something is still missing. Paul raised many questions, but there are even more to be raised and tackled. The true nature of uncertainty perhaps, or a new approach to value. How in the world do we do systems thinking in practice? To succeed we need to change people’s hearts and minds at a deep level, particularly those of people in authority. Perhaps we need more sermons!
Another paper came with a jump in time to 2020 and the piece ‘Systems and sustainability’ in CEES Volumes 37 and 38. Now here was a real sermon, full of wise thinking. Paul said: ‘This paper has set out some of the key tools and concepts which characterise Systems and Systems Thinking as they apply to civil engineering and other disciplines, and in particular to Sustainable Development’. He rightly pointed out the need to reform engineering education curricula to bring in the systems-thinking approach. This builds on the acronym ASK, which stands for Attitude, Skills and Knowledge. Traditional engineering education concentrates mostly on Knowledge, with little treatment of Skills and practically none regarding Attitude. Yet sound systems thinking requires the emphasis to be reversed if anything, though in truth what is needed is a rebalancing of A, S and K. The obvious question is, how do we educate the educators if, as is often the case, their world is very different from practice? By this stage, although Paul’s writing was full of examples and practical details, the emphasis had moved way beyond quantitative techniques.
Finally, in ‘Getting into shape and avoiding the apocalypse’ (Volume 39, 2022) Paul’s preaching was in full flight. His central point was that ‘it all comes back to the role of infrastructure, resilient infrastructure and the role of Engineers in delivering it in the face of climate change and international development’. Certainly the engineer’s role in infrastructure is paramount – for designing it, building it, maintaining it, recovering from disaster, as well as making sure it is resilient. This role aligns with the needs of people and the natural world. And infrastructure and our understanding of it are becoming increasingly complex. Systems thinking is needed. Neither are we engineers alone. Collaboration is key, and it is seldom easy. ‘Engineers need to play their part in providing Systems Level Solutions’, said Paul. Can we do it? Paul ended with an aphorism: ‘There are no silver bullets, but there may be some silver linings’.
More clearly than ever, the role of the Journal of Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems is the continuing support and development of systems thinking and its power to tackle the deep and complex needs of people and the world. The initial vision of Ian Munro and Colin Brown has become clearer as the journal’s editorship has passed through Paul Jowitt’s hands. There is no comparable journal at present, trying to encompass both the theory and practice of the discipline of systems thinking. Paul deserves our heartfelt thanks. The journal calls for our ever-strengthening support because what it tries to do matters. Greatly.
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