Thanks to Amazon’s amazing “Search inside this book” I confirmed my earlier sense that Sir Geoffrey Vickers thinking was worth pursuing. Amazon now enables you to search the entire text of a number of books and view the pages where your search term occurs. Entering “Vickers? in their entry to Peter Checkland’s “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice” pulled up a lot of references. There on page 262 there was a passage from “Freedom in a Rocking Boat” and a comment from Checkland, which suggested that Vickers had resolved some of the ideas I am still struggling with in “Purposive Drift”.
The passage from Vickers begins “The meaning of stability is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover the fact that life consists of experiencing relationships, rather than seeking goals or ‘ends’.” Checkland comments that, ?Vickers suggests replacing the goal-seeking and goal-seeking-with-feedback (cybernetic) models by one in which personal, institutional or cultural activity consists in maintaining desired relationships and eluding undesired ones.”
So now I am faced with the quest of tracking down Vicker’s writings most of which seem to be out-of-print. But as a taster I did find one paper on line, where he was writing about what Health Services were for, that says to me that here is a mind that still has much to contribute to our thinking today.