Geoffrey Vickers Sir ( Charles ) Geoffrey Vickers VC ( 13 October 1894 – 16 March 1982 ) was an English lawyer , administrator , writer and pioneering systems scientist . He had varied interests with roles at different times with the London Passenger Transport Board , Law Society , Medical Research Council and Mental Health Research Fund . In the later years he wrote and lectured on social systems analysis and the complex patterns of social organisation . The Sir Geoffrey Vickers Memorial Award has been presented by the International Society for the Systems Sciences since 1987 in his memory . He was awarded the Victoria Cross in World War I while serving in The Sherwood Foresters , and was knighted following World War II during which he served as Deputy Director General at the Ministry of Economic Warfare , in charge of economic intelligence and as a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee . Biography . Early life . Geoffrey Vickers was born and grew up in Nottingham , where his father Charles Henry Vickers ran a successful lace business , Vickers & Hine Ltd . He described his first day of school as " school introduced me to the anguish reserved both for the non - conformist who wishes to conform and the awkward who long to excel in dexterity " . He attended Bramcote , a preparatory school near Scarborough and then Oundle School ; a public school before entering Merton College , Oxford where he briefly studied Classics from 1913 until the start of war . He later described his home as " a place of unalloyed happiness . The only stresses of the time came from the external world of school or the internal world of awakening conflict and confusion . . . I remember nothing desired that was satisfied by spending money of mine and nothing that was denied for lack of money . . . we moved by bicycle and bus , played in each other ' s gardens and stayed in farmhouses " . He described his father as " the best and most lovable man I ever knew ; and be seemed to combine the two superlatives without the slightest effort " . World War I . His education was interrupted by World War I . He and his brother William Burnell Vickers volunteered for service in the army . Geoffrey joined the Sherwood Foresters ( 7th Robin Hood Battalion ) and was in France before the end of 1914 first as a second lieutenant , promoted to temporary Captain in 1915 and then to Major and as Second in Command , 1 Bn , The Lincolnshire Regiment in 1918 . Explaining his thoughts about going to war , he later wrote " In August Germany invaded Belgium , we had a treaty with Belgium , so we all stopped what we were doing and went off to war . It was as simple as that " . He was awarded the Victoria Cross for action in 1915 and the Croix de Guerre ( Belgium ) in 1918 . He won the Victoria Cross for his actions on 14 October 1915 when he held a barrier across a trench in the Hohenzollern Redoubt , France against heavy German bomb attacks ( the ' bombs ' of the citation were early grenades ) ordering a second barrier to be built behind him in order to secure the safety of the trench regardless of the fact that his own retreat would be cut off holding back the enemy for long enough for a second barrier to be completed . His brother Burnell was killed in action in 1917 . In June 1918 he commanded a battalion in the Second Battle of the Marne for which he was awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre . Inter - war years . After the war he returned to Oxford and took a pass degree in French , European history and law in 1919 . He qualified as a solicitor in 1923 and by 1926 he was a partner in the leading London law firm of Slaughter and May . He specialised in the legal aspects of large financial operations , many of which has international dimensions . In 1930 he was one of the first to take the five day commercial flight from the UK to India and during the 1930s he was also involved in negotiating the extension of the German debt . In 1938 he established and chaired the ' Association for Service and Reconstruction . The above initiative put him in touch with a number of people who met regularly in a group called ' The Moot ' that also included Joe Oldham , Karl Mannheim , Reinhard Niebuhr , Paul Tillich , John Middleton Murry , T . S . Eliot , Michael Polanyi , Sir Walter Moberly and Adolph Lowe . The Moot itself grew out of a conference on Church , Community and State held in Oxford in 1937 . World War II . Vickers served in World War II ; he was re - commissioned as a Colonel , and was seconded as Deputy Director General at the Ministry of Economic Warfare , in charge of economic intelligence . From 1941 to 1945 he was a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Chiefs of Staff . He was also a member of the London Passenger Transport Board ( 1941 – 46 ) and of the Council of Law Society ( 1944 – 48 ) . Afterwards . After the war , Vickers had a successful career in management and administration before becoming a prolific writer and speaker on the subject of social systems analysis and the complex patterns of social organisation . He wrote many booking including The " Art of Judgement " , " Freedom in a rocking Boat " and " Human Systems are Different " . He introduced the concept of ' Appreciative Systems ' to describe human activity . His work was taken - up by researchers at the Open University in particular . From 1946 to 1948 he was also first Legal Advisor to the National Coal Board . At the time of creation on 1 January 1947 when some 750 , 000 workers from 800 different private companies became part of the largest employer in the western world where he worked alongside E . F . Schumacher . Afterwards he became a member of National Coal Board in charge of manpower , training , education , health and welfare ( 1948 – 55 ) . From 1952 until 1960 he was member of the Medical Research Council and was chairman of the Research Committee of Mental Health Research Fund from 1951 – 1967 . In 1977 he was president of the Society for General Systems Research , now the International Society for the Systems Sciences . Between 1955 and 1958 he took part in the ' Round Table on Man and Industry ' a project sponsored by the School of Social Work at the University of Toronto , the conclusions of which were published in ' The Undirected society ' . On the inside jacket cover he muses ' The Industrial band - wagon rolls ever faster onwards , remaking the world we live in and with it ourselves . Are we in the driving seat or merely passengers - or even under the wheels ? What part does human decision making play in directing or controlling the process ? ' . His second wife , and close companion died in 1972 and his manuscripts for ' Western Culture and Systems Thinking ' and ' Autonomy and Responsibility ' were constantly rejected for publication . In 1977 he moved to a retirement home , on the same street in Goring - on - Thames on which he had lived for many years . Geoffrey died in 1982 , however the influence for his work is still alive . The International Society for the Systems Sciences presents the Sir Geoffrey Vickers Memorial Award each year in his memory . His military medals were left to the Sherwood Foresters Collection and are on display in Nottingham Castle . Systems practice . In the later years Vickers wrote and lectured on the subject of social systems analysis and the complex patterns of social organisation . His work was taken - up by researchers at the Open University in particular . Vickers is regarded as a systems practitioner rather than an academic . He introduced the concept of appreciative system s to describe human activity . He recognized that appreciation of systems requires the participation of not only the observer , but also that of the subject . Much of his work is devoted to the analysis of judgement in terms of what he called ' appreciative behaviour ' : this is described most effectively in " The Art of Judgement " ( 1965 ) . He believed that social institutions are best analysed as systems , and his published work , notably " Human Systems are Different " ( 1983 ) , made far - reaching contributions to systems thinking in its applications to human society . Appreciative System . Appreciative System is a term invented by Vickers in 1968 to refer to " the activity of attaching meaning to communication or the code by which we do so " . Vickers has stated : A response by Peter Checkland : Geoffrey Vickers continued corresponding with Peter Checkland in the years before Vickers ' death and discussed the relationship between systems ideas and real - world experience . From those discussions Checkland created the model of the appreciative process , that may be used as a basis for making sense of the world we live in . Checkland ( 2004 ) worked on numerous examples to demonstrate the way in which the model may be applied in very different situations . Moral and political philosophy . Geoffrey Vickers ' perspectives on moral and political philosophy can be presented through three key terms : Publications . Geoffrey Vickers wrote several books , articles and papers :