The European Journal of Information Systems recently published two articles seeking to contribute to the body of knowledge about soft systems methodology (SSM). The present paper is a response to these. The papers discussed relate SSM to other bodies of knowledge: grounding SSM and offering a toolkit for rich picture diagramming. This paper argues that, in these two papers, there is a tendency to pay too little attention to the intrinsic characteristics of SSM. While SSM is user-dependent and open to interpretation, this paper raises some issues pertinent to a critique of these two articles from an SSM perspective, and suggests more rigour and subtlety in dealing with SSM.
