Professor Gerald Midgley

• Academician, International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS) 2019
• Fellow of the Helenic Society for Systemic Studies (FHSSS) 2016
• PhD in Systems Science, City University, 1992
• MPhil in Systems Science, City University, 1988
• BA(hons) in Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1982

Gerald Midgley is a Visiting Professor of Systemic Leadership in the Birmingham Leadership Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. He also holds a part-time appointment in the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull; runs his own Systemic Intervention consultancy organisation; and holds visiting professorships at Linnaeus University and Mälardalen University, both in Sweden.

Gerald has held research leadership roles in both academia and government, including fourteen years as Director of the Centre for Systems Studies at Hull, and seven years as a Senior Science Leader in the Institute for Environmental Science and Research (ESR), New Zealand. At ESR, he brought a social systems lens to the institute’s independent research for the New Zealand government: he led systemic interventions addressing highly complex public health, environmental health, environmental policy and policing issues. He has been back in the UK since 2010, and now works mostly on projects with national government and local authorities.

Gerald has written almost 400 papers for academics and practitioners on systemic leadership, systems thinking and community operational research, and has been involved in a wide variety of public sector, health service, natural resource management, community development and technology foresight projects. While most of these have been in the UK or New Zealand, he has also led or collaborated on systemic interventions in many other countries world-wide.

Gerald was the 2013/14 President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. He has written or edited twelve books, including: Systemic Intervention: Philosophy, Methodology, and Practice (Kluwer, 2000); Operational Research and Environmental Management: A New Agenda (Operational Research Society, 2001); Systems Thinking, Volumes I-IV (Sage, 2003); Community Operational Research: OR and Systems Thinking for Community Development (Kluwer, 2004); Forensic DNA Evidence on Trial: Science and Uncertainty in the Courtroom (Emergent, 2011); and the Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking (Routledge, 2023).

MSc Systems Thinking and Leadership Practitioner.

• Systemic Leadership
• Systems Thinking
• Systemic Action Research
• Communicating systems thinking and systemic leadership.
• Community Operational Research
• Power relations in the context of systemic leadership and systems practice
• Conflict and marginalization processes
• The neuroscience and social psychology of perception, emotion and consciousness applied to the development of systems methodology
• Methodological pluralism / multimethodology / mixed-method research
• Applied projects in any area of policy or practice where the pursuit of public, community or socio-ecological benefit requires systemic intervention to address complex environmental, social and organizational problems
• Capability-building in systemic leadership and systems thinking for the institutions of tomorrow, to deal with some of the grand challenges facing humanity

Research interests 

Gerald’s current systemic leadership research (in collaboration with Rachel Lilley) is on the relationship between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work that the systemic practitioner needs to pursue in order to facilitate multi-stakeholder systems change. His work examines the implications of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology (particularly how cognition, emotion and action combine to form a single anticipatory system in the body) for systemic leadership and systems thinking. This research is at the cutting edge of a ‘new wave’ of systemic inquiry that is seeking to address some of the most challenging local-to-global issues of our time. 

Much of Gerald’s theoretical and methodological work, prior to his involvement with systemic leadership research in Birmingham, was focused on understanding and dealing with conflict and marginalization; community and stakeholder participation; reflective practice; boundary critique (reflecting on stakeholder boundaries and values to inform systems practice); and methodological pluralism (creatively mixing methods drawn from different paradigms, and designing new methods when required). All of these themes are still relevant to Gerald’s research in Birmingham, but with a systemic leadership framing. 

All Gerald’s research has been built around a theory-methodology-practice cycle, where new theoretical and methodological developments inform applied projects, and the learning from these projects feeds back to enrich the theory and methodology. He has led or contributed to over one hundred externally-funded systems thinking projects, and has supervised forty PhD students in their own systemic intervention work. 

 Current externally-funded projects 

• Facilitating systemic innovation to create a food system around a newly cultivated bean that can grow in the UK (thus reducing imports from North America), taking account of potential economic, social and environmental benefits and harms (funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council).                                                                                                                      

• Research across thirteen UKRI projects on UK food system transformation, looking at lessons from those projects on how system change should be conceptualized and enacted (funded by UK Research and Innovation).                                                                                                                        

• Building capabilities in systems thinking through training workshops, the mentoring of a senior policy maker in charge of UK water management information systems, and the supervision of a PhD student who is building capabilities in systems thinking in the Civil Service (funded by the Department of Food, Agriculture and Environment [Defra] and the Environment Agency). 

• Systems thinking with Active Withernsea, a project seeking to improve levels of physical activity in Withernsea through community development, focused on both local leadership and wider system change (funded by Sport England and East Riding of Yorkshire Council).                                                                                                                           

• Supporting the twelve Yorkshire universities to better engage with communities and local government, so their research is more responsive to community agendas (funded by UK Research and Innovation).