Warfield’s data on individual reactions to group problems has revealed a phenomenon he calls Spreadthink, e.g, there exists a consistent lack of commonality of viewpoint, no matter what the group, no matter what the problem. The disparity in attitudes among individuals is so great as to produce ineffective group decision-making unless further education and understanding takes place between group members. Presented at 16th Annual Meeting, Assn. for Integrative Studies, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, 30 September 1994.

Contains part of the theory needed for writing Interpretive Structural Modeling software. The mathematical theory of how to eliminate overlap among concepts using Translatable Graphics, Structural Types, Problem Definitions, Block Representation of Sets, and Mapping Theory, can be helpful in replacing a set of overlapping goals with a set of relatively independent goals when constructing a usable planning or policy decision.

Societal Systems describes a unique methodology for coping with complexity - Interpretive Structural Modeling.

ISM, with its efficient and rapid organization of knowledge, can become the basis for modeling dramatic social or organizational gains.

The book contains the theoretical and mathematical background for the ISM process, which remains in use as a major source for persons wishing to develop software for Interpretive Structural Modeling. A modern version of ISM software is available on this site.

Ajar Publishing is working on a corrected reprint of Societal Systems that may be available in 2019.

This is a short, fully annotated list of works by 33 authors whose writings contribute to essential knowledge needed to understand and take advantage of the Warfield program for dealing with complexity. This paper was used as a handout to accompany a talk Warfield gave to the AAAS Fellows meeting (American Association for the Advancement of Science) in Washington, D.C. on 13 May 1997.

This article is a review of the intellectual history presaging development of a management system using structural graphics to display group generated results in Interactive Management (IM) Workshops. Tony Perino and John Warfield co-authored this article, which is a greatly altered version of Warfield's first paper by the same title written 1996.

Contains part of the theory needed for writing ISM software, giving techniques for correcting structural defects (e.g. non-regular hierarchical structures) when using Interpretive Structural Modeling. The paper was included as part of Warfield's GRAILS proposal (ADA Syntax Study and Recommendations: A Proposal to the Software Productivity Consortium, Part 1, and A Graphically-Integrated Language System: A Proposal to the Software Consortium, Part 2), as an appendix.

The cascading weight of transitivity is made clear using layman’s terms. Explains the need for publicly viewed structural models and discusses use of, and need for, problematiques. Used as a classroom handout at the Defense Systems Management College where Warfield conducted a series of Interactive Management workshops and lectures for the teaching staff. 

Considered by Warfield to be one of his most important papers, this is a description of the seven Interactive Management processes developed at the Center for Interactive Management at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It deals with an approach to how humans might be able to tackle and solve the "gigantic mess" problems of society which are currently beyond human endeavor and often beyond human intellectual grasp. This was the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR) Presidential Address, presented at 27th Annual Meeting SGSR, Book-Cadillac Hotel, Detroit, Michigan on 26 May 1983.

To view the full copyrighted abstract written in the authors' own words please use this link.

Building on Charles S. Peirce's ideas on symbolic logic and the organization of human knowledge, this is a presentation of a model of information-gathering and processing which will reliably and incrementally increase humanity's storehouse of accurate, usable scientific knowledge. In part, this paper is a protest against current enshrinement of the superficial and insufficient 'artificial intelligence', (a widely utilized methodology which is said to be superficial and insufficient for human needs). Includes discussion of the “Cosmic Partition,” which he introduced at the 1985 SGSR Annual meeting in Los Angeles in his paper "On the Choice of Frames for Systems Studies."