A practitioner-led case for diagnosing before fixing.

42 The Systemic Review is SCiO's publication and policy-engagement programme – a way of putting decades of practitioner experience in front of the people who commission and shape public policy. SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation) is the international professional body for systems practitioners: practice-led rather than academic, and multi-disciplinary rather than confined to one sector or methodology.

The name carries its own argument. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything – useless, because nobody had properly worked out the question. That's the pattern we keep finding in public policy: plausible fixes deployed against problems that were never properly diagnosed. Every paper here applies the same discipline in response – name the system as it actually behaves, before naming a fix.

Our contributors work inside government, health, local authorities and industry, applying systems methods – the Viable System Model, critical systems heuristics, soft systems methodology, and system dynamics among them – to problems that conventional analysis tends to under-diagnose.