Sir (Charles) Geoffrey Vickers, VC (13 October 1894 – 16 March 1982) was an English lawyer, administrator, writer and pioneering systems scientist.

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.

[3][5] The citation for his VC, appearing in The London Gazette in November 1915, reads as follows: For most conspicuous bravery on 14th October, 1915, in the Hohenzollern redoubt.

[6][7]His brother Burnell was killed in action on 21 June 1917 while serving with the 184th Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery.

[8][9] In June 1918 he commanded a composite battalion in the Second Battle of the Marne for which he was awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre.

In 1930 he was one of the first to take the five-day Imperial Airways commercial flight from the UK to India[11] and during the 1930s he was also involved in negotiating the extension of the German debt.

[12] 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.

He wrote many books including The Art of Judgement, Freedom in a rocking Boat and Human Systems are Different.

At the time of creation on 1 January 1947 when some 750,000 workers from 800 different private companies[15] became part of the largest employer in the western world[16] where he worked alongside E. F.

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.

[17] 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.

Such circular relations Vickers takes to be the common facts of social life, but we fail to see this clearly, he argues, because of the concentration in our science-based culture on linear causal chains and on the notion of goal-seeking.

Vickers suggests replacing the goal-setting and goal-seeking with feedback models in which personal, institutional or cultural activity consists in maintaining desired relationships and eluding undesired ones.

The process is a cyclical one which operates like this: Our previous experiences have created for us certain 'standards' or 'norms', usually 'tacit' (and also, at a more general level, 'values', more general concepts of what is humanly good and bad); the standards, norms and/or values lead to readiness to notice only certain features of our situations, they determine what 'facts' are relevant; the facts noticed are evaluated against the norms, a process which leads to our taking regulatory action and modifies the norms or standards, so that future experiences will be evaluated differently.

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.