The Other Side of Success Factors—A Systemic Methodology for Exploring Critical Success Factors

This paper puts forward a systemic methodology to explore Critical Success Factors (CSFs). The common idea about ranking CSFs is to explore the relationship of ‘more important’, i.e. directly assessing whether success factor A is more important than factor B. This idea is prominent in the prevailing approaches, e.g. the qualitative inquiry, quantitative analysis, and multi-criteria decision making. Exploring CSFs from a different lens, this paper argues for systemic approaches, reckoning that manifold interrelationships could exist between system elements. Considering the manifold interrelationships, the proposed methodology contends that two opposite interrelationships could exist between CSFs—‘helping to achieve’ and ‘inhibiting to achieve’. The first step of assessing CSFs is to construct a digraph in a participatory way, showing the transitive ‘helping to achieve’ relationship between CSFs and obtain the ‘helping to achieve’ score for each element. The second step is to examine the inhibiting relationship through a pairwise comparison to obtain the ‘inhibiting to achieve’ score for each element. The third step is to combine the ‘helping to achieve score’ with ‘inhibiting to achieve’ score to obtain the net score for each success factor. This output aims to provide the relevant stakeholders with a more comprehensive spectrum in assessing CSFs to develop their organizations well.