John N. Warfield

John Nelson Warfield (November 21, 1925 – November 17, 2009) was an American systems scientist, who was professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences (IASIS) at George Mason University, and president of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society.

Warfield was born November 21, 1925 and grew up in Missouri, and studied at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Originally he majored in chemistry and minored in mathematics, but his studies were interrupted by World War II. After basic training in the U. S. Army Infantry, the Army put him in a specialized training program to study electrical engineering, which he found very interesting, especially electronics and communications. After the war he completed his original undergraduate program and continued on to get advanced degrees in electrical engineering. He received the Bachelor of Arts in 1948, Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1948, and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1949 from the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. He received the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana in 1952. His major was electrical engineering with a specialty in communications engineering.

He gained about 10 years of industrial experience with the firms: Wilcox Electric Company, Battelle Memorial Institute, and Burroughs Corporation. His industrial experience included theoretical and experimental research, electronic development and reliability testing of navigational equipment for jet aircraft. His longest service in this group was with the Battelle Memorial Institute from 1968 to 1974, where he held the title Senior Research Leader. At Battelle, and later at Virginia and George Mason universities, he developed the sociotechnology of Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) and developed Interactive Management [1] in collaboration with Alexander Christakis from 1979 till 1989.

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