What are the crucial aspects of SSM that must be adopted and why?

It is the presence of people that complicate matters.
If we were to ask a number of managers to tell us what
their organisation is trying to achieve, we would receive
different answers.
As an extreme example suppose we were interested in
measuring value for money in the prison service (this is
a real example). Assessing costs is not too difficult, but
value requires us to know what a prison is for.
Answers to this question ranged from:
> Removing rights and privileges (punishment).
Controlling interaction between offenders and the
public (security).
to:
Instilling society’s norms and values (rehabilitation).
with many mixtures in between.
In most organisations these differences are more subtle
but they are nevertheless highly significant.
In SSM the words in brackets in the above example are
given the variable [W].