Complex System Engineering

As a systems engineer with almost 20 years of sporadic reading in the areas of chaos theory and complexity theory, I tend to overestimate how much the typical system engineer understands about these topics.

When the topic comes up, I usually get a response that amounts to "I've heard about that." Among older engineers, I occasionally hear a reference to some variation of cybernetics or system dynamics. And, in reviewing more recent system engineering literature, I'm most likely to see a reference to "wicked problems."

There are a number of fields of study and concepts that are related to these topics. My favorite "big picture" is this diagram from the International Institute for General Systems Studies.

Regardless, most system engineers don't appear to see these topics as anything more than intellectually intriguing. Since very few of us build systems that actually exhibit complex or chaotic behavior, I suppose that's understandable.

However, as decentralizing & hyperconnecting technologies become commoditized, the capabilities we create are increasingly being tightly coupled to complex decision contexts. So, I'm starting to see a few references to system engineering for contexts that are primarily complex.

This presentation by Christof Fetzer discusses how complexity comes to dominate many Systems of Systems as they grow in size, and how system engineering must change to effectively address a complex context. And, George Rebovich of Mitre gave an interesting presentation on "Systems Thinking for the Enterprise" at the 2006 International Conference on Complex Systems. It it, he covers much of the same terrain as Fetzer, although from a different perspective. A more in-depth discussion by Rebovich is found here.

And, there's been some recent activity by INCOSE in this area. However, after reviewing a bit of what's being written recently about complexity by system engineers, I better understand why I got such blank looks when I raised the topic (from the perspective of social psychology) with some INCOSE leaders at a local chapter meeting about a decade ago. Even today, most of what's written tends to one of two extremes: (a) a deterministic approach wrapped in a complex sheepskin, or (b) some kind of "emergence magic."

Much of the recent material is helpful for giving traditional system engineers a better understanding of some of the key issues. And, some of it draws some important distinctions. But, I'll continue to look to Snowden's Cynefin, Klein's data-frame, and Weick's social psychology when I'm pondering basic concepts that illuminate how to design deterministic capabilities that mesh cleanly with complex decision contexts.

Postscript: Here's a critique (by George McConnel) from a traditional engineering perspective that has some good points. And, a summary (by Sarah Sheard) that covers much of the waterfront (also from a traditional perspective). Both are from a recent Symposium on Complex Systems Engineering.