Reflections on INCOSE International Workshop 2023

The conference began with two keynote addresses that set a tone that PPI’s René King characterized as “forward moving – forward looking”.

by John Fitch

(PPI Presenter and Principal Consultant)

Email: jfitch@ppi-int.com

Copyright © 2022 by John Fitch. Authored for PPI SyEN.

Dr. Olivier de Weck, MIT’s Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics, Professor of Engineering Systems, and Faculty Director of the Engineering Systems Laboratory (ESL), delivered the first keynote. Dr. de Weck probed the foundations of systems engineering both from the scientific literature and industrial practice. He compared the state of systems engineering today with the 300-year evolution of chemical engineering from its roots in alchemy through the maturation of its scientific foundations (e.g., the Periodic Table of the Elements and chemical reactions between these elements) to the state of the practice today. If this pattern holds, system engineering, still searching for its scientific foundations, is very early in its development as a mature engineering discipline.

As one of INCOSE’s earliest members, Randall Iliff from PPI observed that “Oli’s comments on the relative immaturity of SE are a great reminder that we are just starting the journey of helping the world to more efficiently engineer systems. It’s also important to take away his point that most of the world still operates at a level of ‘functional alchemy’ rather than established science. Alchemy is adequate for many routine tasks – we’ll do better by absorbing rather than fighting such use.”

Dr. de Weck also made the case for developing a new overall equation governing systems science, an equation that preserves the amount of complexity before and after system development. Because the technical complexity of all types of systems is steadily increasing, there is a need to reduce the organizational complexity of our engineering system, i.e., to find the “sweet spot” between technical