FINAL THOUGHTS FROM SYENNA

My final thoughts for this edition have been shaped by the two outstanding articles provided by truly senior thought leaders in the systems engineering community.

In the Forum section, Randall Iliff has proposed a simple three-element model of barriers (Ignorance, Misunderstanding and Ego) to the adoption of all the goodness that SE has to offer. Randall has invited you to contribute to that discussion through a quick online survey based on your experience (perhaps painful) of crashing into these and other (yet to be named) barriers. His hope is that the collective wisdom of SE practitioners will lead to better understanding of this system of barriers and to creative ideas on how to counter them. The motivation for this piece is the “go wide” realization that millions of engineers and other creative problem-solvers on planet Earth could benefit from even a small dose of SE goodness and that small dose, applied at scale, could have huge positive impacts on well-recognized (and likely intractable without some systems thinking) global challenges.

The feature article by Sandford Friedenthal and Ed Seidewitz summarizes the “diff” between SysML v2 and SysML v1 and highlights the potential benefits of refactoring the modeling language standard. You will not find a more compact and well-written explanation of this important work. This “go deep” treatise highlights modeling language enhancements and simplifications aimed at removing barriers to MBSE adoption. It fearlessly tackles the numerous devils that are in the details of modeling the problem domain and solution space of the increasingly complex challenges being faced by SE practitioners – modeling with sufficient completeness, precision, and flexibility to successfully address these challenges.

Both articles shout that “SE, done well, is worth the investment!” They recognize barriers to adoption that have limited the reach and global impact of the SE discipline. But they attack these barriers in very different ways.

It would be unwise to treat the “Go wide (to reach more folks)” and “Go deep (to tackle highercomplexity challenges)” messages as mutually exclusive paths to greater SE global value creation. Thinking about them reminded me of two simple models of reality/causality that might show how the two approaches to improving SE adoption could be complementary. Because this is a Final Thoughts post, not an academic journal article, I’ll paraphrase my understanding of these two models and point you to the veritable source, Wikipedia, for deeper insights.

To Syenna, the Hierarchy of Competence model asserts that human beings advance in competence in any capability or skill through four stages:

• Unconscious Incompetence

• Conscious Incompetence

• Conscious Competence

• Unconscious Competence

SE is comprised of many such capabilities and the path to growth for each capability begins with the “Oh my!” moment when individuals or teams realize that they are incompetent in an area that very much matters to their success. That state transition from Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence is humbling and gives Ego an initial opportunity to erect barriers to growth. Deny the problem. Blame something or someone else. Cast doubt on the merits of any proposed path to