INCOSE UK RIG/TWG + APTA SE webinar Systems Thinking for Systems Engineers September 2024

The extraordinary explosion of systems thinking in the 1950s and 1960s has left us with a broad range of well-proven systems techniques, of which systems engineering (SE) is only one. At last year’s Annual Systems Engineering Conference, Professor Mike Jackson challenged the SE community to arm itself with some of these other techniques in order to be able to tackle problems with which systems engineering (SE) struggles on its own. We (Marcelo Blumenfeld, Jon Elphick and Bruce Elliott) agree wholeheartedly. At the University of Birmingham, we teach master-level engineering students about the range of well-proven systems techniques that are available and introduce them to some of these techniques, including Soft Systems Methodology, the Viable Systems Model, System Dynamics and Critical Systems Heuristics.
In this short lecture we hope to leave systems engineers who are not already familiar with systems techniques beyond SE with an idea of what they are, the sort of challenges that they can be useful for and with the inspiration to learn more. If you are already familiar with some or all of these techniques, then we should be interested to compare our views with yours.