Ode to Systems Engineering

This blog is about society, not about engineering. It even contains a message for politicians. Our society faces numerous problems that are too difficult to solve with improvisation and “gut feeling”. Take one of the worst problems in society: mobility. This is a complicated problem. In fact, it is too complicated to have it solved by small party circles and commune politics. A city may decide to ban cars from the city centre and cause a terrible mess elsewhere, because people look for alternative routes.

Politicians don’t understand it would be easy to cut traffic jams in towns by 50% by moderately adapting traffic lights to cell phone movements. When you say this, some politicians believe the use of the cell phone movements are a threat to privacy, but they don’t understand how feasible and obvious it is to prevent this. Politicians still don’t understand sufficiently how detrimental company car policies are for our mobility, our environment and our economy. This is because they can’t assess sufficiently the impact of their decisions.

But wat is systems engineering then? To put it simply, you enter the complexity of a coherent piece of real life into a box and you call it a black box. You can study many things about this box: the inputs, the outputs, how it behaves and interacts with other boxes. Systems Engineering forces you to make a detailed map of the interactions between systems. You start understanding how measures taken on one system may influence others. You also start understanding feedback mechanisms. You notice that more of A does not always lead to more of B. We need more systems engineers in politics and we need more politicians who believe in systems engineering. INCOSE is an organisation that tries to standardise terminology and methodology in systems engineering.

It is not true that systems engineering is totally unknown outside engineering faculties. In fact, systems engineering is often used in a false and perverse way in social media.  A typical example appeared recently: do you know what would happen if everybody stopped eating meat? Then the Facebook entry sketches the most absurd short term consequences, obviously with the implicit message: we should not stop eating meat. The question whether we could perhaps start by eating less meat is not even raised. Similarly, non-believers in climate change like to sketch absurd images of what would happen if we stopped driving cars. I hate this nonsense on Facebook and Twitter.

I hope to see some real systems engineering in politics, press and social media. It all starts with intellectual honesty and integrity. I also refer to my dutch blog: “Intellectuele integriteit in het Industrieel Beleid”.