Systems engineering to conquer complexity

Most of the real-world problems that we encounter as individuals or businesses is complex and truly systemic. We often confront ill-structured, messy problems found in social systems, and business systems, in particular. Additionally, the rate of change in society and in our business environment is faster than the rate at which people can perform effectively. Hence Systems engineering practitioners should earn the knack and ability to engineer solutions for systems that include human beings and soft-systems, where objectives are ambiguous, decision processes are ill-defined and even quantitative measures of performance may not exist. In this context, the present paper propounds the SSS (Structuring-Solutioning-Solving) framework of Systems engineering especially for soft systems capturing the above discussed issues and presents a case to illustrate the points. Hope that this helps people involved in engineering of complex systems in meeting the challenges of complexity with efficiency and effectiveness and thus help businesses and society at large, in conquering complexity. The methodology of our SSS framework entails the practitioners to structure thoroughly the unstructured problem situation in terms of what we call a `Purpose Process Picture' facilitating the solutioning and eventual solving of the real core problem. The framework draws inspiration from a number of research areas namely design science research, systems thinking and complexity research, the theory of constraints thinking processes and the resource-based theory of firm. The advantage of the SSS framework is that it addresses the economic and systemic concerns in the complex problem situation and provides a system-level consideration that enhances the top-down thinking; consistent with the systems engineering approach; which can be hailed as the new incarnation of systems engineering.