Congress told NASA to build a new rocket out of old Shuttle parts. The INCOSE Handbook calls that a brownfield design problem. The cost difference between that approach and SpaceX's clean-sheet alternative is a systems engineering lesson worth $60 billion.

The electric vehicle supply chain stretches from a showroom in California to a cobalt mine in eastern Congo, and most of the people in between never appear on a requirements document. This piece starts with a classroom question about a cow and ends with a mine collapse, and the Systems Engineering lesson connecting them is the same one the INCOSE SE Handbook has been making all along: your stakeholders are everyone your system affects, not just the ones who are easy to find.

In March 2016, Go world champion Lee Sedol walked away from the board mid-match. He needed fifteen minutes alone to process a move that no human player would have considered, made by an AI system whose engineers could not fully explain why it had chosen it. That moment is still one of the most striking illustrations of what happens when a system develops an internal logic that outgrows its designers’ ability to describe it. This piece looks at what Move 37 still has to teach Systems Engineers about complexity, opacity, and the limits of understanding the systems we build.

Failure has come up on this blog before. It keeps coming up because disciplined learning from failure is one of the things that separates good systems engineering from the kind that produces dramatic footage. SpaceX's Starship test program is the current headline version of a problem systems engineers have always faced: how do you turn a visible, expensive failure into a genuine engineering asset rather than just a press release? This piece works through that question using the INCOSE SE Handbook's verification framework, and there is a free checklist at the bottom if you want a practical tool for doing it on your own program.

The Singularity debate is long on capability and short on maintenance. I know this pattern. I saw it at an air show thirty years ago when I asked a stealth fighter pilot if his aircraft was hard to maintain and he said “You have no idea.” No system escapes the life cycle. It just shifts where the cost and friction eventually show up. This piece examines what the AI acceleration narrative keeps leaving out, and what systems engineers are specifically trained to ask about it.

When Elon Musk floated the idea of putting servers in space, most people either cheered or rolled their eyes. Systems engineers should do neither. They should recognize the pattern: two radically different architectures, the same stakeholder need, and a genuinely interesting trade space worth examining. I dust off a favorite classroom example from the 2007 INCOSE SE Handbook to show why that kind of architectural imagination — disciplined, not fanciful — is exactly what the Handbook has always asked of us. There is also a free Architecture Alternatives Comparison Worksheet at the bottom, if you want a practical tool to do this in your own program before assumptions quietly harden into designs.

When I heard that Scott Adams had died, my mind went straight to a filing cabinet — and a folder of Dilbert cartoons I used to pull into SE training sessions whenever a room full of engineers needed permission to say what everyone was already thinking. Adams gave technical professionals exactly that: a way to laugh at broken systems before getting serious about fixing them. This is a tribute to the man who did it better than anyone, and a harder look at what his later career tells us about the cost of speaking uncomfortable truths.

Boeing’s recent safety issues highlight how small, accepted risks can accumulate into enterprise-level failure. This article explores what Boeing’s experience teaches systems engineers about risk aggregation, tolerance, culture, and governance—and why disciplined, integrated risk management is essential in complex systems.

INCOSE has just released the Fifth Edition of the SE Handbook back in July 2024. We took a year to develop a whole new course based on this new version. This new course is now available and for sale. Check out INCOSE SEP Exam Preparation Course [Self Paced Video version]

INCOSE has just released the Fifth Edition of the SE Handbook. What does that mean for the INCOSE SEP Knowledge Exam? What are the transition plans to retire the old Exam based on the Fourth Edition?

What’s happening with SE Scholar and Certification? We have INCOSE’s Professional Development Portal and the latest news from Courtney Wright, the Program Manager for INCOSE’s Certification Program,

What’s happening with SE Scholar? We had interviews, podcasts, and even a new advertisement campaign.