Why is it that we as engineers always seem to think we never have enough of us in product development? Or that we never have enough time? I believe it starts with insufficient use of a systems engineering approach. We don’t spend enough time in determining our unknowns in the …

One of the most important—and often overlooked—aspects of good systems engineering is first principles thinking. In an excellent article on first principles thinking in his Farnam Street blog, Shane Parrish discusses first principles thinking in the context of Julia Child’s French cooking. Arguing that what made her extraordinary television show …

This is the third and final post of three blog posts about systems engineering for rapid innovation in a hyper-dynamic world. The first post introduced the subject; the second post discussed how to address each of the three systems—the system-of-interest, the enterprise system, and the external system—from the standpoint of …

This is the second in a series of three blog posts about systems engineering for rapid innovation in a hyper-dynamic world. The previous post introduced the subject; this post  wraps up the discussion started in the last post on how to address each of the three key systems from the …