As Hurricane Sally crawls toward the Louisiana shores of the Gulf of Mexico, her 80 mph sustained winds are no match for the lashing 150 mph gust of her category 4 older sister Laura. But where Laura strode into Lake Charles, Louisiana driving her swath of damage forward at a …

There have been a number of attempts at generating a mathematical definition of a system, dating back to at least Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s now classic book, General System Theory, published in 1968. The systems engineering community would benefit greatly from such a definition, which would define a system precisely in …

The most alert and knowledgeable readers will have already noticed a contradiction in the title. While “control” is a traditional engineering concept and focus, its meaning in the realm of complexity can best be described as “eroded.” Even that is probably a generous description. A more accurate title statement would …

Last time, in Part I, we discussed what emergent behavior is, where it ultimately originates from, and why unintended emergence is hard to mitigate when not caught early. We also introduced the Cha-Cha-Cha investigative approach utilized primarily in the scientific community and tailored it for use in systems engineering and …