Ask any engineer what they do, and once you drill down past the knee-jerk response of “build stuff/make stuff” to the real essence of their profession, they will tell you that they “solve problems.” The very word “engineer” is rooted in the Latin words ingenare (to create, contrive, devise) and …

What is a metamodel? The English prefix “meta” comes directly from the Greek meaning “beyond” or “after.” That has been extended in English usage to mean “about,” connoting a higher level of abstraction. Thus, “meta-cognition” is “thinking about thinking” and a metamodel is a model of a model. Why have …

Mark Simons once found himself sitting in a circle at his then 8-year-old daughter’s yoga class. Participants went around and introduced themselves, explaining what they did for a living. Realizing that no one in the room would be likely to know about systems engineering, Simons thought quickly about how to …