Course Introduction - Read this first!
Welcome to ESI 6550 Systems Thinking in Engineering!
ESI 6550 - Systems Thinking is going to be different from your other Engineering classes. Most engineering classes are concerned about designing, building, maintaining, and using developed systems. They teach you processes, techniques, tools and rules for building or working with engineered systems. If you are a practicing engineer, I am sure you have found the information useful and practical - perhaps you were even inspired to perform your work using new approaches learned or inspired by your classes.
For this class, you are going to have to take a step back - think "outside the box" or even more appropriately, realize "there is no box" at all.
This course is a thinking course. In fact, you can consider this course a "Systems" approach to "Thinking." There will be some SYSTEMS engineering - but more than that, it is hoped that you will learn more about THINKING. Thinking not just about systems, but about everything.
You may have seen the acronym BLUF - Bottom Line Up Front. Well here is the BLUF ideas for this course:
1) The process of thinking is not linear. It is iterative and dynamic. The act of seeking understanding of a problem through thinking will reveal new information, which will redefine the problem itself, thus requiring more thinking. For the complex problems we study today, you might never really finish thinking about a problem, because there is always more to think about. You need to realize that such thinking takes time and focus, two things that are challenging in this day and age.
2) It's all about context. The physics of a situation may clearly define a specific problem and solution when only examining that situation by itself. Place that situation in the context of a larger whole and the systems thinker can see how the context interacts, influences, and changes the solution (as well as the perceived problem). Our health is an excellent example - your problem may be a stomach ache, and you might understand that the pain comes from excess acid - so you take something to treat the excess acid. But the real problem is not solved. What caused the excess acid could be a much more severe problem that must be addressed.
3) There is likely more than one right answer. And the answer itself is subject to those pesky non-linearity and contextual forces. Even a wrong answer can serve as a "right" answer (I figured out how NOT to do something).
By the end of this course, it is hoped that you will understand some of the basic "tools" of systems thinking and be able to apply them to any problem space, whether that is engineering, management, healthcare, or in your personal life.
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