Strategies for system planning
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| Strategies
Leadership Communication |
The verb 'to engineer' is used here to mean 'to use a range of strategies for achieving successful outcomes in situations of complex uncertainty'. Professional engineers will typically engineer the design of an aircraft or a bridge. Busineses are 'engineered' (or 're-engineered'). The strategies used have universal application in complex problem solving. They are not confined to the practice of engineering.
Figure 1 shows some features of an engineered process.
The key issues are competence, i.e. the skills of those inolved and governance, i.e. how responsility, authority and accountabiliy is allocated.#
Competence is shown as having two main components:
- Disciplinary expertise i.e. the abilities of those involved to carry out specific tasks. It i normal to require expertise from several disciplines
- Ethos - the principles that guide the actions of the participants.
Whereas 'what you know' might be described in term of disciplinary expertise, ethos is 'how you think'. Ethos is a crtical issue in engineered processes.
Critical thinking is shown on the diagram as a subset of ethos but it can also be viewed as a