This book comprises a set of stories about being an engineer for many decades and the lessons the author learned from research and practice. These lessons focus on people and organizations, often enabled by technology. The settings range from airplanes, power plants, and communication networks to ecosystems that enable education, healthcare, and transportation. All of these settings are laced with behavioral and social phenomena that need to be understood and influenced. The author's work in these domains has often led to the question: "Well, why does it work like that?" He invariably sought to understand the bigger picture to find the sources of requirements, constraints, norms, and values. He wanted to understand what could be changed, albeit often with much effort to overcome resistance. He found that higher levels of an ecosystem often provide the resources and dictate the constraints imposed on lower levels. These prescriptions are not just commands. They also reflect values and cultural norms. Thus, the answers to the question were not just technical and economic. Often, the answers reflected eons of social and political priorities. The endeavors related in the book frequently involved addressing emerging realities rather than just the status quo. This book is an ongoing discovery of these bigger pictures. The stories and the lessons related in this book provide useful perspectives on change. The understanding of people and organizations that emerges from these lessons can help to enable transformative change. Fundamental change is an intensely human-centric endeavor, not just for the people and organizations aspiring to change, but also for the people helping them. You will meet many of these people in this book as the stories unfold. The genesis of this book originated in a decision made early in the author's career. He had developed a habit of asking at the end of each day, "What did I really accomplish today?" This was sometimes frustrating as he was not sure the day had yielded any significant accomplishments. One day it dawned on him that this was the wrong question - He needed to ask, "What did I learn today?" It is always possible to learn, most recently about public health and climate change. In planning this book, the author first thought in terms of accomplishments such as projects conducted, systems built, and articles and books published. He could not imagine this being interesting to readers. Then, it struck him - It is much more interesting to report on what he learned about people and organizations, including how he helped them accomplish their goals. This is a book of stories about how these lessons emerged. In planning this book, the author first thought in terms of accomplishments such as projects conducted, systems built, and articles and books published. He could not imagine this being interesting to readers. Then, it struck him - It is much more interesting to report on what he learned about people and organizations, including how he helped them accomplish their goals. This is a book of stories about how these lessons emerged.

This book comprises a set of stories about being an engineer for many decades and the lessons the author learned from research and practice. These lessons focus on people and organizations, often enabled by technology. The settings range from airplanes, power plants, and communication networks to ecosystems that enable education, healthcare, and transportation. All of these settings are laced with behavioral and social phenomena that need to be understood and influenced. The author's work in these domains has often led to the question: "Well, why does it work like that?" He invariably sought to understand the bigger picture to find the sources of requirements, constraints, norms, and values. He wanted to understand what could be changed, albeit often with much effort to overcome resistance. He found that higher levels of an ecosystem often provide the resources and dictate the constraints imposed on lower levels. These prescriptions are not just commands. They also reflect values and cultural norms. Thus, the answers to the question were not just technical and economic. Often, the answers reflected eons of social and political priorities. The endeavors related in the book frequently involved addressing emerging realities rather than just the status quo. This book is an ongoing discovery of these bigger pictures. The stories and the lessons related in this book provide useful perspectives on change. The understanding of people and organizations that emerges from these lessons can help to enable transformative change. Fundamental change is an intensely human-centric endeavor, not just for the people and organizations aspiring to change, but also for the people helping them. You will meet many of these people in this book as the stories unfold. The genesis of this book originated in a decision made early in the author's career. He had developed a habit of asking at the end of each day, "What did I really accomplish today?" This was sometimes frustrating as he was not sure the day had yielded any significant accomplishments. One day it dawned on him that this was the wrong question - He needed to ask, "What did I learn today?" It is always possible to learn, most recently about public health and climate change. In planning this book, the author first thought in terms of accomplishments such as projects conducted, systems built, and articles and books published. He could not imagine this being interesting to readers. Then, it struck him - It is much more interesting to report on what he learned about people and organizations, including how he helped them accomplish their goals. This is a book of stories about how these lessons emerged. In planning this book, the author first thought in terms of accomplishments such as projects conducted, systems built, and articles and books published. He could not imagine this being interesting to readers. Then, it struck him - It is much more interesting to report on what he learned about people and organizations, including how he helped them accomplish their goals. This is a book of stories about how these lessons emerged.

This book includes all of the papers presented at the NATO Symposium on Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures held at Roskilde, Denmark on August 4-8, 1980. The Symposium was sponsored by the Scientific Affairs Division of NATO and the Rise National Laboratory of Denmark. The goal of the Symposium was to continue the tradition initiated by the NATO Symposium on Monitoring Behavior and Supervisory Control held in Berchtesgaden, F .R. Germany in 1976 and the NATO Symposium on Theory and Measurement of Mental Workload held in Mati, Greece in 1977. To this end, a group of 85 psychologists and engineers coming from industry, government, and academia convened to discuss, and to generate a "state-of-the-art" consensus of the problems and solutions associated with the human IS ability to cope with the increasing scale of consequences of failures within complex technical systems. The Introduction of this volume reviews their findings. The Symposium was organized to include brief formal presentations of papers sent to participants about two months in advance of the meeting, and considerable discussion both during plenary sessions and within more specialized workshops. Summaries of the discussions and workshop reports appear in this volume.

We seem to be stuck, staring at insurmountable challenges. The pandemic is the opening act for climate change, and we need to get much better at anticipating and preparing for these types of challenge. Simply rebuilding bridges once they fall, or houses once they are swept away, is both expensive and risks human lives. Anticipation and preparation costs more now, but is much less costly over time. Of course, spending now to save later is not a dominant American tradition. We have managed - or at least reacted to - the Aids epidemic (1981-2013), Internet bubble bursting (2001), the real estate bubble bursting (2007), the opioid epidemic (2017), forest fires on the West Coast (2018), and the coronavirus pandemic (2020). Very recently, we have experienced the fall of Afghanistan (2021), the latest earthquake and hurricane in Haiti (2021), and the attack on Ukraine (2022). Various earthquakes, hurricanes, and recently cicadas, but fortunately not locusts, have been sprinkled throughout. Beyond Quick Fixes steps back from business as usual to rethink how we can approach the complex challenges of contemporary society — health, education, energy, and social media. Rouse retreats, initially, into the principals of design thinking rather than policy making; he rigorously reconsiders our typical modes of operation and explores alternative ways of thinking about complex problems and potential solutions. The result is an integrated approach to addressing complexity to assist leaders and advisors responsible for addressing these challenges.

Public-private collaborations are central to the functioning and provisioning of most essential ecosystems. Ecosystems such as security, healthcare, education, and the environment face challenges of governance, diverse constituencies, numerous advocacy organizations, incompatible outcome metrics, and persistent media attention, to name a few. There is a wide range of public and private players involved in operating, sustaining, and investing in these ecosystems, including stakeholders from government, industry, academia, non-governmental organizations, and the general public. Fundamental change requires understanding a wide range of interests and accommodating change strategies accordingly. The challenges of transforming these ecosystems would easily qualify as "wicked problems"; social or cultural problems laced with incomplete or contradictory knowledge, large numbers of people and opinions, substantial economic burdens, and inextricable connections with other issues. Transforming Public-Private Ecosystems addresses these challenges for the four important ecosystems of national security, healthcare delivery, higher education, and energy and climate, and provides an integrated perspective for understanding and enabling change.

Failures are a common phenomena in civilization. Things fail and society responds, often very slowly, sometimes inappropriately. What kinds of things go wrong? Why do they go wrong? How do people and organizations react to failures, and what are the best ways to react? William B. Rouse takes an analytic approach to these questions and addresses eighteen well-known cases of high-consequence failures. He employs a multi-level framework to integrate findings across the case studies, and in turn uses these to outline a conceptual approach to integrated failure management. Though diverse in their causes and outcomes, his analysis shows that the conceptual design of an integrated approach to failure management can encompass each of the case studies, all of which would have benefitted from the same conceptual decision support architecture. This enables cross-cutting system design principles and practices, assuring that failure management in every new domain and context need not start with a blank slate.

Mathematical modelling and simulation is an increasingly powerful area of mathematics and computer science, which in recent years has been fuelled by the unprecedented access to larger than ever stores of data. These techniques have an increasing number of applications in the professional and political spheres, and people try to predict the results of certain courses of action as accurately as possible. Computing Possible Futures explores the use of models on everyday phenomena such as waiting in lines and driving a car, before expanding the model's complexity to look at how large-scale computational models can help imagine big scale "what-if" scenarios like the effect self-driving cars on the US economy. The successes and failures of complex real world problems are examined, and it is shown how few, if any, failures are due to model errors or computational difficulties. It is also shown how real life decision makers have addressed important problems and used their model-based understanding of possible futures to inform these decisions. Written in an entertaining and accessible way, Computing Possible Futures will help those concerned about the futurity of their decisions to understand what fundamentally needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how to do it.

For This Marvelous Country is the true life story of a B-17 combat pilot in the Eighth Air Force, 92nd Bombardment Group in the European Operational Theater of WWII. Bill struggles through twenty-five combat missions, including the epic air battle, Schweinfurt. Then, after a stint in the States, he volunteers for a second tour, anxious for combat and eager for the responsibility of a crew. Bill and Marg's wartime correspondence began in 1943 at her mother's persistence. Their letters were "friendly, but not familiar"; a reflection of Bill's military training.

This volume brings together several perspectives on the nature of work processes in enterprises and on how information systems can best support these processes. The genesis of this idea was the shared interests of the authors in how enterprises improve and change. The shared belief is that change of enterprises relates to change of work processes and the success of such changes relates to how work processes are supported by information systems. Thus, the papers in this volume address both the nature of work and the design of information systems to support work.This volume is divided into two main sections: work and workflow, and information systems. There are three papers in each section. The disciplines represented across these six papers include management, engineering computing, and architecture. These four disciplines pursue work, workflow and information systems from quite different perspectives - management to represent business practices and processes, engineering to represent the physical flows in the system, computing to represent the information flows, and architecture to represent human flows within and among physical spaces. Enterprises, of course, include all these types of flows.

An argument that understanding healthcare delivery as a complex adaptive system will help us design a system that yields better health outcomes. Breakthroughs in medical science, innovations in medical technologies, and improvements in clinical practices occur today at an increasingly rapid rate. Yet because of a fragmented healthcare delivery system, many Americans are unable to benefit from these developments. How can we design a system that can provide high-quality, affordable healthcare for everyone? In this book, William Rouse and Nicoleta Serban introduce concepts, principles, models, and methods for understanding, and improving, healthcare delivery. Approaching the topic from the perspectives of engineering and statistics, they argue that understanding healthcare delivery as a complex adaptive system will help us design a system that is more efficient, effective, and equitable. The authors use multilevel simulation models as a quantitative tool for evaluating alternate ways of organizing healthcare delivery. They employ this approach, for example, in their discussions of affordability, a prevention and wellness program, chronic disease management, and primary care accessibility for children in the Medicaid program. They also consider possible benefits from a range of technologies, including electronic health records and telemedicine; data mining as an alternative to randomized trials; conceptual and analytical methodologies that address the complexity of the healthcare system; and how these principles, models, and methods can enable transformational change.