History of Systems Engineering

Talk delivered at  West Oxford Academy, Oxford (27 October 2015) and Imperial College, London (18 February 2016). Both events were open to all.
---
In February 1944, the world's newspapers were flooded with the news that Charles E. Bedaux, one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful industrial consultants, had committed suicide while under FBI custody in Miami, Florida. Here, readers were told, Bedaux was detained under a charge of treason for collaborating with the Nazis during the war.

Reminding readers that Bedaux had made a fortune out of his 'Bedaux System of Human Power Measurement', reporters, in particular Janet Flanner of 'The New Yorker', also reminded readers that Bedaux was already famous for being a friend of the British royalty before the war. What's more: they noted that the Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII) and Wallis Simpson had married at Bedaux's magnificent French château in summer 1937.

But who, really, was Charles E. Bedaux? Was it true, as Flanner's biopic asserted, that his vaunted 'Bedaux System' was merely 'pseudo-scientific' and 'did not differ much from the old Frederick Winslow Taylor shop-management system of the [eighteen] nineties'?

While conspiracy theorists and journalists have long-deployed a phantom version of Bedaux in a variety of fantastic international plots involving various British royals, Hollywood actors and top Nazi officials (Adolf Hitler included), until now there has existed no professionally-researched account of Bedaux's life, nor his influence as a consultant. Moreover, it will be suggested that Bedaux's demonised reputation has not just warped literature in relation to consultants, but also in relation to broader narratives related to the history of technology, business, and management.

This public talk will explore the fact that, in the Bedaux case, the truth really is stranger than fiction. But this has not stopped fanatics and even forgers working to make the opposite the case. It is time to set the record straight and work out where to go next.

What does good operational research (OR) practice mean, and what can critical systems thinking (CST) do for it? This two-part essay proposes new answers to both questions. Part 1 first reviews the idea and history of systems thinking in OR, as a basis for properly situating CST within OR. It then offers a comparative, non-partisan account of the two strands of CST, critical systems heuristics (CSH) and total systems intervention (TSI), and identifies their combined potential in an ability to enhance the contextual sophistication of OR. The prevalent but inaccurate notion of the history of OR as a linear evolution from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ and ‘critical’ systems thinking is replaced by an integrated perspective of OR as applied systems thinking.

How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated themes are identified: the relationship between scientific and engineering knowledge, engineering knowledge as a distinct field of study, the social epistemology of engineering, the relationship between engineering knowledge and its products, and the cognitive aspects of engineering knowledge. We discuss areas of potential future research that are underdeveloped or "undone."