Situational Awareness: A Transformational Perspective

The Transformation Systems Engineering Caucus, established in the last few years, identifies ways in which systems engineering might become more effective through adaptation of approaches, techniques, and methods from other fields to systems engineering, and the synthesis of new combinations of these approaches. Situational awareness is central in two steps of applying transformational practices and insights to systems engineering efforts: (1) in noticing that there is a need or opportunity to use transformational approaches, and (2) in identifying the specific transformational approaches, methods, techniques, and insights which offer the greatest likelihood of success in completing the systems engineering effort. The purpose of this paper is to describe these uses of situational awareness in support of transformational systems engineering.