A Tinkerer's Mindset: Lessons from the Technical Leadership Institute's Cohort 8 on Safe-to-Fail Probing as a Tool for Informing Judgement

Tinkering — or making small changes to experiment toward an improvement in performance — is seemingly a natural characteristic of many systems engineers. As such, systems engineers are uniquely qualified to develop complex solutions necessary to overcome lack of clarity, achieve order, and avoid failure. Further, there is a much broader conversation surrounding the possibility of “failure” being beneficial in systems engineering projects. In response to the needing to inform judgment in situations shrouded in uncertainty, members of INCOSE's Technical Leadership Institute (TLI) cohort 8 examined the role of safe-to-fail probes play in informing judgement for systems engineers. Within the constraints of the TLI's major project, virtual workshops and qualitative interviews were two data collection mechanisms established to empirically investigate the role(s) of safe-to-fail probing in systems engineering. Overall, the data sets offered conclusions describing the potential role(s) of safe-to-fail probes for systems engineers working in uncertain environments. Resulting from this (limited) empirical exploration are additional insights and implications for how systems engineers may invoke safe-to-fail probes to improve decision-making in uncertain and challenging situations. Such a tinkerer's mindset can help systems engineers transition from the constraints of “intolerable failure” to the opportunities related to probing-sensing-responding to “responsible failures.”