Craig Hayenga

The defining moment that began my fascination with and study of complexity was when I was finishing my dissertation at the University of Colorado in early 1979 and went to a talk on “From Being to Becoming” given by Ilya Prigogine. His talk on time and complexity in the physical sciences completely captivated me. As my career progressed, I have continued my fascination with complexity, mostly through self-study and reading, only recently being able to begin to blend the interest with my career.

My academic career was as a Physics Professor at New Mexico Tech. I left the security of tenure for industry many years ago. I am currently an Engineering Program Manager at Lockheed Martin, working with a number of program activities. My post-academic career path has been an expansion from pure research to Systems Engineering and Program Management and those organizational, procedural, and psychological factors involved in designing, building and delivering tangible products to customers and users. We are just beginning to consider the impacts of complexity theory to such areas. For example, traditional program management techniques tend to be rather linear and only approximate some of the real world problems of running a program. We build linear Gantt charts with simple dependencies and only experience the emergent properties when the real world gets more iterative than our plans.

While complexity has been the subject of Systems Engineering for many years, the meaning used within SE is somewhat different than that used for complexity theory. SE has a stated goal to reduce complexity in the sense of a safe, predictable performance of a system. The underlying assumption of traditional SE is a decomposible system. Complexity theory is undermining that assumption for many 'systems' we want to field. By understanding differences and learning how to bring the two disciplines into dialogue, we should be able to advance how we engineer systems and begin to learn how to embrace rather than avoid complex properties such as emergence, as opposed to attempting to design them away. I believe a better understanding of complexity theory can help us reformulate our ways of engineering systems and managing our programs.

I grew up in Albuquerque, so also look forward to being close to my old home for a while. I love wine and plan to explore some old favorite wineries, and look for some new ones. Yes, New Mexico does have good wine, if you look for it.

Questions:

1. What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!

On the dreaming side, I still love pure physics and philosophy and exploring how complexity is shifing our world view. Manuel De Landa's work is especially intriguing. On the practical side, I want to explore and understand the implications for such areas as how we engineer systems by embracing, rather than fighting complexity and emergence.

2. What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?

While I hate the concept of becoming a greybeard, I do have many years of experience in academia and industry to help challenge the group on 'real world' problems. As a practicing Systems Engineer, I can bring some of how we do things today to help show the areas we need to work on changing.

3. What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?

As stated above, most of my complexity work has been self-study. I hope to fill in the gaps in what I have studied on my own with a more formal grounding.

I hope to make many new connections with people in the field and work to bridge SE and complexity.

4. Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS?

Again, I want to explore how we engineer systems with a mind to embracing complexity.