The Reflexive Turn in Systems Engineering: A Disciplinary Response to Complexity

Abstract

The Future of Systems Engineering (FuSE) programme has called for the discipline to evolve as a transdiscipline capable of engaging complex eco‐socio‐technical challenges. Yet the pace of that evolution has been slower than the arguments for it would predict. This article examines why. It argues that systems engineering as institutionally constituted, through its standards, handbooks, professional bodies, certification pathways, and educational curricula, encodes the epistemological stance of what Morin terms restricted complexity, and that this encoding reflects the historical conditions under which the discipline was formed and the commercial and contractual pressures that continue to sustain it. Drawing on prior papers that develop the epistemological framework (Leal Ascencio, 2026a) and the empirical evidence from the UK Ajax armoured vehicle programme (Leal Ascencio, 2026b), I advance a disciplinary and institutional argument for what I term the reflexive turn in systems engineering. I identify four institutional sites at which reform would be required, namely the standards ecosystem, the INCOSE governance structure, the professional formation of engineers, and the community's own scholarly and conference practices. I anticipate specific lines of pushback that reform would encounter and address each in turn. The paper is offered as a contribution to the FuSE conversation and to the special issue's call for advancing systems engineering in the face of complexity, drawing on two decades of training practising systems engineers as the experiential foundation for the disciplinary observations advanced here. Systems engineering faces a puzzle. The intellectual case for reforming the discipline to address complex socio‐technical situations has been available for some time. The Future of Systems Engineering programme has taken up this case; the guest editors of this special issue have themselves published substantial work on the discipline's transdisciplinary evolution. Yet the pace of institutional change has been slower than the intellectual case would predict. This article proposes an explanation and a response. The Explanation is That Systems Engineering As Institutionally Constituted Encodes What Morin terms Restricted Complexity, and that this encoding reflects the historical conditions of the discipline's formation and the commercial, contractual, and Formation‐Based Pressures That Continue to Sustain it. The response is a Set of Specific Proposals For What I term the Reflexive Turn in Systems engineering: a Coordinated Programme of Institutional Reform Addressing the Standards Ecosystem, INCOSE governance and the FuSE programme, professional formation, and the community's own scholarly practices. The Article Makes Three Contributions of Direct Significance to the Systems Engineering community. First, it develops a political economy of the discipline that identifies the historical formation, the Institutional Apparatus, and the sustaining pressures that produce the reform difficulties the FuSE programme confronts. Second, it works through precedents for the reflexive turn from three adjacent disciplines that have undergone analogous reforms, namely architecture, safety science, and nursing science, and Derives from Them Concrete Models For Institutional change. Third, It Advances Specific Proposals For Reform At Each of the Four Institutional Sites Identified, Grounded in Two Decades of Training Practising Systems Engineers Across Defence, aerospace, infrastructure, and the public sector. The paper rests on established epistemological foundations set out in a companion paper published in Kybernetes and on documented empirical evidence set out in a companion paper published in Safety Science. Together, the three papers form a coherent triptych with distinct contributions. The present article is the disciplinary intervention: its purpose is to identify what the framework and evidence require of systems engineering as an institutional formation, and to offer concrete proposals through which the INCOSE community and the FuSE programme could take up the reflexive turn. It responds directly to the special issue's call for advancing systems engineering in the face of complexity.