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Why Systems Engineers May Have an Edge When It Comes to Personal Resilience
Author(s) -
Hahn Heidi Ann
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2021.00861.x
Subject(s) - resilience (materials science) , ambiguity , assertion , agency (philosophy) , engineering ethics , psychology , computer science , engineering , sociology , social science , physics , thermodynamics , programming language
This paper posits that individual or personal resilience, that is, the ability of a person to adapt to and recover from adversity (Public Health Emergency [PHE], 2020), is key to overcoming personal challenges and that personal resilience is important to organizational and societal resilience as well. Among the examples of personal resilience listed by Spacey (2017) are unaffectedness, tolerance for ambiguity, change agency, and big picture thinking. Arguably, as is discussed in the International Council on Systems Engineering's (INCOSE) Systems Engineering Competency Framework (Presland, Ed., 2018), these are characteristics that should be possessed by systems engineers, hence the assertion that systems engineers may have an edge when it comes to personal resilience. This paper breaks down these characteristics further and relates them to the systems engineering (SE) competencies. It also provides a few suggestions on how to develop personal resilience, specifically by developing oneself in the INCOSE Professional Competencies.