Over the past decades, a common definition of the term system has eluded researchers and practitioners alike. We reviewed over 100 current and historical definitions of system in an effort to understand perspectives and to propose the most comprehensive definition of this term. There is much common ground in different families of definition of system, but there are also important and significant differences. Some stem from different belief systems and worldviews, while others are due to a pragmatic desire to establish a clear definition for system within a particular community, disregarding wider considerations. In either case, it limits the effectiveness of various system communities' efforts to communicate, collaborate, and learn from the experience of other communities. We discovered that by considering a wide typology of systems, Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory provides a basis for a general, self‐consistent sensible framework, capable of accommodating and showing the relationships amongst the variety of different definitions of and belief systems pertaining to system. Emergence, the appearance of a new phenomenon or capability as a result of relation or interaction between objects, is key in differentiating between objects that are systems and those that are not. Hence we propose a family of definitions, related by the common theme of emergence, which is in line with both the realist and constructivist worldviews, and covers real and conceptual systems. We believe this better reflects the current scope of systems engineering and is required to support the aspirations expressed in INCOSE SE Vision 2025.

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The System Definition Survey issued to INCOSE Fellows in December 2016 revealed at least five radically distinct worldviews on Systems within a relatively small, but moderately representative, part of the INCOSE community. We describe and analyse the survey results, and comment on differences between the responses from the Fellows and the responses to a similar survey issued to the System Science Working Group a month later. Then we discuss how the different worldviews on “system” revealed by the surveys map onto different areas of the set of system definitions described in a previous paper. We conclude that all the worldviews identified offer useful perspectives for systems engineering, and that Systems Engineers need the flexibility to adopt different worldviews for different situations, or at least to act “as if” different worldviews are true in different situations.

Adaptability in manufacturing is becoming increasingly important, as it provides flexibility without requiring significant up‐front investment. In this paper, we review the history of this concept, indicate issues with prior work and advance our knowledge of this topic. We provide an explanation and analysis on the concept of mission‐based adaptability that adopts a similar definition as the adaptability in ecosystems, which describes a system's adaptive capability relative to on‐going changes. Our analysis shows the mission‐based adaptability's empirical mathematical properties and indicates this formulation is able to resolve previous approaches’ issues at an optimal level of abstraction. We employ extensive tools and analysis on an airplane engine design example case and demonstrate the importance and usefulness of the adaptability metric for decision makers in the manufacturing industry.

We envision that Systems Engineering (SE) can be transformed into a truly transdisciplinary discipline – a foundational meta‐discipline that supports and enables collaboration between all the disciplines that should be involved in conceiving, building, using and evolving a system so that it will continue to be successful and fit for purpose as time passes. SE can be applied in different ways depending on the situation and how well current SE process patterns are matched to the problem in hand. We identify four elements of this new transdisciplinary framework: SE Tenets; SE Approach; SE Process; and SE Toolbox. We suggest that the use of SE then needs to be considered in three domains: problem space, solution space, and transformation space that helps us along the development‐delivery‐evolution trajectory. We propose twelve SE tenets and show how they should be applied in these three domains. We perceive that even though all elements of the current SE Process can be justified in terms of the twelve tenets applied to these three domains, the current commonly used, standardized SE Process is not suitable for all situations requiring an SE Approach or an application of the SE Tenets. We claim that the framework presented in this paper can act as a unifying structure that facilitates the evolution of Systems Engineering from the current focus on a “standardized” process model suited to a particular class of problem, to a more agile and capable “transdiscipline” that will provide an enabling construct for more successful collaborations that can better deal with a wider range of complicated, complex and chaotic problem situations.