Please join us on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 5:45 PM Pacific Time for a HYBRID presentation on The Fragility of Efficiency: Supply Chains, Traffic Lights, and MBSE, by Dr. Art Villanueva. This evening, we will learn how with optimization comes low resilience, and what we can do about it.
New Location! This presentation will be held in person at a new location, Anny’s Burgers in Kearny Mesa (San Diego), where we will meet in the covered patio area. Anny’s has burgers, wings, salads, beer, and more! Each person orders individually and the chapter will subsidize up to $10 of each member’s bill.
MAIN INFORMATION
Date: Wednesday, 25 March 2026, from 5:45-7pm Pacific Time (presentation starts at 6pm)
(New) Location: Anny’s Burgers, 5375 Kearny Villa Rd, San Diego, CA 92123 (Google Maps)
Cost: Free! Attendees are welcome to order from Anny’s, and the chapter will subsidize $10 toward each INCOSE Member’s bill.
Remote: This presentation will be broadcast live on Zoom.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://incose-org.zoom.us/j/83575365764?pwd=bvhRDwvrEynKoThjzC2TI8604CQvKi.1
Meeting ID: 835 7536 5764
Passcode: 027721
By Phone: 669-444-9171 (same meeting ID and passcode as above)
ABSTRACT
Systems engineering often falls victim to the Mechanic’s fantasy: the belief that complex systems can be optimized like complicated machines. By relentlessly driving out inefficiency and variance, we inadvertently strip away the slack required for resilience. This creates systems that are highly efficient at steady-state but catastrophically fragile during disruptions. To build truly resilient systems, we must shift our paradigm from the Mechanic to the Gardener.
Drawing on themes from the book The Gardener and the Machine, this presentation explores the fragility of efficiency by examining catastrophic failures of over-optimization across three domains:
- The Technological Domain (Supply Chains): How “Just-in-Time” logistics eliminated vital slack, turning local disruptions into cascading global failures.
- The Biological Domain (Traffic Lights): How hyper-efficient traffic algorithms fail in the real world by treating unpredictable humans as predictable machines.
- The Social Domain (The Illusion of Compliance): How MBSE has devolved into performative rigor, prioritizing auditable checklists over actual engineering insight to create models that are perfect on paper but hollow in reality.
By exploring the universal physics of system failure, attendees will leave with actionable strategies to escape the compliance trap and return to the essential work of cultivating system resilience.
PRESENTER: Dr. Art Villanueva
Dr. Art Villanueva is the author of the book The Gardener and the Machine: Designing Systems That Thrive on Disruption. He is a systems engineer and AI practitioner who tackles complex, real-world challenges as the founder of Phronos, and as a Senior Staff Engineer developing next-generation aerospace technologies at General Atomics. Dr. Villanueva’s career spans defense, clean tech, and enterprise strategy, including leadership roles at Northrop Grumman and Dell Technologies. He is a published researcher, holds multiple U.S. patents, and is a certified INCOSE ESEP.