Designing Ultra Large Scale Systems – Can Lean Inventive Systems Thinking (LIST) Help?

The challenges of designing the needed Ultra Large Scale (ULS) systems are beyond the methods and techniques that humanity currently knows of. These systems are characterized by extraordinary decentralization, inherently conflicting, unknowable and diverse requirements, continuous evolution and deployment, heterogeneous, inconsistent, and changing elements, erosion of people/system boundary, normal failures and new paradigms for acquisition and policy. Today the largest systems being designed are what in the US military parlance are called System of Systems (SoS). The current cutting-edge SoS are characterized by operational and managerial independence of elements, evolutionary development, emergent behavior and geographic distribution. ULS will be SoS at Internet Scale. This is not a simple matter of extending the current approaches as P.W. Anderson in his 1972 classic paper described More is Different. We have definitely come a long way from that time in our approaches to design systems. Yet predominantly our approaches continues to be constrained by the analytical and logical thinking (analogical thinking) that we have perfected over past centuries. The research agenda proposed to design ULS systems includes – Human Interaction, Computational Emergence, Design of all levels, Computational Engineering, Adaptive System Infrastructure, Adaptable and Predictable System Quality, Policy, Acquisition and Management. In this paper we explore the suitability of different thinking dimensions for designing ULS Systems – these are Lean Thinking, Inventive Thinking and Systems Thinking. Our hypothesis is that these thinking dimensions need to play a much larger part than the current analogical thinking that we are used to, in order to design these highly complex systems of the future. We propose our framework named the Lean Inventive Systems Thinking (LIST) as a possible approach to design such ULS Systems