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Complexity is nothing new to systems engineers and managers. The discipline of systems engineering evolved to improve our ability to deal with scale, interdependency, and complexity in systems development. Few systems engineers would doubt that complexity is increasing every year. The rate of change, the increasing interdependence and adaptability of systems, and the increasing ambitions of our clients ensure that complexity keeps expanding to the limits of our capacity to cope with it.

Complex systems science provides a strong foundation for understanding, coping with, and even exploiting complexity. There is a large and rapidly expanding literature on networks, complexity, and complex adaptive systems that can guide systems engineering practice. But busy systems engineers rarely have the time to keep up with this literature, which is diffused across the many interdisciplinary applications of complex systems science. This paper is written for systems engineers and program/project managers who suspect they may encounter complexity-related challenges. This paper applies key concepts from complex systems science to systems engineering to suggest new methods that can handle complexity rather than assuming it away. It is not a complete or even extensive treatment, but is intended as an introduction to the subject for systems engineers as they encounter and work with complexityrelated phenomena.