Sep 27, 2026 · 37 min · 11 segments
How can Amazon River turtle eggs, ant colony behavior, and submarine operations help us design more resilient systems? In the latest episode of the INCOSE Podcast, we sit down with Dr. Bryan…
Bryan WatsonGuest
Samantha BernalHost
And so you've also described your career as being centered around building resilience, both in people and in systems.
So we were doing a Calling All Systems about a year ago, and I was talking to the panel beforehand.
And I said, what do you want to talk about? And they said, we can talk about whatever you want, but don't ask us to define resilience because that will be the entire panel.
So with that in mind, my very humble definition is I would say we want to prevent bad things from happening, mitigate the impact, and speed recovery.
And that can look like a lot of different things, like you've mentioned, right? It can be from the actual system organization side, the network side, or it could be specific behaviors that we're trying to promote in our system that can help any of those kind of three phases.
For example, let's say I have a group of robots or a group of individuals working together, and I need to figure out which one has been corrupted.
Identifying that corrupted one is something that will help promote that system resilience.
And so then you left the Navy and then you went to earn your PhD at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where your work included research in sustainable systems and systems of systems resilience.
And so for somebody who's just browsing and doesn't really have a whole engineering background, how would you explain what a systems of a systems is?
And once again, this is a topic where if you want to start a good fight at the NCOCIS, you can ask someone to define resilience and systems of systems.
But the way that I approach it is if we go down one layer, we can say that a system of system composes of interacting complex systems that where complex systems exchange energy matter material or information and from my perspective a complex system is a system that is has many characteristics but really a defining one is it has intelligent goal-seeking agents in it right so it has something in it that's making decisions that's seeking a goal that's not deterministic it's not a doesn't always equal b right a could equal b or c or d and there's some sort of probability distribution that happens there.
And so the example I love to give, just based on my own background, right, is the physical submarine itself is a complicated system.
And so you've also described your career as being centered around building resilience, both in people and in systems.
So we were doing a Calling All Systems about a year ago, and I was talking to the panel beforehand.
And I said, what do you want to talk about? And they said, we can talk about whatever you want, but don't ask us to define resilience because that will be the entire panel.
So with that in mind, my very humble definition is I would say we want to prevent bad things from happening, mitigate the impact, and speed recovery.
And that can look like a lot of different things, like you've mentioned, right? It can be from the actual system organization side, the network side, or it could be specific behaviors that we're trying to promote in our system that can help any of those kind of three phases.
For example, let's say I have a group of robots or a group of individuals working together, and I need to figure out which one has been corrupted.
Identifying that corrupted one is something that will help promote that system resilience.
And so then you left the Navy and then you went to earn your PhD at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where your work included research in sustainable systems and systems of systems resilience.
And so for somebody who's just browsing and doesn't really have a whole engineering background, how would you explain what a systems of a systems is?
And once again, this is a topic where if you want to start a good fight at the NCOCIS, you can ask someone to define resilience and systems of systems.
But the way that I approach it is if we go down one layer, we can say that a system of system composes of interacting complex systems that where complex systems exchange energy matter material or information and from my perspective a complex system is a system that is has many characteristics but really a defining one is it has intelligent goal-seeking agents in it right so it has something in it that's making decisions that's seeking a goal that's not deterministic it's not a doesn't always equal b right a could equal b or c or d and there's some sort of probability distribution that happens there.
And so the example I love to give, just based on my own background, right, is the physical submarine itself is a complicated system.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
