Essential Business Challenges: How to Understand Complexity, Address Change, and Make Better Decisions

Society seems increasingly complex, in part due to constant ＂breaking news,＂ likes, tweets, etc. Considerable change is being entertained, or at least debated. Significant decisions are required. Decision-making lately has been flawed, laced with contention, hesitancy, and poor outcomes.

The author has long helped clients and sponsors to understand complexity, address needs for change, formulate plans, and make decisions to invest resources to execute these plans. His engagement with them has focused on formulating problems, devising possible solutions, and deciding which solutions merited investment.

This book represents the author’s reflections on these engagements, associated challenges, and typical outcomes. These stories are reports about clients’ or sponsors’ problems and how he and his colleagues went about addressing these problems of complexity, change, and decision-making. The clients or customers for these services included over 100 enterprises in industry, government, and academia. Most were large, many in the US, but quite a few were in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Geography mattered in these engagements but did not dominate.

The chapters in this book represent his reports on what he learned, and what he could generalize across airplanes, automobiles, banking, computers, communications, insurance, pharmaceuticals, retail, satellites, semiconductors, and telecoms, working with stakeholders from companies, agencies, and academia.

William B. Rouse is a Research Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, as well as a Senior Fellow in the office of the Senior Vice President for Research, Professor Emeritus, and former Chair of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Principal at Curis Meditor, a firm focused on the health of people, processes, organizations, and society. His research focuses on understanding and managing complex public-private systems such as healthcare delivery, higher education, transportation, and national security, with emphasis on the mathematical and computational modeling of these systems for the purpose of policy design and analysis.

Rouse has written hundreds of articles and book chapters, and has authored many books, including most recently Design of a Human-Centered Society (Routledge, 2024), Beyond Quick Fixes (Oxford, 2023), Bigger Pictures for Innovation (Routledge, 2023), Transforming Public-Private Ecosystems (Oxford, 2022), Failure Management (Oxford, 2021), Computing Possible Futures (Oxford, 2019), Universities as Complex Enterprises (Wiley, 2016), Modeling and Visualization of Complex Systems and Enterprises (Wiley, 2015), Understanding and Managing the Complexity of Healthcare (MIT Press, 2014), Economic Systems Analysis and Assessment (Wiley, 2011), People and Organizations: Explorations of Human-Centered Design (Wiley, 2007), Essential Challenges of Strategic Management (Wiley, 2001) and the award-winning Don’t Jump to Solutions (Jossey-Bass, 1998). He has edited or co-edited numerous books including Perspectives on Complex Global Challenges (Wiley, 2016), Engineering the System of Healthcare Delivery (IOS Press, 2010), The Economics of Human Systems Integration (Wiley, 2010), Enterprise Transformation: Understanding and Enabling Fundamental Change (Wiley, 2006), Organizational Simulation: From Modeling & Simulation to Games & Entertainment (Wiley, 2005), the best-selling Handbook of Systems Engineering and Management (Wiley, 1999, 2009), and the eight-volume series Human/Technology Interaction in Complex Systems (Elsevier).

Among many advisory roles, he has served as Chair of the Committee on Human Factors (now Board on Human Systems Integration) of the National Academies, a member of the advisory committee for the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Academies, a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and a member of the DoD Senior Advisory Group on Modeling and Simulation. He has been designated a lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council and National Academies. Rouse is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has been elected a fellow of four professional societies -- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES).

Rouse received his B.S. from the University of Rhode Island, and his S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.