Faculty Spotlight: Systems Thinking: Nightingale & Rhodes

Two of MIT’s leading engineering systems thinkers, Debbie Nightingale and Donna Rhodes, have a terrific partnership as well as distinct careers. Their work on MIT Professional Education’s recent International Program in Italy, “Architecting the Future Enterprise,” is just the latest in their collaborations on transforming large-scale organizations using lean principles. Nightingale and Rhodes began co-teaching a graduate level course in 2004 and they are completing a book for MIT Press about the same subject. Both embrace a holistic approach to this field.

“Taking a holistic approach is the defining difference,” Nightingale says of their methodology.

“Most of the time when people look at the architecture of an enterprise, they are taking a single view—looking at the IT or the organization or the process. Our approach is that you have to look at all the parts in parallel.”

She uses that philosophy throughout her work, which includes heading the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), a cross-disciplinary center that focuses on high-impact, complex systems, and as co-director of the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI).

One of Nightingale’s newest projects, cosponsored with LAI and the MIT Collaborative Initiatives, is in healthcare research. She is the project lead on a major new grant from the US Military Health System designed to improve the treatment of military personnel suffering from PostTraumatic Stress Syndrome and major depression. Her team will review existing services, map enterprise-level decisions and their interactions, and help the Department of Defense create a more efficient and effective operation.

One of the things Rhodes shares with Nightingale is a focus on working with decision makers to forge a new understanding of complex systems, how they interact, and how they can be improved. “We help [decision-makers] create visions for the future,” Rhodes says. “We come up with different concepts of what they could do and evaluate those.”

In the Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri), Rhodes is applying systems findings in one industry sector to other enterprises. She is also examining what she calls systems of systems.

“Today is it rare to have one system that is not connected to another system,” Rhodes says. “In the defense industry, ground forces are connected to satellites and to ships. You have higher order systems that are comprised of systems in themselves and when you do that, the enterprise itself becomes more challenging than the technology.”