Enhance Decision-Making With Control Systems

This text is a part of our unique career advice collection in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.

A lot of engineering is decision-making. Engineers make choices about product design, program administration, expertise street maps, analysis instructions, management of technical groups, and extra.

As a previous president of the IEEE Control Systems Society and now the 2026 president-elect of the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society, in addition to holding management positions in business and academia, I’ve thought rather a lot concerning the connections between control systems and technology management.

The secure, dependable efficiency of airplanes and spacecraft, automobiles and vehicles, properties and buildings, chemical vegetation and manufacturing amenities, communication and monetary networks, and plenty of different complicated techniques depends on automation and control systems. However, as I focus on right here, the ideas of management engineering are additionally related to human decision-making in expertise administration.

Whether or not in engineering or administration, uncertainties are pervasive. Within the case of the latter area, we will by no means be certain about innovation processes, market projections, and folks’s personalities and capabilities. Certainly, the uncertainties could seem so overwhelming that some is perhaps tempted to decide by flipping a coin.

However most choices are usually not made randomly, and management engineering affords insights for managerial decision-making underneath uncertainty.

Psychological fashions and uncertainty

We depend on psychological fashions—our information, beliefs, assumptions, experiences, observations, and reasoning. However fashions of any selection are usually not actuality. They’re correct approximations at greatest, they usually’re fully improper at worst. It’s important that each one decision-makers acknowledge the discrepancies between their psychological fashions and actuality, after which take motion to cut back the mismatch.

Let me draw an analogy from management engineering. To develop a management system for an plane, for instance, mathematical fashions—not the psychological selection—are developed of the aircraft’s airframe. For numerical accuracy, the fashions require “ample excitation,” which implies offering a wide range of inputs, reminiscent of deflections of flight control surfaces, and measuring how the airplane reacts to them.

Primarily based on that information, fashions of the required accuracy could be created and integrated into the flight controller design. The info should be wealthy sufficient in order that related alerts can rise above irrelevant noise.

Selections are not often one-and-done affairs. Main a staff, managing a challenge, allocating sources, and enterprise a design all require common interactions with others, with preliminary choices adjusted recurrently over time.

The identical applies to psychological fashions for human decision-making. Monitoring regular day-to-day operations of a company or a challenge seemingly wouldn’t present data of a excessive sufficient signal-to-noise ratio for psychological fashions to be reliably up to date.

As an alternative, particular duties and conditions could be instrumental in attaining the purpose. For instance, a supervisor may give a difficult job to a staff member primarily to enhance the supervisor’s psychological mannequin of the worker, slightly than to deal with a urgent organizational want. The improved psychological mannequin can assist the chief decide one of the best function for the worker when an precise difficult state of affairs arises.

No matter effort, psychological fashions won’t ever be excellent. There’ll at all times be uncertainty. So, one essential lesson for decision-makers to remember is that no matter you recognize, you solely assume you recognize. Resist the temptation to imagine you actually know the reality.

As a decision-maker, the objects of your psychological fashions embrace your group, different stakeholders, and the exterior atmosphere. However additionally they embrace your self-model. It’s essential have a transparent understanding of your personal capabilities, preferences, and circumstances. Examples embrace your workload, the tempo at which you’re employed greatest, your flexibility in gentle of different priorities, and what motivates you. And, in fact, you have to admire that your self-models are unsure, too.

Folks typically don’t know themselves in addition to they assume they do. Be trustworthy with your self, and ask for feedback from trusted colleagues and friends. Don’t react defensively; hearken to the suggestions, then mirror. Doing so can strengthen your understanding of your self.

Dynamics and decision-making

Generally the consequences of a choice aren’t instantly obvious. It might take days and even years for that to occur. Within the meantime, observations can present a sign of the consequences, however they is also improper. In management concept, for instance, we educate the idea of inverse response, the place the preliminary response to a choice is the alternative of the ultimate impact.

A easy instance is what occurs to an organization’s earnings if it considerably will increase its analysis and improvement funding. For the subsequent few quarters, earnings seemingly can be decrease due to the R&D bills. As soon as new merchandise roll out, profitability most likely will improve.

A supervisor who doesn’t acknowledge the non permanent inverse response development and cuts R&D sources can worsen slightly than enhance issues by sacrificing the long-term vitality of the corporate. Such short-sighted choices occur all too typically.

Selections are not often one-and-done affairs. Main a staff, managing a challenge, allocating sources, and enterprise a design all require common interactions with others, with preliminary choices adjusted recurrently over time.

These dynamics should be thought-about in complicated decision-making conditions. The changes are based mostly on monitoring the exercise, thereby closing the suggestions loop.

Time delays could be particularly troublesome to handle. As famous, choices made about tasks and processes take time to have an effect. Delays may result from numerous sources together with communication points, new insurance policies, staffing issues, procurement instances, and reporting processes.

To be an efficient decision-maker, your psychological mannequin ought to embrace estimates of delays. The problems arising from unanticipated setbacks in suggestions processes are well-known, each in management engineering and systems engineering. The power to anticipate delays—and, the place potential, to cut back them—is a beneficial ability for decision-makers.

Connecting the dots

The interconnections among the many ideas of psychological fashions, uncertainty, dynamics, and suggestions are deep and interesting. The insights they provide for decision-making are quite a few.

One instance is the robustness-performance tradeoff in management engineering. The tradeoff refers to the truth that the best ranges of efficiency can’t be attained whereas concurrently being strong throughout instances of excessive uncertainty. This perception is the idea of the “no free lunch” theorem in optimization, that means that no decision-making method could be optimum in all conditions.

When uncertainty ranges improve from a mismatch between a psychological mannequin and actuality, the presence of noisy information, or exterior disturbances, decision-making needs to be much less aggressive. As an alternative, it is best to reply by making gradual modifications and ready for suggestions alerts. To paraphrase, the extra unsure the state of affairs, the extra one ought to hedge one’s bets.