4. The Fourth Principle: Evidence- and Risk-Based Decisions

“Look before you leap.”

—Anonymous proverb

“He who hesitates is lost.”

—Anonymous proverb

Principle 3 emphasizes having a variety of systems engineers and stakeholders concurrently understanding the system’s needs, envisioning opportunities, exercising prototypes, and developing, verifying, and validating operations concepts, requirements, architectures, and life-cycle plans. Without some mechanism to synchronize and stabilize all of this concurrency, this could be a recipe for chaos.

One of the several contributions of Principle 4 is to serve as a means to synchronize and stabilize the concurrent activities and system artifacts. As discussed in explaining Figure 0-6 (the ICSM Concurrency ...

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