Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) is an interdisciplinary field that studies the cognitive work of people handling difficult situations — making decisions, detecting anomalies, building diagnoses, coordinating with others — in complex and consequential environments.
When your engineers are responding to an incident at 3am, they are engaged with cognitive work. They’re building a picture of what’s happening, forming and revising hypotheses, making trade-offs with incomplete information, and coordinating across teams and tools. The dashboards they’re looking at might be well-designed in the traditional sense with clear labels, logical navigation, good visual hierarchy, etc. and still fail to help the people understand how a failure is propagating, what the automated systems are currently doing about it, and how much time they have before the situation gets worse.
A CSE perspective is not about what people should do, according to a procedure, a checklist, or a run-book.
It’s about what people actually do when they are under pressure to handle an ambiguous situation, when the signals they’re getting and observations they’re making contradict each other, and all possible actions have some potential to make things worse.
The ultimate goal of CSE is to use this understanding of cognitive work in order to design technical systems (tools, interfaces, artifacts, etc.) that support effective human-machine collaboration.
It asks questions such as:
- How do experienced practitioners recognize that something is going wrong before alerts fire?
- How do teams build and maintain a shared picture of what’s currently happening, what’s been tried, and what’s expected to happen next?
- What makes some tools genuinely useful in a crisis, and others a hindrance — even when those tools are perfectly “usable”?
Concrete answers to questions like these are what shapes the design of tools and other things that can support engineers when and how they need it. Answers to questions like these rarely come from simply asking engineers – it comes from understanding what they actually do in those situations.
CSE is what underpins everything ACL does. It’s how and why our post-incident analysis work goes deeper than those produced via templates which only generate action items. It’s why we focus on how expertise is built, shared, and sometimes lost. And it’s why we keep returning to the same uncomfortable truth: the things that make your systems harder to understand are usually the same things that made your business successful.
This is a different perspective than what most in the tech industry are used to.
Because CSE is a field that ultimately informs the design of interfaces, it’s often conflated with the “UX/UI” that many are familiar with. These are in fact different, and here’s how.
For those interested in learning more about CSE, Lorin Hochstein maintains a bibliography of seminal works.