Such developments depend on the modern view that knowledge and information is sets of layered patterns in our computers and in our brains.

They have discovered that human factors in failure are not just a matter of individuals making slips, lapses, or mistakes, but are also the result of organizational and cultural situations which are not easy to identify in advance or at the time. Indeed, they may only become apparent in hindsight.

Looking inwards, your structural subsystem of bones and muscles is also a holon with its own emergent properties such as your body size or muscular dexterity. Looking outwards, your family is a holon with its own emergent properties such as happiness or closeness. The highly connected neural connections in the brain create emergent consciousness.

The characteristics of each layer emerge from the interacting behaviour of the components working in the layer below.

How do we judge the quality of information on which we depend to make decisions that could risk someone dying?

Engineering is, in its most general sense, turning an idea into a reality – creating and using tools to accomplish a task or fulfil a purpose.

There is still a need for highly specialist expertise that has to keep up with new technology. But perhaps even more importantly, that specialism must be tempered with a much wider understanding of the big picture than has typically been the case in the past.

For a soft system, the axiom noted earlier becomes ‘all soft systems have inherent flaws or defects’.

A complex hard system has a layered structure just as in a computer. At any given level, there is a layer underneath that is an interconnected set of subsystems, each of which is a hard system and also a physical process.