The Aegis program and its forebears share a number of common attributes. Today, the Aegis culture informs and guides the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (ABMD) program and beyond, cementing its place in acquisition history as a model approach for aerospace engineering development in the 21st century.
Wayne Meyer, the “Father of Aegis,” expressed profound simplicity in his own operationally-focused way: “Build a Little, Test a Little, Learn a Lot.” The culture that Meyer embedded into the Aegis program retains the best of the legacy of the previous Skunk Works, Atlas, Polaris and Saturn V programs. They realize that when they distrust their simplifications they will feel confused, but they will also know that out of their confusion may come fuller understanding of what they face.”
They understand that the means to move toward profound simplicity is through doubting the completeness of their assumptions, through experimenting, and through experiencing a wider variety of possibilities. “HROs,” writes Weick, “strive for profound simplicity. Citing Esalen Institute social psychologist William Schutz, who coined the phrase, Weick writes of profound simplicity in terms of the progress of organizational understanding that moves through three stages: from superficial simplicity, to confused complexity and finally to profound simplicity. Weick characterizes as high reliability organizations (HROs) and the institution of programmatic cultures of profound simplicity. These developmental advances succeeded by dint of what organizational theorist Karl E.
Amidst an environment of strategic urgency and competing bureaucracies, program and project managers had to master organizational and planning challenges as they successively integrated often unproven technologies into systems of increasing complexity. In the post-World War Two era, legendary and seminal aerospace projects like the aircraft programs of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, the missile programs Atlas, Polaris and Saturn V and the Aegis area air and missile defense system were enormous and complex engineering development undertakings.
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