The Art of Thoughtful Integration

In the purest spirit of today’s web creators, I’ll start this article with a great catchphrase:

“We live in a complex world”. Boom! Let me explain.

When I try to keep track of the evolution of technology, science, and the systems that fill our lives, it quickly becomes clear to me that complexity seems to be on the rise. I do my best to stay updated — I read, I curate the right intellectual diet — but sometimes that still doesn’t seem enough.

We’ve become demanding. Every new iteration of a system adds new features, and we, as users, started to have high expectations for how well those features should perform. Systems respond by growing more sophisticated, and it takes real experience to keep that complexity under control.

According to NASA, “a system is the combination of elements that function together to produce the capability required to meet a need.” But needs evolve, and systems evolve accordingly, sometimes making complexity grow faster than our human bandwidth. When that happens, it’s common to find that behind every system there’s a team, not an individual. And because of this, today it has almost become impossible to find someone who has built a fairly complex product entirely on their own.

I believe this applies to many fields where complexity is high, and I’d argue it’s especially true for space systems, like satellites.

“We live in a complex world,” and hell yeah, “satellites are complex.”

Although I’m still a noob in the professional world, Satellites are my background, the craft that forms the lens through which I view and analyse many things. I consider myself an aspiring expert in the space sector, so this article will from time to time focus on that (we’re on satelliteintegrators.com, duh!), but I hope the ideas I’m sharing could stimulate anyone dealing with complexity, in one way or another.

So, okay...we live in a complex world, but how do we deal with complexity?

As already mentioned, one of humanity’s favourite emergency measures against complexity is the concept of teams. The world as we know it has been built by teams of brilliant individuals, and satellites are no exception.
As a matter of fact, every team that dreams of orbit needs, at the very least, someone who understands attitude and orbital mechanics, an RF expert, a software wizard, a power/avionics bro, and a few mechanical folks ready to squeeze everything into a box.

A lot has been written about the power of teamwork, how collaboration takes you further, how no one achieves greatness alone, etc ... Although I agree with most of those ideas, the truth is teams can also suck, especially when they are too big.

There are several reasons for that, I believe this article from the organizational psychologist Bob Sutton from Stanford summarized the issue brilliantly. My own take on the matter is:

1. Team moves at the speed of the slowest

2. Interpersonal friction is harder than engineering

3. High risk of Blabbermouths taking over and real work quietly stalling.

Companies like Amazon or McKinsey seem to have understood this well. They came up with odd and memorable concepts but the idea is simple: small teams work better. It’s the same logic you use when organizing a trip with friends: planning with two people is easy and fun; doing it with ten is in the best-case scenario just fun.

In the space industry, however, this principle is often ignored. The perceived complexity is so high that it feels impossible to let a small group run the show. The reflex solution? Hire more people. Build larger teams. Add more “A-Players.”
Sometimes that helps. Often, it just delays the work.

Because let’s face it: building a team to manage complexity is complex in itself.
It takes serious effort to decide whether adding more people actually helps or just adds noise, and it takes even more to find decent People  who’ll not threaten the human fabric of your organisation. Yet that effort is often skipped, because in difficult times we instinctively reach for the easiest-looking solution: ask for help, bring more people in, share the weight. And while that can work, it’s far from the only answer.

Can “teams” really be our only strategy to deal with complexity?
Oh my god, no.

It turns out there is an entire profession dedicated to that, the Systems Engineer.

A systems engineer is supposed to do… well, systems engineering. And at its core, systems engineering is the discipline of making complex things work.
NASA defines it as a “methodical, multidisciplinary approach” to designing, building, and managing systems throughout their entire life, from concept to retirement. But in simpler terms, it’s about seeing the big picture without losing control of the details, shaping interactions so that everything work together to meet a real need.

If you ask the elite of Systems Engineering, they’ll tell you there are far better starting points to deal with complexity:

• Stakeholder analysis, that in a no-fluff jargon is the ability of figuring out what people want. This involves talking with not only the customers, but also users and or operators.

• Decomposition, breaking a system down into parts, understanding how those parts connect, both functionally and physically.
  As René Descartes put it in Discourse on the Method (1637):
  “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.”

This sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

To deal with something complex, you first need to remember why you’re dealing with it at all (i.e. what need you’re trying to meet) and then take it apart until each piece feels understandable and actionable; not so small that you lose the meaning, not so large that it overwhelms you.

All right; there’s enough meat on the BBQ: three ways to deal with complexity (teams, stakeholder analysis, decomposition) and one specialty to rule them all: systems engineering. However, dear readers, even though my job title says that I’m a systems engineer, I still haven’t quite figured out how these things are supposed to rub shoulders with each other.

Because here’s the thing: the more you decompose, the more you zoom in —but the more you zoom in, the easier it is to forget the very need you were trying to solve in the first place. So, you ask someone who actually met the client... but wait, that person’s on vacation. Fine, let’s have a meeting to align. We zoom out for a bit, realise we’ve been drifting sideways, and during the very same meeting about client needs, someone suddenly discovers that the pinout of the cable connecting unit A to unit B is wrong. No problem! we ask Tom, Dick, and Harry to fix it while we go back to sorting out the client’s needs. But oh no, Tom and Harry can’t stand each other, so maybe ask Bob instead? Except Bob’s sick today. And so it goes… round and round… for quite a while.

Everything leads me to the fact that to find meaning in all this mess, you have to master something, not in terms of “years of experience” or “number of products built,” but in a deeper, more deliberate way. To explain what I mean (and maybe to teach it to myself) I came up with a concept that sounds like it could come straight out of a glossy business book: The Art of Thoughtful Integration.

So, what do I mean by that?
The art of thoughtful integration is the craft of making elements work together on purpose.

Integration, in this sense, isn’t just about connecting parts so they fit; it’s about making them make sense together — systems, processes, and, most importantly, people.

It’s knowing when to add, when to simplify, and when to step back to check if the whole still solves the needs it originated from. But it’s also knowing when to speak and when to stay silent, when to listen and when to propose. It’s both a skill and a science: balancing opposing requirements, aligning different ideas, and constantly asking whether the system is not only built right, but also the right thing to build.

And yes, it’s an art. It reminds me of the spirit of the Florentine workshops during the Renaissance, where apprentices learned everything (from painting to goldsmithing) under one roof. That same energy must live in the act of building products, whether satellites, microwaves, books, or boxes...because building things well is a noble pursuit, and it deserves a word as powerful as art. Maybe that’s why the best companies often turn into hotbeds of talent: art is contagious, and when it spreads, it elevates everyone involved.

But this art must also be thoughtful, structured, intentional, rigorous. Bringing an idea to life takes more than a shared drive and a handful of Jira tickets. It takes analysis, imagination, and selection. It’s pure labour, a slow process that demands seriousness and care.

All in all, that’s what satelliteintegrators.com will be about.

I started this journey with a few mates scattered across the industry to document our shared pursuit of mastering the art of thoughtful (satellite) integration and hopefully build a tight community along the way.  The fear of being judged is always there, especially by colleagues, professors, friends, friends of friends, but if you only move when it’s safe, you don’t really move at all.

We start moving then, hopefully in the right direction!

Until next time,

Giuseppe Negro