Exunum Strategic Solutions™

A sharper picture.
A different starting point.

Clarity on what your system requires. Analysis you can build on.
Eyeglasses reflecting green trees
Photo by Bud Silva on Unsplash

Hard-won experience forged the best practices for developing, integrating, and fielding systems. They hold up well until they encounter a horizon where perception blurs and comprehension resists even the most disciplined effort. Requirements drift. Interfaces never quite close. Decisions escalate without end.

Yet, when you understand your system on its own terms, clarity emerges. What seems unrelated begins to follow recurring patterns. What needs to change becomes traceable, even predictable. What once overwhelmed transforms into something tractable.

We bring that lens to our clients' most critical moments.

Practice & Research

What we offer
and what we're pursuing

Consulting Practice

From need to results

Every engagement starts with your team and what success looks like to you. Analyzing your system on its own terms, we identify the structure it needs to deliver that success, and help you build toward it.

  • Get a clear picture
  • Structural DiagnosticSystem DiagnosticsGain insight into what works, what doesn’t, and which changes matter most.
  • Collaborative StudySystem ArchitectingTurn an unmet need into an architectural design, or uncover the need served by an existing capability.
  • Leadership Stand‑UpRole ArchitectingDefine what your organization’s architectural or technology leadership needs to accomplish, and set up the role for whoever fills it.
  • See it through Optional
  • Operational StreamliningCapability BuildingStrategic Alignment
  • Comprehensive EngagementCarry a diagnostic or study through to results, with us guiding your team or doing the work on your behalf.
  • Fractional CTO / Chief ArchitectFill the newly stood‑up role with experienced leadership, part‑time and ongoing.
Recent work · Structural Diagnostic → Comprehensive Engagement

A client’s web application, written with AI coding tools, had begun resisting improvements and extensions. After a quick diagnostic, we’re refactoring it according to our architecting patterns while it remains in active use by a growing community. Our judgment shapes the design, AI translates it into code under guided human oversight, and purpose‑built quality controls govern every change before it reaches production.

Explore engagements Small business? See Small Business Essentials
Systems Research

Toward a systems science, sharpened by application

  • Unifying Systems Theory (UST)Testing our hypothesis that an empirical law governs the conditions for system coherence, and formulating UST from first-principles derivation and evidence.
  • The Skeptical Systemist™Sharing the history and reasoning behind UST through a whitepaper series and companion podcast, so anyone can explore and build on the ideas.
  • Technology DevelopmentTurning UST architecting patterns into technology that solves real problems.
From research to practice

Structured around UST architecting patterns, our Data Persistence Service offers a promising approach to a long-standing problem: maintaining alignment between an application’s code and its database as each evolves on its own schedule, without upkeep that grows as dependencies accumulate.

Full research page coming soon
About

Who we are
and why we're doing this

Mission

To bring clarity to how the world understands and works with systems, through the lens of our Unifying Systems Theory (UST).

Vision

A world that designs and adapts its systems on the basis of a science derived from empirical law and first principles — examinable, transferable across domains, and strengthened by every application.

The Name

Exunum: A contraction of the Latin ex uno ad unum — from one, toward one. Starting from the whole, differentiating around what must necessarily hold to always cohere back toward the one.

Strategic Solutions: Where that reasoning meets the work. Aligning people, processes, and capabilities toward what the system needs to function as one, in service of decisions and outcomes that matter.

Why We Exist

Despite decades of sustained work by many thoughtful researchers, a unified, domain-independent theoretical foundation for systems has remained elusive. In 1968, von Bertalanffy called for universal principles that would hold across domains without having to be rediscovered in each one.¹ Hazelrigg and Saari note that this pursuit has been ongoing for over fifty years, and that proposed theories have so far "fail[ed] to accommodate even a sizable fraction of the current systems engineering community."² INCOSE has named a rigorous theoretical foundation as a goal since at least 2014 — yet it remains unmet and prominent in its vision for 2035.³ More fundamentally, the field has no agreed‑upon definition for its namesake: a 2017 review of more than one hundred definitions of “system” found “important and significant ontological differences” among them.⁴

We believe that starting from an empirical law governing the existence of every system holds promise for a scientific foundation the field has long sought. Informed by decades of experience, reasoning from that law has already given us something practical: a set of patterns that reflect the conditions for coherence, shaping how we understand systems and structuring how we work with them. Mapped onto a given system, the patterns guide what goes where, so we can focus on what matters and set aside the rest.

We put this approach to work on our clients’ problems, so they can move forward with confidence.

¹ Von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. George Braziller, New York.

² Hazelrigg, G.A. and Saari, D.G. (2022). "Toward a Theory of Systems Engineering." Journal of Mechanical Design, 144(1). DOI: 10.1115/1.4051873.

³ International Council on Systems Engineering (2014). A World in Motion: Systems Engineering Vision 2025. INCOSE. See also INCOSE (2023). Systems Engineering Vision 2035.

⁴ Dori, D. and Sillitto, H. (2017). "What is a System? An Ontological Framework." Systems Engineering, 20(3), 207–219.

Meet the Team