Navigating Uncertainty: Guiding Attention in Purposeful Human Activity Systems

ABSTRACT Engineering teams are complex socio‐technical systems that design, realise and manage engineered solution systems. However, the tools available to systems engineers to organise and support these teams are not yet as advanced or mature as those used for the systems they engineer. The purposeful human activity systems model (PHAS) was developed to address that gap. This paper proposes extending PHAS by integrating the free‐energy principle (FEP) from computational biology. It introduces a formal model of cognitive agents that navigate, interact with and modify their environment, self‐organising around minimising uncertainty and surprise by actively maintaining predictive models of the world that represent individual and shared worldviews. Minimising uncertainty is the primary driver of attention in this model, highlighting potential leverage points for designing practices and environments that coordinate and guide the focus of engineering teams. Because the model is symmetrical, the environment also models the agent, providing a formal description of affordances and context shaping. The proposed model is used to re‐examine the original PHAS framework, and a case study demonstrates how a small team of engineers used the model to improve their cyber‐security practices.