The paper proposes an approach for designing complex enterprises as systems of systems that on each level of hierarchy have a (recursive) self-designing property. A definition of self-evolving / self-designing systems is given using the notion of life cycle relationships as defined in ISO 15704:2000 and is presented in a form for practical use in enterprise engineering. The approach is based on an extension of Nam Suh's axiomatic design, by introducing a third design axiom, the ‘axiom of recursion'. It is argued that (under certain circumstances) by distributing the design authority between systems on each level, it may be possible to limit the complexity of the system that any design authority needs to see.