Here’s part of the talk I presented in Turkmenistan on my recent visit.
A definition that helps us understand what engineers really do and why:
Engineers are people with specialized technical knowledge
who collaborate with lots of other people to conceive, deliver, operate and sustain artificial objects, systems and processes.
These artefacts enable people to be more productive,
to do more with less effort, time, materials, energy, uncertainty,
health risk, and environmental disturbances.
Research reveals engineers spending much of their time coordinating the work of other people since they have special technical knowledge. They need to work with clients to figure out what they really need, persuade someone to provide the money, and then deliver solutions. They issue instructions, and then monitor the work. They constantly watch for “mutations of intent”, misunderstandings and difference of interpretation of drawings and documents, often only casually read if at all. Engineers make predictions: what would happen if the work continues like this? Would it matter? If the result would be a significant deviation from the required technical (or commercial) performance, an engineer then has to intervene and get people to work differently. That can be challenging, partly because engineers may not have as much implementation knowledge as the people they are watching.
Unfortunately, no engineering schools teach engineering collaboration methods (to my knowledge – please send me examples if you know). The methods are unknown in engineering schools. In fact, collaboration in most universities is often seen by faculty and students alike as a kind of cheating. Surely, the students must acquire the knowledge for themselves: getting other students to show them how to arrive at problem solutions has to be cheating.
Engineering technologies are universally applicable: they work everywhere. However the ways people collaborate differ radically from one country, culture and company to another. Since technical collaboration is not taught, it is not standardized, and engineers learn haphazardly from others who learned haphazardly as well. And it is these differences that cause large performance differences between firms and countries. Since it is not taught, is it surprising that collaboration is hard to master?
How many formal collaboration methods can you describe, today?
That’s why I have written my books, to provide engineers and mentors the language and concepts to help young engineers learn effective collaboration methods.
That’s the hard part of learning soft skills – and usually not mentioned. What’s been your experience?
Photo credit: Getty Images at Unsplash.com
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