Important Point 1
Throughout this book, bold-face text is used to highlight words or phrases that are extra important and/or linked together in contrast or similarity; bold-italicized text is used to indicate a verbal emphasis you would hear if the words were being communicated verbally.
|
Learn with intention from the experiences |
When I was early in my career, in my mid-to-late twenties, I thought I had a lot to offer. I did in a sense. I knew a lot of facts — a lot of factual knowledge. I had even had the opportunity to create factual knowledge through my doctoral research and continuing with my own grad student advisees. As I gained experience, I eventually realized what I had to offer with my factual knowledge was really not that much; at least, not as much as it could be. With more time, I came to understand why. The ultimate value of factual knowledge is governed by how it is applied, being amplified greatly… or not. And how it is applied is largely influenced by experience — by one’s experiential knowledge, not just the experiencing of experiences. In other words, experiential knowledge is the amplifier of factual knowledge. And to gain experiential knowledge you should learn with intention from the experiences of life, don’t just experience them.
It is sort of a no brainer, by the nature of the word experiential, that experiential knowledge comes with experience. And experience simply takes time. You can gain factual knowledge at a higher rate by reading and studying facts at a higher rate. You can gain from others’ experience through reading, listening to audios, watching videos (beyond cats playing on YouTube). And doing those things is great and has been a huge accelerator in my life, though I did not adopt those means until the past decade. But personal experience, including putting others’ experience you learn from to the test on your own, simply takes time. At age 30, I had only five years or so of professional experience and only about 10 years of adult life experience. I had exposed myself to very little from others’ experience, at least not in an intentional manner. Any factual knowledge I had in my head had minimal opportunity for amplification as a result of my minimal experiential knowledge, in spite of a fair amount of experience.
1 Why A Book (or Two)?
Fast forwarding to now — I was 50 years old when I began writing some parts and pieces of what evolved to be a pair of books — the situation has changed, but also continues to change. At the start I was simply filling some design-process gaps that emerged in our new curriculum. Those gaps had emerged in exchange for a much improved and modern technical foundation we intended to build in our students. We converted the credit hours of all our required lab courses, and the junior-level engineering design processes course, into a great four-semester series focused on practical implementation of engineering science knowledge by way of modern simulation tools — à la the “digital twin” within the “digital thread” that is a huge focus of the U.S. DoD in recent years. They define the digital thread as follows:
|
|
Wow, that’s a mouthful! Oh, but there’s more. The digital twin is
|
|
An open-ended focus on both the physical twin and the digital twin aspects of engineering make up a big part of this change to our curriculum called the ME Practice sequence. It was a huge step forward in engineering education, and a huge undertaking as well. However, there is always a tradeoff. Remember this: any meaningful engineering design problem involves tradeoffs; actually, any meaningful design problem does, whether it is seen as being in the realm of engineering or not.
The tradeoff hit me where I live. The capstone design program entrusted to my leadership is the two semesters that follow the ME Practice sequence. It is the two-semester sequence that brings it all together through a team-based, open-ended, real-world/real-consequence experience. In the process of converting to the ME Practice sequence, we lost a lot of the design process tools and, to an even greater extent, the continuity of their application within the process. However, it has proven to be a price worth paying for the positive results of the noted ME Practice focus. Nevertheless, there were some gaps to fill, and that’s where I got going with this.
|
|
At the start I had no thoughts of a book. But with time, I realized that the application of the design process, but with a focus on mindset, might have new value. Mindset is defined as “attitude, disposition, intention, inclination;” put another way as I see it here — mindset is more about how you think than what you think. As I continued on this venture, I got to thinking it might have broader value, beyond capstone design courses. My target audience became engineering students though those the first decade of engineering practice; my work-product was to be a book that supports their professional development, not another textbook treatment of the design process of which there are others… good ones. Time will tell in regard to breadth of value to others. But, as I neared the end of my writing, culminating in the actual engineering design content after a slew of engineering practice foundation — mindset and its practice — I was beyond 400 pages in book format. I also realized that there are really two pieces to this: (1) the mindset and practice of connecting with others and composing the engineering problem, and (2) solving the problem through design, from the creative element through to the details, and beyond — selling it all. The latter includes some mindset matters as well, but it is where the engineering design activity really takes hold, while the former seemed potentially useful to an even broader audience. All this pointed to breaking it into two books, each more focused, and each more digestible at around, eventually, 250 pages.
This is the first of the books; the second, a follow-up companion, is entitled Math to Mettle: Supporting, Selling, Struggling, and Surviving in the Practice of Engineering Design.
2 And the Times are A Changing, Maybe We Should Too
Connected to the aforementioned idea of the digital engineer is the technology and tools that come along with it, in fact, enable it. For decades, research has been ongoing in the areas of modeling the behaviors of systems; some of it is really pretty old-school as the behaviors of many systems were understood a century ago. By “understood” I mean mathematically represented. That is, we had models of them where we could predictively calculate the output given an input, and in many simpler cases, invert that mathematical relation to determine what input should give a desired output. We have come to a point in time where the speed of computation — technology — and the means of mathematically and digitally representing physical systems, have given birth to a new breed of engineering software. These software tools are useable not only by specialized analysts, but also by the broader genus of engineers. It allows more engineers, through direct engagement, to understand and design very complex systems and their components.
These computer simulation tools no longer need the expert analysts who sit in their cubes all day building the models, running them, debugging them, re-running them, and ultimately handing off the results to a design or process engineer who, by way of contracting to the analyst, are not directly engaged with the problem and its solution. In some cases the modern versions of these simulation tools even automate the job of exploring a design space, such as FEA-based software that optimizes geometry of a structure — generative design. And I can only expect more and more of the non-FEA simulation tools will, in short order, have a design-automation shell built around them. That is largely what the FEA-based optimization software is — an automation shell that “exercises” the FEA model, continually adjusting it, in a smart, non-random way, through iteration.
Could an engineer do that iteration with a model-based simulation? Yes; the work of analysts often includes exactly that. Can more engineers be more productive with a design-automation shell built around more and more of the modern simulation tools that are already making them more productive? Yes. So, we must be changing our mindset in regard to how we approach engineering problems. And built on that change in how we think, we must then change our “doing” in order to make profitable use of these modern, model-based, digital tools and the mining of the vast quantity of data they can rapidly produce. But we must also realize the value of the engineer is shifting from the number cruncher in the middle of the design process to the idea generator at the front end and the interpreter and communicator at the far end, and the seller throughout. That is not to say engineers now do neither the ideation nor the interpretation and communication of results. They do. But, once the software-based number-crunching becomes more democratized so any engineer can do it, the greater proportional value of an engineer shifts elsewhere. And with everything advancing and becoming more complex over time, those areas of understanding problems (needs and wants), interpreting, communicating, and selling become more proportionally important than in the past.
This technology and automation revolution is happening outside engineering, all over the economy, where automation and technology is displacing many jobs and creating others. It seems to me certain tasks will get displaced, or rather, be made incredibly efficient. But, and fortunately for the engineer, some others will become more important as their automation is either not imaginable in the near-term, or maybe not possible at all, like those noted above. Geoff Colvin, in his book Humans are Underrated: What High Achievers Know that Brilliant Machines Never Will,[1] covers this subject well for the broader economy, and also includes some thoughts on engineering. And it doesn’t end there.
In the industrial age, knowledge and left-brain activities were highly valued, even to the extent of emphasizing focus on specialization over generalization. But really, generalists of the industrial age were of high value in other ways. It was the generalist of that left-brain world who was able to bridge the gaps across the various domains of technical specialization. Bridging those gaps, and more so identifying the specific gaps in need of bridging, in order to solve a grander (i.e., real) problem, is where societal/market value may be realized. As we go from the information age into what Daniel H. Pink terms “the conceptual age” in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,[2] right-brain attributes and related aptitudes will become more valued as abundance and automation progress. He also emphasizes, rightly so, that this reality does not mean left-brain work will become unimportant. Rather, left-brain attributes and aptitudes will still be necessary, just no longer sufficient.
Building on that, like the generalist of the left-brain world was a true creator of value as a gap-bridger, those in the future who build and implement similarly strong left- and right-brained attributes, so as to bridge the gaps between the dominant left-brainers and dominant right-brainers, will be well situated. They will be the ones — engineers(!) — who have strengths in what Pink calls (his terms underlined):
- design (the form beyond the function; or what I call aesthetic functionality (i.e., a blending with the field/profession of industrial design)),
- story (storytelling [Chapter 6 in A Game Against Reality]),
- symphony (i.e., integration, or system-level thinking [generally throughout Math to Mettle]), and
- empathy (in problem understanding [Chapters 7 and 8 in A Game Against Reality], as well as in the receptive side of communicating [Chapter 3 in A Game Against Reality]).
Pink’s book was first published in 2005, 10 years before Colvin’s book; but I didn’t run across and read Pink’s book until about two years after I read Colvin’s book. Pink’s book is a great complement to Colvin’s, and also supplementary to Colvin’s in that Pink provides guidance on how to grow in these attributes or aptitudes with additional references and exercises at the end of each chapter on those aptitudes. Because of their incredibly important content overall, I strongly recommend any reader here who has 20 or more years of career ahead of them to read both Colvin’s and Pink’s books — must reads for the young engineer of the 2020s.
Turning back to engineering and automation, as I noted, I do not see the automation of ideation in the foreseeable future; perhaps software to help, such as to mine past ideas and make suggestions and introduce sparks to the ideation process, but the truly creative element in all that is human, and more so right-brained and conceptual. With more time on our hands as engineers, made possible by efficiencies that come with modern simulation tools, we can devote more time to the ideas end of the engineering design process. For that matter, we can devote more time to the understanding of the problem at hand, which precedes the ideation stage. In fact, we should be capitalizing on the efficiency of these modern simulation tools to do better engineering, to do more simulation, analysis, and exploring in the virtual realm than we could have afforded in the past.
Now, don’t think for a minute that these simulation tools relieve the engineer from understanding what is going on under the hood in them. That is needed because results will always need to be communicated intelligently, and to do so those results must first be correctly interpreted and then converted to a form suitable for numerous audiences, especially less technical audiences. Engineering, even at the fundamental engineering sciences level, is needed to do that. Every nitty-gritty detail of the equations and the code implementing them is not needed by the typical engineer to intelligently and competently use the software that embodies those equations. But the basics that allow interpretation are needed. And interpretation is becoming more and more a means to an end than the engineer’s end itself. Firstly, interpretation sets the stage for communicating why one’s ideas for solving a problem, models of which are simulated by the software, could and should work. And secondly, ultimately, an idea, after the engineering design details have been competed by an engineer, making some but not exclusive use of software, must be realized and interpreted in the physical world.
Ah, the physical world. Is that where we humans keep a stronghold over the digital engineering tools? Well, yes but not entirely. Clearly, we have technology and automation in manufacturing; that is my root field and we have a good dose of it in my company’s shop. But there is still a lot of “human” — specifically, technically savvy and physically intuitive, hands-on humans — needed to get the technology to do what it is supposed to do, to keep the automation working right. In fact, I anticipate that more manufacturing jobs at the low-to-moderate skill level will go the wayside while more and more engineers hit the factory floor to oversee the highly digital, computerized equipment and its integration. And I don’t mean only mechanical engineers, but computer scientists, and who knows what other disciplines. Heck, the machines are just high-powered computers that make stuff move, and move fast, and do amazing things when it all works as intended, and create tremendous chaos and physical damage when things go awry. These shifts on the manufacturing floor with its automated equipment and its proper use toward amazing results rather than chaos and destruction… they are analogous to what was noted above regarding the shifts in the engineer’s office with its automated simulations and their proper use toward amazing results rather than chaos and destruction. The shift of technical skillsets, and with that even greater need for attention to mindset and nontechnical skillsets, will be seen in the office and on the factory floor. Those emphasized words — mindset and nontechnical skillsets — are largely the purpose of this first book, the growing importance of some of the nontechnical ones being emphasized by Pink. The second, follow-up companion book, puts them into action to solve the problem, sell it, and get through it.
So, it is for these reasons that this first book has been written:
- future engineers must continue with building a requisite engineering understanding that has been around for decades, and add to it
- much greater focus on deeply understanding the real problem at hand,
- better teaming that is especially important in understanding a problem and conceiving ideas to solve it,
- strong communication of their work product on the back end, and
- selling it all throughout.
|
|
As noted above, it is more about how we think than what we think. It is largely about the “soft” skills, as much of this is historically called; but it adds to that a flavor of the reality of the real physical and human world all engineers touch upon as we work with others and for others, serving while creating and delivering value. In the case of some of these soft skills, better termed professional skills in our context, engineers for decades have realized, once on the job at least, that they need to have them, like being good communicators. Communicating is foundational in those vital, nontechnical aspects of teaming, understanding, and selling. Yes, it includes selling, one that has always been important yet blindly left purely implicit by the engineering education community. This includes selling oneself, her team, and their solutions; none of those are left to the implicit here!
Communicating, understanding, and selling are areas I had much room for growth as recently as 15 years ago. Communicating … I got it, and had been working on it. Understanding… I got it, and would talk the game of understanding real market and end-user needs and wants so as to not expend precious engineering resources on a solution looking for a problem. But I didn’t really know what it meant and how important it is for engineers — not just marketing and sales — to be engaged in that understanding process and its result. And selling… I had no idea how important it really is, and that we all needed to do it, and how so many of us engineers sucked at it since no one ever told us we, as engineers, and simply as humans as well, need to be salespersons! Now I get it — the selling, and what it really means to understand. I get it as a result of personal experience. At the point when I started this book venture, I had spent 12 years riding the fence between the world of academia and the world of entrepreneurism. I had set out to build a business around crazy new ideas in my field of machining (cutting metal), and to commercialize products from that. Talk about experience; that brought a lot of experience — very costly too, which made it that much more educational! I underwent some major changes in my personal life in that timeframe as well — more experience, on the “life” side.
With that outside-academia experience I had rather painfully gained, complementing (but not replacing) my academic side that also brings value and importance, what I found is that my gap-filling writing to support the ME Practice curriculum transition just kept going, and covered much more than the engineering design process to cover all those realities — communicating, teaming, understanding, and selling — that are the focus of this first book. In fact, at one point I had dumped far more words onto the screen about mindset and these nontechnical, human realities than the engineering design process itself. Why? It is the realities I had experienced outside the walls of academia that hit the human aspects of it all — communicating, teaming, understanding, and selling — which is just what engineers generally miss in our curricula but so badly need. And furthermore, through my outside-academia entrepreneurial commercial experience, I also realized it is not enough to just know stuff, but to have a mindset to use and grow that knowledge.
As noted, much of this happened in the business side of life, but to a great extent in personal life as well. These were things I had to experience to learn, or at least to learn that they were important to learn and continuously get better at. I realized that placing a deserved importance on these human mindset elements is what was missing in the eight years I had been director of our capstone design program. We were doing well (and continuously improving) on work-product documentation, exercising stage-gates, building greater consistency across eight-plus faculty members working with me advising more than 200 students on 35-40 industry-funded projects per year. I didn’t head into this thinking Oh, I now have enough experience to be worth sharing. My mind just kept rolling through things, typing up on my phone wherever I was, voice notes while driving, and then piecing it together. As noted, it became more than just some gap-filling handouts.
3 Experience Takes Time, But We Always Have More Than Someone
Looking back to the very beginning of this unusually long preface… yeah, I know, its long; remember, part of all this is about understanding the problem, and that is what this preface is about, the problem, as I saw it, being the need for writing these books. Okay, so way back then I wrote When I was early in my career, in my mid-to-late twenties, I thought I had a lot to offer. … As I gained experience, I eventually realized what I had to offer with my factual knowledge was really not that much; at least, not as much as it could be.
I had piles of stuff on my plate. Writing a book was not one more thing that made sense in that regard. But… maybe now I had something more to offer than I did twenty years ago. I didn’t know that many more facts than before, but I had way more experience in life and in the application of facts, new and old to me, and in a much more practical, “real-world” setting. But when is there enough experience to be of value to share? I don’t know. You will be the judge as you read. But I can say this for sure. I will have more experience in a year from now, and a year after that, and… Just two weeks ago I turned 51 (and that was nearly a year ago now as I do my final preface edits!), and have added some new content to the oldest of my writings that originated back when I was a young 50. Just that one more year of experience has changed my thinking and how I apply myself — my mindset. And it’s already quite different in the couple years since then, including additions and adjustments inspired by more learning from others and from viewing life, including old and typical repeated situations, through an ever-evolving lens. Five years from now, this book would likely be much different yet again. God willing, perhaps I will be around and called to write something else; no plans to do so (!), but another thing I have learned from more life experience is to (as the saying goes) never say never.
One takeaway is this. Experience takes time, and, since time progresses, experience can continue to grow, as long as we learn with experience — as long as we do not live “20 years of life as one year of experience 20 times,” as the saying goes. And that returns to the last phrase of paragraph one — that’s what differentiates experiential knowledge from simply experiencing the experiences of life.
|
|
The other takeaway, in regard to when is the right time to start sharing, is this. We always have more experience than some others, and can share that with them. We always have less experience than some others, and can learn from them to the extent they are willing to share. We all have at least some useful tidbits to share, as disjoint as they may be. And after years, maybe decades, it can all come together beyond useful tidbits into something connected. I didn’t know when, it just sort of flowed out unexpectedly. But know this; this book is less me than the others who have taught me. I am more the conduit, or integrator, not the originator. I am grateful to the many authors, speakers, customers, advisors, colleagues, teammates, business partners, friends, family, and students (in no particular order there) who have contributed to my experiential growth over the past 16 years.
Wait, 16 years? 51 – 25 = 26. No, my math’s not that bad. Here’s why 16 is the right number. I can earnestly say that my accumulated experience is only about 16 years. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but would be more embarrassed if I never did admit it and found myself now, years later, with no change made. And on top of that, it would suck if my past screw-up was now glossed over if, instead, it could be brought to light to the benefit of someone else, maybe helping one other person wake up earlier in life than I did. So, I share it here. In a nutshell, there was a “lost” decade in there before I had learned the importance of living life intentionally, not just working hard, simply going through the motions. There was regrettably a decade of not letting experience truly accumulate versus the alternative — experiences just repeating themselves over and over each year that passes. No matter how good the motions may seem, just going through them is shortchanging yourself and the others whose lives you touch.
4 Long-Term = Layin’ It All on the Line
You will see moving forward I have chosen to open up a bit, as I did just above. I am a real person with all sorts of flaws and mistakes under my belt. Proud… no; thankful… yes. I hope that by sharing some of the tough times I have faced and mistakes I have made, in the spirit of learning to be passed along, you will get a sense of my passion and perseverance with a focus on the long-term. It is this final point that is most important here — thinking long-term, or beginning with the end in mind as Steven Covey stated it. If you are willing to think long-term, then it is my hope you will really focus on learning from others’ mistakes, and successes — their experiences — sooner rather than later as it was for me. That hope starts right now, that you humor me and invest the time it takes to digest these writings, that is, to read them and also ponder them, even a bit, looking to their potential long-term benefit. I can state this for a fact; if the helpfulness to my readers of any element of this book was in doubt to me, I sure would not have included it. I would not have spent the countless hours thinking, writing, editing, etc. Like you, I have other things I could be doing. Furthermore, I have no publisher requiring me to do anything or include anything, or remove anything for that matter. So, in the context of long-term value, I hope you want for yourself — like I want for you — a future that is as bright as possible to the benefit of both you and those around you in the years to come.
When will this book be done? I know that a year from now I will have another year of experience added to my current state since I am learning — accumulating experience, not experiencing life as one year over and over. It is my hope that a year from now you have another year of experience accumulated, and that the time spent reading here is seen to provide at least a little value in that pursuit. My hope for you is that you build your experiential knowledge starting from an earlier age than I did; that your mindset grows.
Throughout the book you will find quotes. Here, I am referring to the short ones, generally centered and at the start or end of a section. I have never been a big quote person, but having become a more avid reader in recent years, I found quite a few of those in my head. They remain in my head because they are concise, wise, often counter-intuitive and/or clever, all together making them catchy enough to stick in even my less-than-stellar memory. But there are a good number that I found by seeking, asking myself has someone else said something wise, clever, or catchy on this subject that might register with readers? Google is an amazing place, and with some critical searching beyond the first hit, what seems like pretty good fact-checked sourcing can be found. But as an imperfect human in an imperfect world with imperfect information, apologies to all if in any case I fell short on finding the accurate sourcing. In the latter stages of writing, I ran across a quote of Abraham Lincoln in a book I was reading. That day it was spot on for a section I had recently written in the chapter on “Continuing?” (in the follow-up companion to this book). But it also hit me for where I was at personally, well, professionally as related to my business.
Something I have learned to do and gotten pretty good at doing — according to others — is facing what the future holds and doing something responsible now in support of the responsibility I will hold later. But reading a quote of Lincoln’s on such was a timely reminder. Just in the preceding days I was looking ahead at the cash cliff in my business, something I was used to doing, but it was hitting me a little differently this time than it had for quite some time. And what I should be doing now in regard to that outlook was not so clear. Anyway, reading that quote was a good and needed poke, a shift of mind and thinking. And that day, I realized yet again how we just don’t know when little nudges of others’ words are what we need to hear, often unexpectedly, sometimes seemingly unrelated until they hit our minds out of nowhere. I now have all these short quotes in one place, and I take 10 minutes about once a week to read through them, pondering a little, not just a speed read. Admittedly, some weeks, nothing comes of it. But some weeks, one of them is perfect in the context of something going on in some aspect of my life. I suppose if nothing else they get driven into memory so that at some point it might come to mind when helpful to another to hear it. Maybe some will strike a chord with you. For this reason, at the end of the book, you will find all these quotes in one place. Helpful or not to you, they are there, if only for my own use as noted.
In reaching a destination, the voyage is most important,
but you can’t let your ship sink before it gets out of the harbor.
|
|
To wrap up this long-term, experiencing experiences, etc. mindset, while thinking long-term (years) is important, and you have to intentionally face the challenges of the immediate (days to weeks), you cannot lose sight of the time scale in the middle and let it all fall apart there, in the mid-term (e.g., the coming months). So, you need to envision long-term, focus on mid-term, and deal with near-term, in that order and learn through it all. The “in that order” part means, without the long-term taking precedence, the near-term and mid-term are running blindly forward. As Stephen Covey states, “start with the end in mind.”
Important Point 2
My writing in this book is not intended to be formal, rather more as I would be sharing it with you verbally if time permitted — colloquial. Do not consider this to be a great example of how your professional/project documentation should be written. That should be more formal in style, sentence structure, and word choice.
[1] Geoff Colvin, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will, 2015,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OZ0TLBK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1.
[2] Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, 2006,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000PC0SPU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1.
wjendres.com 