Early engineers of the 19th century were rock stars of their times, much like famous dot-com entrepreneurs of our times. Petroleum engineering got its start after this early “generalist” phase of the profession when the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) formed a standing committee on oil and gas in 1913.
The first petroleum engineering degree followed suit at the University of Pittsburgh in 1915, and today SPE represents more than 140,000 professional and student members around the globe. From that early formative period of petroleum engineering, technical specialization increased and continued into the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, but more recently, engineering has faced pressures to change.
Mark Somerville, a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Olin College, and I have written about this in our book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education. In particular, we spell out the six minds that all of today’s engineers need to embody to reach their full potential. They are the
- Analytical mind
- Design mind
- Linguistic mind
- People mind
- Body mind
- Mindful mind
Analytical Mind
Most engineers will have no trouble identifying with what we call the analytical mind. They know (and have survived) the drill of “applying” mathematics and science, so let’s move to the others.
Design Mind
When we talk about design mind, we are probably still within most engineers’ comfort zone. However, maximizing our design capabilities has had some ups and downs over the years. A report called the Grinter Report in 1955 ultimately led to (a) raising the math/science content of the engineering curriculum, and (b) reducing the design and practical content. Meetings in the 1960s helped redress some of the perceived harm of the Grinter changes by establishing capstone senior design courses at a number of schools, and increasing design content has been an important trend ever since.
Today, these design education efforts are going further. Companies such as IDEO integrate industrial design, engineering design, and applied anthropology so that design thinking connects human usage and conceptual design directly. A required second-year class called User-Oriented Design at Olin College has students working in teams with groups of individuals (firemen, soup kitchen operators, flight instructors, bicycle messengers, to name a few) over the course of the semester. The goal of the course is to create a conceptual design of technology that will improve the work lives of the group studied.
Linguistic Mind
When asked the question, “What is the language of engineering?” it is tempting to give the answer “mathematics.” but some simple reflection puts this to rest.
What do engineers do in a given day? They
- Write emails.
- Write reports.
- Talk on the phone.
- Go to meetings.
- Prepare and make presentations.
- Prepare specifications, proposals, and contracts.
In short, engineers are constantly in language. They do not “build” much themselves—construction or manufacturing workers usually do the heavy lifting. Engineers “design” and “build” things with their computer keyboards, pencils, pens … and vocal cords. In short, it is engineers’ speech acts that result in things being created.
Engineers work on design, but whether a particular design is accepted by decision makers or is implemented by those doing construction depends largely on the quality of the speech acts that engineers employ every day.
People Mind
Engineering education in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s was a lonely tackling of problem set after problem set. The rising recognition of design education and the increasing team nature of engineering practice, partly in response to the rise of teamwork as part of quality and other organizational practice, has led to the growing recognition of engineering as a team sport, practiced both by and for people.
Although there is much debate on the validity of the term “emotional intelligence” and its measurements, there can be little question that the increasing importance of working with people and serving others raises the bar on the caliber of “sharp soft” skills that young engineers develop.
One way to develop these skills involves paying attention to the practices developed under the rubric of executive coaching. The C-suite is awash with coaches getting paid large sums of money to help CEOs, CFOs, and CTOs to develop better people skills, but why do we wait until someone makes it to the C-suite? Why not develop better sharp soft skills in young engineers right out of the chute (or even prechute), and see what happens?
Body Mind
If connecting mind and body are important to dancers or athletes, why is it also important to engineers?
Firstly, engineers show up as leaders and followers as embodied human beings. The term “leadership presence” or simply “presence” captures this idea. Sometimes we trust, follow, and work better with certain individuals because of how they carry themselves. What is it about them? Do they have good eye contact? Do they speak at a pace that matches the understanding of those around them? Are they in the room in a way that encourages connection and interaction? It is hard to characterize human presence precisely, but we know it when we see it, and it is increasingly important to cultivate in young engineers.
Secondly, an increasing body of literature suggests that effective decision making involves intuition that comes from body awareness and signals. This kind of naturalistic decision making has been studied in first responders, the military, and in engineering circles. Old engineering professors exhorted us to develop our engineering intuition, and new science and practices may be helpful in cultivating engineering intuition systematically.
Mindful Mind
There is also the need for engineers to have a mindful mind. Daniel Siegel, author of Mindsight, has defined mindfulness as “a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention.”
We live in times of increasing change. Noticing what is going on around us is increasingly essential, and mindfulness is one important way in. For example, the concepts from Chade-Meng Tan’s book, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), have been taught at Google, and the program is being promoted as a form of continuing education for professionals in the workplace.
Toward a Whole New Engineer
There has been a tendency to talk about engineering as something (a) strictly rational, (b) largely scientific, and (c) reducible to mathematics. Moreover, engineering as taught and practiced today continues to reinforce this view. This approach more or less worked in an age of technical specialization, but the fast pace of change, the integration of engineering with other disciplines, and the increased emphasis on the human side of engineering both as practiced and as a human service demand that we move beyond views forged in an earlier era toward the vision of a whole new engineer.
Petroleum engineers have played a pivotal role in the rise of the modern engineer, and they can once again join hands to rejuvenate their own discipline and engineering as a thriving whole. Join the conversation by sharing your thoughts with me and by getting involved in the movement.
David E. Goldberg is the president of the nonprofit Big Beacon and also a noted computer scientist, civil engineer, and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2010, he resigned from his tenured professorship to work full time for the transformation of engineering education. He can be reached at deg@bigbeacon.org. In 2014, Goldberg and Mark Somerville (along with Catherine Whitney) coauthored the book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education, published by ThreeJoy Associates and available in hardcover and e-book formats.