Trapped Ideas

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Your great idea is not helping anyone if it’s stuck in your head. Engineers spend years training to solve problems. Your college courses create problems and you develop solutions based on your course work (formal knowledge). Then you enter a career. There you’re told which problems to solve. This time with knowledge gained through experience or from on the job learning (apprenticeship knowledge).

An engineering career is great that way, it’s full of problems to solve. And, the combination of problems is infinite, because engineering is a combination of science, technology, art and business. The other professions that are as old as engineering have solved all the problems related to the craft. For example, Blacksmithing is probably as old as civil engineering. But, for the most part all the big problems in blacksmithing have been solved. It's now up to the blacksmith and his skill level to implement the solutions.

In engineering, there could be problems related to design, construction, financing, human resources, forecasting, production or any of the other disciplines involved in creating the infrastructure. When you look at all these disciplines think of how the problem sets of one combine with the other. One example could be combining marketing and engineering to convey a design solution in a product like this one. This augmented reality drone footage helps engineers show their work to a client prior to construction. The progress of visualization techniques helped engineers move from paper drawings into 2D CADD. Next, we developed 3D CADD and now this AR solution. Engineers can now show someone (without words and drawings) what a project will look like before any work begins. The 3D rendered videos can do all the "show and tell" and the vision is communicated exactly.

In this quest to solve problems, we encounter small problems while trying to solve bigger problems. In such a problem rich field, you'd expect high ideation and solution making. There should be many other solutions like this AR tech, but instead what we see is many workarounds. A workaround is a way of hacking together a solution or operating in a sub-optimal state. Some workarounds are justified if the problem is seldom encountered or a solution would be more costly or time consuming to figure out.

However, some problems will justify looking for better solutions, but the workaround will get in the way. The reason workarounds get in the way is because they become engrained. One thing that helps me recognize a workaround is the phrase: "This is the way we've always done it!". This is a familiar reply and is usually handed down from a more tenured person to a less tenured one. Sometimes it can be reactionary and sometimes it’s given after much thought. We have all heard it and we’ve probably all used it. I didn't notice how widespread this response was until someone wiser saw me using a workaround. Before I could use my saved-up excuse of “This is the way I’ve always done it” the other person was quicker to exclaim "There must be a better way!" Now put these two responses side by side.

Option A: This is the way I’ve always done it!

or

Option B: There must be a better way!

Which one fills you with curiosity and which one gets you through the day?

If you're on the receiving end of, "This is the way we've always done it" you probably start thinking or following up with,

• "Why have we done it this way?”
• "Who came up with the solution?”
• “Is this solution the best way of solving our problems or have we explored other options?”

As you move down this line of questioning (if you even feel comfortable enough to ask the other person) you typically meet more and more resistance. They become either defensive or non-responsive and gives reasons that seem more like grasping than evidence. I’ve had this running hypothesis that this resistance to questioning is measurable. If electrical resistance is measured in Ohms, one day we'll be able to measure the Ohms of resistance to a new idea through some form of brain signal interception. The reason the other person is resistant to our questions is because the questioning gets them imagining the new and possibly harder work that would need to be done in order to solve the problem well. People don't like changing workarounds because of this resistance. Newton's First Law works on minds as well as objects. Once momentum has been gained in a certain direction it is hard to shift direction or stop the movement. Gentle nudging may be the best approach. No one likes their neatly ordered world picked apart. This first response fills one side of the discussion with curiosity. The other side usually just wants to move on. They may be some pondering about the workaround but in order to get through the day the respondent just repeats the excuse, shrugs and moves on. Person A gets curious. Person B wants to get home.

The second response “There must be a better way!” is the most optimistic. It usually springs out of disbelief and is communicated in the same tone. Also, it leaves you with a limited set of responses. Either you say "No, there's no better way.” Or, you can think through some better ways. I'm convinced that this is the true engineering attitude towards a problem. It stops you in your tracks. It makes you wonder. You even start asking yourself all the questions that the first response elicits from others.

• "There must be a better way."
• "Why am I doing it this way?”
• “Do I really understand the problem?”

These are the question more engineers should ask themselves. If you're not having one of these moments once or twice a week are you really doing anything unique. Couldn't your job be robot-ed away? That is curiosity and meaning in the second response.

I've done all the workarounds you can think of: drawing cross sections by hand, editing in the PDF versus the Word document, copy/paste/rename on CADD files versus creating new ones from a seed file. But after a while I start thinking “There must be a better way?" I find myself asking the question more and more now. The only answer I can come up with is that we don't have the right tools. As engineers we're already given a pretty large tool bag in formal and apprenticeship knowledge. If the tool, we need isn't in the bag we dismiss the entire search and return to a workaround. And why? Because we have a job to do. We can't spend days or weeks searching for a better solution. This is a difficult fact to reconcile because I believe it is hurting our profession. Think of how many processes you go through that if automated could save time and money for your company.

If we identify one of these problems that has no immediate solution what do we do about it. We can go to a supervisor or discuss with a co-worker. People usually get excited about solving these non-obvious problems, right? Wrong. I don’t see this reflected in the real world. If they did, we’d see more solutions in the market for civil engineers. Think of this, are you still using Microsoft Excel to develop a budget. Or still having to draw cross sections by hand to get it to 100% complete. Or maybe you’re still editing in the PDF because you found an error at the last minute and you didn’t feel like recompiling that Word doc and its multiple appendices. The work arounds are everywhere, and they are hurting our profession because from the very onset we have learned to settle for sub-optimal solutions. And these are the ones I know from experience. You probably have your own workarounds hiding in the closet.

What can we do about this? If there is anything to be done at all. I have seen excited engineers deflated, shot-down, disappointed, brushed off and dismissed when trying to improve workarounds. Good engineers have been discarded for speaking up with more passion that tact and all their good intentions were for naught as the cry for improvement eventually fell back to the status-quo. The solution can’t be with others then. You shouldn’t expect other people to solve the problem for you. They have lives. They have their own problems. They do not want your problems as well. You'll have to do something about it yourself. This means you must choose which problems you attempt to solve wisely. There are only so many problems worth solving. Not every work-around should be changed.

Once you decide what problem you want to solve, how do you get the leverage to solve it. The leverage could be capital, media, relationships, data or skills. With enough capital leverage you could pay someone to solve the problems or you can allocate that resource to yourself and solve the problem with your own expertise. With media leverage you can convince others that a problem is worth solving and gather their support as a resource to deploy and fix the problem. With relationship leverage you can use your position with someone with the right authority to help solve your problem. With the right data you can show others the problem, what it is costing to not solve the problem and therefore what can be gained. With the right skills we could just solve the problem our self and not need any of the other leverage.

What skills typically have such high value that we wouldn’t need outside help? The skills that don't require anyone's authority to use, technology and media. These are just the forms of leverage that we need. With the right software skills imagine the applications you could build on your own. With the right media imagine the customers you could attract.

If you're not using technology and media then you're stuck with the other forms of leverage. In an engineering firm the highest leverage is at the upper brackets of the organization. To get access to this leverage your only coin is the relationships you can build with these people. I have seldom seen this go well in the pursuit of a solution to a big problem. Again, people have their own problems and they don't want your problems too.

Let’s consider the problem of .DOC to .PDF conversions. If you tried to solve that problem by getting your firm to hire a developer and build a custom solution for your industry you’re almost guaranteed to fail. Why? Because solving the .DOC to .PDF conversion process is extremely difficult. It would require a high up-front capital investment and a search for the right talent. But, it could possibly be worth billions of dollars. Have you heard of the company DocuSign? It allows companies to manage electronic signatures on PDFs. The company has a $42B market cap as of Black Friday 2020. This was an application sitting right under Adobe’s nose and they were not able to capitalize on it or didn’t even see it. Here is another one - PlanGrid. This software allows users to store, access and markup PDFs of construction documents in the cloud. The company sold to Autodesk in 2018 for $778M. Not many engineering firms will break these valuations based on their typical profit centers. But I’m sure they have at least one firm-wide problem that if identified, solved and marketed could bring them returns they’d never see from their existing revenue lines. I believe there are at least a dozen of these problems sitting right under the noses of engineering firms. So why aren’t they being solved or attempted.

Returning to the title of this essay, I want you to revisit all those problems trapped in your head. Now try to imagine how you’d solve the problem with the right technology and media leverage. Gaining at least a brief knowledge of what it takes to build an online application would be tremendous for every young engineer. Knowing how to build an online community around that market would be the second step. Now, if you revisit that problem with this new thinking of technology and media how would you approach the problem a second time? You’re going to be in this career for a lifetime. Do something along the way to improve it. Don't let that idea stay trapped in your head.

Action Item: Keep a list of problems you encounter in your day. Learn to code on your own time. Start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.