Ten Steps to a Whole New Engineer and a Whole New Engineering Education

We live in a technological time. With nearly 7 billion people on the planet (and counting), we depend upon technology in almost every aspect of our lives. Billions are clothed, healed, fed, transported, connected, entertained, and employed through increasingly complex products, processes, and systems. And while technology is in one sense the gift that enables life for billions, its unintended consequences cause environmental and sustainability problems that are increasingly a concern.

As such, engineers and engineering are increasingly necessary to sustain and improve our way of life. Unfortunately, engineering is increasingly not the career path of choice for many who would otherwise make terrific engineers, and even if it were, the kinds of engineers being turned out by colleges and universities around the globe are too narrowly technical to address the complex and integrated nature of the opportunities and challenges of our times.

Big Beacon is a global movement to transform engineering and engineering education, to make engineering an attractive career path to young people and to help educate the kind of engineers that our world needs. The Big Beacon Manifesto calls for (1) a whole new engineer appropriate to our times, (2) a whole new engineering education to educate the engineers we need, and (3) steps of educational rewire or effective educational change or transformation that will bring about the necessary change.

The following are ten steps necessary to bring a new generation of whole new engineers into the world:

Step 1: Become aware how engineering and engineering education got stuck. To create a whole new engineer, we need to understand the historical consensus, sociological factors, and conceptual ingredients of the cold war engineer. After World War II, there was a belief among engineering academics that physics won the war, and the curriculum was stripped of practical subjects and injected with a heavy dosage math, science, and engineering science. These decisions were made in large part to tap into the growing status of science, and they went against the distinctive philosophical nature of engineering as a practical discipline.

Step 2: Recognize ways the world has changed. Since World War II there have been three missed revolutions that have changed the world in ways that call for a significantly different kind of engineer: the quality revolution, the entrepreneurial revolution, and the information technology revolution have change the way we make things, the way we make institutions, and the way we make connections. These revolutions were "missed" in the sense that they were embraced by organizations that face competition in the marketplace and largely missed by those that don't, including universities. Friedman, Florida, and Pink highlight these changes in their sayings that "the world is flat," that "we live in a creative era with a rising "creative class," and that we need a "whole new (creative) mind." As a result, the engineer of the cold war, a category enhancer, is being replaced by the engineer of the 21st century, a category creator. Unfortunately, engineering schools are continuing to turn out engineers appropriate to earlier times.

Step 3: Understand why reform efforts haven't worked. Many efforts have been mounted to fix the engineering curriculum, and they have largely focused on content, curriculum, and pedagogy. These bright shiny objects of reform are attractive, because they seem to offer a fairly direct way to bring about change, but they largely haven't worked. Content and pedagogy change can be brought about classroom by classroom, but the efforts end up being isolated and don't diffuse or spread quickly. Curriculum change could be more transformative, but it ends being a political process with a stable equilibrium in the status quo. The twin sentiments that "Transformation is great," but "Don't change my course" is something of an academic NIMBY problem ("not in my back yard") in which people generally favor change, as long as it doesn't require personal change or commitment. Thereafter, the political process of logrolling ensures that curriculum change goes nowhere fast.

Step 4: Use a change approach that combines emotional, conceptual, and organizational factors. In industry, change processes use a combination of heart, mind, and restructuring, and change eventually takes place. In academic life, universities date back to the Middle Ages, and they received their last organizational upgrade when German universities invented the modern research department in the 19th century. To overcome this inertia, best practices such as those described by the Heath brothers or John Kotter must be brought to bear in ways that activate passions among all stakeholders, especially students. The educational system currently assumes that all of the key change variables are rational, but effective change practices recognize that the key variables are emotional, cultural, and institutional.

Step 5: Trust students before they trust themselves. An unexamined assumption of the way we educate students (not just in engineering) is that they are fundamentally incompetent and unable to learn without the disciplinary expertise and learning guidance of the teacher. Although not intended as such, this message creates a continuing dependency on expertise and guidance that is inconsistent with the ideal of lifelong learning. Programs that trust in students and help them take action, fail, and learn on their own teach students that they are resourceful, creative, and whole human beings and capable of taking initiative whenever it serves them. The result is a more courageous, self-confident practitioner right out of the box.

Step 6: Instill the keystone habits of noticing, listening, and questioning (NLQ). If we think of education as an iceberg, much of the effort of traditional education is above the waterline. We teach and master concepts, facts, and figures, essentially mastery of the already mastered. Education in a world of change is largely about factors below the waterline, the ability to notice, inquire, reflect, and learn. Explicit experiential training in noticing, listening, and open-ended questioning transforms schools by (1) giving teachers the tools they need to become aware of the perception, needs, and untapped potential of students, and (2) give students the tools they need to become aware of their own stories and purpose, and to guide their own learning in productive directions of their own choosing. NLQ is not the whole story, but the current system becomes more amenable to the needed changes as more students and faculty members practice NLQ.

Step 7: Promote cultural change through intentional shifts in language and story. The current culture of engineering and engineering education is held in place through certain unnoticed stories and language. The need for "rigorous" courses and the disdain for "soft" subjects is preserved by the very words we use. To change the culture in ways that promote the values of the whole new engineer requires the creation of sticky language and stories that compete against the status quo. "Soft" subjects become the "missing basics" and the "fundamentals" become a "math-science death march" as part of an essentially cultural process that leads to effective and sustainable change. Successful exemplars of change such as Olin College are as much about culture shift as curriculum or content shift.

Step 8: Create new institutional forms to promote innovation, community, and connection. The current educational system is a collection of individual teachers and students acting largely as individuals in a world of teamwork and collaboration. New programmatic incubators such as the iFoundry model connect dots across the organization to permit pilot innovation and experimentation. New and revitalized forms of student organizations connect students to their school experience from the very first day, thereby connecting them socially to a supporting culture and community. Faculty members connect to students and each other in ways that promote lifelong faculty development in ways that bring greater meaning and leadership capability to their teaching and scholarship. These forms help knit together a less parochial and more interdisciplinary organization.

Step 9: Practice and teach entrepreneurship in thought and action. Enterpreneurship has a different kind of action logic from the usual planning practices of routine organizations and business. In routine settings, we plan by setting goals, predicting how to achieve them, and then arranging a reasonably sure sequence of tasks to achieve exactly the predetermined goals. In entrepreneurial settings, our ability to predict is much less certain, so both the goals and ability to predict outcomes for tasks is much less predictable. As such, entrepreneurs must be present to what happens in the moment and then must be much less attached to the goals they started with. Instead, given the high uncertainty and high variability in outcome, the entrepreneurial actor must immediately learn from what just happened and in real-time formulate a response to those outcomes and possible next states. This kind of behavior has been studied in successful entrepreneurs and has been called effectuation by Sarasvathy. In a world of change and uncertainty, it is fundamental that young engineers be taught these processes in addition to those of causal thinking or planning. Moreover, the processes of changing our educational systems must themselves become more effectual and entrepreneurial and less dependent on more rigid action logics if they are to be successful and bring about more effective reforms.

Step 10: Band all stakeholders together coordinate effective action and collaboratively disrupt the status quo. To date, education reform has largely been a school-by-school or even classroom-by-classroom attempt to bring about local change, and oftentimes schools or departments carefully guard their innovations as giving their unit a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the real competitor here is not the university down the road. The real competitor is an educational system and cultural forces that preserve a 60-year old engineering curriculum that is demoralizing prospective engineers while or even before they come to school. Even when change efforts aren't viewed in this competitive way, schools have had difficulty coordinating, diffusing, and sustaining the results throughout their own institutions and to others.

To bring about the necessary changes it is important for likeminded stakeholders, whether students, educators, employers, or practicing engineers, to come together and unite to bring about the needed changes. Studies of innovation suggest that radical innovations take place outside of the organizations that are wedded to earlier innovations, and that disruptive innovator takes over from the earlier innovator after the radical innovation has shown its superiority in the marketplace. In the Big Beacon the movement creates a global virtual organization, a disruptive innovator, that transforms the organizations wedded to the status quo.

These steps are not easy ones, but increasing numbers of students, faculty, engineers, and their employers are coming together to help ensure that we have the kinds of engineers our world needs now and in the future

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goldberg/ten-steps-to-a-whole-new-_b_1627092.html