Overcoming the Engineering Mindset
One of the biggest challenges I’ve had throughout my career is dealing with what I call “The Engineering Mindset.” The Engineering Mindset views design problems through a narrow lens, focused only on the specific requirements articulated to them, without paying attention to the larger context of the project. Engineers tend to be very good at addressing the hard requirements of a design, but much worse at addressing the soft requirements. Of course, this isn’t all engineers or limited just to engineers, but it’s a mindset prevalent among engineers.
An example of this is site grading. The expressed goal of a project might be to maximize the buildable area of a lot. This seems easy and straightforward, just grade the whole thing flat, and put in retaining walls where needed. However, often the engineer does not thing about the questions surrounding that decision, like whether it’s cost effective or if it creates a pleasant place to live. (Somehow, engineers always think about the drainage of a site, because if they don’t it becomes their problem later.)
Sometimes engineers will think about the cost implication of their design, mostly because enough clients have nixed their designs over cost in the past, but also because it’s possible to put numbers to the costs. It is not possible to put numbers to the quality of life of the places they design.
An ideal example of this is traffic engineers. What traffic engineers often hear from the community is that they want the level of service of their roads improved. Residents want traffic to flow more freely, especially during rush hour. The traffic engineer’s response to this is often to widen the roads and enable cars to drive more quickly. This increases the throughput of the road and increases level of service for a given volume of traffic. It ignores everything else the community might want from their roadway network.
What the traffic engineer often does not think about is all of the other changes that happen due to wider and faster roads. Often, they assume the traffic volume will stay the same, but it never does. Wider and faster roads induce more people to drive, increasing traffic volumes and eventually returning the road to the low level of service at which it started. Wider and faster roads also serve to break down community since fewer people walk along the city’s streets, and have less opportunity for chance encounters with their neighbors. Additionally, once people in their cars, it becomes much more difficult to sustain local businesses in the community, since it’s just as easy to drive a little further away than stay local. This sense of community and a strong local economy are also things residents often want, but do not articulate these desires when talking about the need to reduce traffic.
Unfortunately, people with an engineering mindset are not going to change. They will continue to act like computers, doing what they’re told while ignoring any context. As city builders who want to create vibrant and verdant communities, we must understand this mindset and know how to overcome it through our own actions.
The first step in overcoming the engineering mindset is to increase the scope of the requirement. Articulate and itemize all of the requirements of a design problem, both hard and soft. Even if the requirement might seem obvious, it should be stated and documented. My wife, who works in medical device manufacturing, told me about this time engineers fixed a bug in their product’s software that fixed the specific problem they were having, but it broke five other things in the process. It shouldn’t need to be stated that the fix shouldn’t break anything else, but it needs to be to ensure the engineers test to ensure their fix didn’t break anything.
For instance, when specifying the requirements for a grading plan, the requirement shouldn’t be simply to maximize the buildable area of the site. The requirements should also identify that walls should pay for themselves by enabling enough additional lots that will cover the cost of the wall and to ensure the grading design enables strong ties between residents by providing for chance encounters in the public spaces and places for residents to gather. These requirements need to be specific, not just to say that the design enables a good quality of life, but what specifically that means and how to achieve it.
When working with traffic engineers, it’s critical for communities to articulate their priorities and goals. Few communities will prioritize level of service over safety, despite most traffic engineers continually designing faster and less safe roads. That’s because they often hear about traffic much more than they hear about safety, so they prioritize reducing traffic. If the community actually prioritizes safety over reducing traffic, that should be documented and referred back to designing roads. In fact, communities should be articulating and documenting the full range of their goals and priorities through their comprehensive planning efforts.
The second step to overcome the engineering mindset is to provide the engineer feedback when they have questions about priorities. Many times, especially in public projects, different goals and priorities are contrary to one another or mutually exclusive. When presented with a set of requirements that can’t all be maximized simultaneously, it’s important to rank and prioritize the requirements for the engineer. This is often an iterative process as the various tradeoffs are better understood so proper direction can be provided. This is much easier for private projects than it is for public ones, since community input is often labor intensive and rarely garners a broad range of input. That is why it is critical that priorities are well defined and ranked in comprehensive planning documents so that further input is not required on a project-by-project basis.
The third and final step to overcoming the engineering mindset is to check to ensure that all requirements are met. Often, engineers will continue to focus on what they see is the primary objective of a project (i.e. preparing a grading plan or designing a road), while ignoring the other requirements that provide greater context. Addressing all of the requirements is much more difficult than only addressing a few of them. It’s common to see cities provide some type of comprehensive plan consistency analysis where a project is shown to further one or two goals of the comprehensive plan, but rarely does it indicate which goals the project makes worse. This is an example of people with an engineering mindset picking and choosing which goals are easiest to meet while ignoring the remaining requirements for the design of the city.
Using this process of defining a broad range of requirements with ranked priorities, working with engineers and designers to understand tradeoffs between the requirements, and then ensuring that all requirements are met is the only way to overcome the engineering mindset. Without following these steps, we allow engineers to do pursue the most straightforward option to solving the primary design objective, without worrying about any of the other impacts of the design.