REALITY CHECK! The Inscrutable Engineer, Natural Law, Entropy, Life, Love & Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

REALITY CHECK!

The Inscrutable Engineer, Natural Law, Entropy, Life, Love & Leadership In The Twenty-First Century


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 7, 2008

“From birth, there are subtle forces at work conditioning us to what we will become. Engineers are the prototype of our technological culture. They are more interested in the phenomenon of things than their ambivalent impact on people . . . Engineers are the last to be hired and the first to go. Increasingly, they are being treated as indentured workers, vagabonds with a modem and microprocessor . . . Engineers have a fatal attraction for being punished rather than awarded for excellence . . . Companies always pay them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit. They are trapped by conformity but prefer to see it as economic. They fail to be aware of their power.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “The Lost Soul of the Engineer,” SHORT CIRCUIT News Letter of Engineering Empowerment, Spring 1993.

MYSTIQUE OF THE ENGINEER

A friend of mine, a quintessential engineer with more than 100 patents to his name, sent me a ring bound essay on “Platform for Prevention,” which addresses the issue of anticipating and dealing with problems of engineering maintenance through quality control.

It has been one of my interests to explore the professional engineer’s psyche, who has created this postmodern society of ours, but who rarely benefits from the economic fruits of his creation except obliquely and always modestly.

Tracy Kidder in “The Soul of A New Machine” (1981) traces the activity of a select group of engineers who are prodded and pushed to an impossible schedule to produce the next great electronic toy for the masses in a “culture of innovation.”

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, Kidder captures the maddening punishment this engineering team endures, sometimes working 24-hour marathon sessions, to produce a cutting edge microcomputer only to have the team dismantled and shredded once the objective had been accomplished. These engineers were as expendable as day laborers with little fruits or recognition for their creation.

Similarly, Stephen Wozniak, the engineering brains behind Apple, Inc., has long since faded from sight while his entrepreneur partner, Steven Jobs, could never be more prominent as the firm they co-founded continues to soar, and Time magazine names Jobs one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World” in its May 12, 2008 issue.

I write in “The Lost Soul of the Engineer”:

“Clearly, the engineer is the preeminent builder of the modern world. He has automated the workplace, ending the factory system. The body of genetic engineering has revolutionized agriculture with biotech laboratories that produce natural products such as vanilla, coconut oil and other staple farm products. A select corps of electronic engineers has created the 24-hour-a-day financial trading system, which in turn enables a truly global economy. The globalization of industry and services now permits multinational corporations to switch production operations from one country to another. This has benefited the power brokers, but where is the engineer’s share of the spoils?” (Short Circuit, 1993, p. 23).

I find the engineer inscrutable. Reading engineering author W. Ross Ashby’s carefully thought out essay on “Platform for Prevention,” with salient information very much relevant to our times, I wonder how many people have read it, will read it, more importantly, how many non-engineering people are likely to understand its message.

It has the taint of engineerlese, the jargon of inclusiveness. People need to be informed as they walk through the grid of life zigzagging between imposing systems and written instructions. They read in their own rhythms, interpreting, thinking and daydreaming their way through work. They have their own ideas about how things should be done, defying procedures and the hieroglyphics of instructions they don’t understand anyway.

These workers are driven by a common will in a network of antidiscipline. It is because of this that important information must be created in the content, context and culture of their moorings if it is to provide the guidance required.

NARROW DOMAIN OF THE ENGINEER

An engineer is unlikely to read fiction and to declare this with righteous pride. What could he possibly learn from “made up stuff”? The power of his discipline is sacred. It defines and protects him from life and non-engineers. He fears fiction may contaminate him with the irrational and aberrant world he despises, a world out-of-control, a world that resists Natural Law and First Principles, a world he would prefer not to exist for the thinking man.

It is the disruptive world “of the other,” the outsider to the engineering discipline, the stranger, the alien, the subversive, the radical. It is this world, unfortunately, where systems of power and thought flourish in creative chaos beyond the controls of the expected where engineers seldom tarry.

The engineer sticks to what can be sensed in the language of logic that is comfortable for him where the chances of being refuted or disputed are between little and none. But all engineering experience, no matter how pristine or isolated, is suffused with the presence of others in a climate of contradiction where the technology one has absorbed, or the language with which one thinks and acts proves derisory.

Engineering is a conformist discipline. Some of its foolproof theories are not as infallible as once thought. Much of the ideas of Newton, embraced with defiance some three hundred years ago, and seldom challenged, have proven suspect, or shelved with the arrival of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others.

LANGUAGE OF THE COMMON SOUL

My sorrow is that W. Ross Ashby, a gifted engineering thinker, has not addressed his document to the person with sixth grade reading and comprehension skills. Such a reader is not a dunce, but the typical worker, whatever his education, who glances at the headlines of the newspaper if he reads one at all, reads his favorite comics, occasionally does the crossword puzzle, checks the activities of his favorite sport teams, and then just might glance at the op-editorial page. Television and the Internet consume his time.

In practice, I have observed workers on the most sophisticated technology working in clean rooms covered from head to toe with white antistatic sterile protective gear to avert contamination. These same workers seldom read the instruction manuals, but gain insight as to how to proceed from their peers who operate a long way from prescribed procedure.

The “Platform for Prevention” is often a gap between engineerlese and the receptivity of the worker for the information presented.

This worker is fully capable of comprehending what is being presented if it is written in his cultural language, which is not necessarily plain English. There are multiple languages of workers that express their experience that might be some distance from the language of engineers.

Not only must the engineer immerse himself fully in issues of his technology, but in the changing nuances and languages of workers who are meant to build his creations.

WHO STIRS THE DRINK?
There is change in the air. Engineers are the new priesthood of the postmodern world. Like their submissive clerical counterparts of the once dominant ecclesiastical authority of the Church, they are subjugated to a higher and remote authority in Mahogany Row.
Ironically, many engineers have risen to CEO status, only to maintain the traditional power of dissembling corpocracy in the midst of its rupture from reality and society, leaving the engineer suspended in animation. This has led to a disconnect between the creators of technology and the working population of builders.

The grid of “antidiscipline” is everywhere. It is now more apparent as it becomes more extensive. It represents the resistance of a society reduced to things to be managed. While popular procedures are seemingly followed, and workers as manipulated mechanisms of discipline seemingly are conforming, they are doing so in order to evade such mechanisms. In other words, what we see is not what we get. We are experiencing a disconnect between thinking and doing, leading and following. This has led to a society unhinged, floating in leaderless leadership. I write in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007):

“This is all played out with bizarre finality in the engineering community. The modern world is a product of the engineering mind. Yet, while engineers created this world, it does not belong to them. It has been stolen from them.” (p. 113)

Empirical evidence? My first discipline was in chemistry and engineering; my first job was in research and development. Subsequent to that, I was a working field chemical sales engineer and consultant across the United States and abroad. Moreover, I was a corporate executive in international operations for two Fortune 200 companies whose products and technologies were in chemical and electrical engineering technology.

Returning to graduate school after my initial career, I earned my doctorate in organization/industrial psychology, and have been a practicing professional in organizational development (OD) and an author in that genre for three decades.

The point I wish to make here is that engineers, and this document of a “Platform for Prevention” is an elaboration of that premise, is that First Principles and Natural Law not only guide engineers, but everyone. It is the way it is.

LIFE AFTER PEOPLE

The History Channel imagined the earth after people. Using empirical evidence and hard science, it illustrated how synthetic and ephemeral our presence, and how life might appear once people vanished.

The earth will not become barren, but will flourish. Abandoned skyscrapers would, after hundreds of years, become “vertical ecosystems” complete with birds, snakes, rodents and plant life. What will not flourish are the monuments to man’s presence.

One small animal may be responsible for bringing down the Hoover Dam hydroelectric plant. Rivers will swell, bridges will collapse as iron girders return to iron ore, cement and mortar will crumble into sand and dust, and bricks will return to clay.

The streets and highways will flourish with beasts we’ve never seen on this continent other than in zoos, as the barriers to these places will no longer contain them. Giraffes, hippopotami, lions, tigers, panthers, cheetahs, leopards, elephants, snakes, and many other breeds of animals will roam the streets and byways scavaging for food, cover and watering holes. Grizzly bears will reappear in California, while herds of buffalo would repopulate the Great Western Plains. Our automobiles would shrivel to piles of dust. Our domestic pets would disappear overtaken by flourishing wildlife. Most records of human existence would fade quickly as if man never stepped foot on this planet.

Trees and exotic plants would spread and their roots would ensnarl homes and workplaces breaking through what once were thought impenetrable walls of fashionable and modest homes in tectonic fashion.

Tens of thousands of residential swimming pools would become spawning places for insects. Once the pools dry up, their walls would crumble as weeds and other plant life punch through their synthetic pores to take possession and bury them from sight.

We already have instances of this scenario.

It is now more than twenty years since the nuclear melt down of the power plant in Chernobyl, Russia, which happened on Saturday, April 26, 1986 at 1:23:58 a.m., local time.

Since the spring of 1990, between 60,000 and 140,000 deaths in the Ukraine and Belarus are attributed to radiation from this accident. Seventy percent of the fallout landed in Belarus affecting 3,600 towns and 2.5 million people. More than 5 million people in this locale suffer today from psychological trauma from this man-made disaster.

Tragic as this is, Chernobyl’s population of more than 50,000 people has vanished. Nature and Natural Law have taken over as man’s replacement.

“Life After People” illustrates what it would be like ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or hundreds of years after man. There would be little evidence of man’s presence after only a century.

Trees and plant life will have swallowed up commercial tracts of buildings while decay would reduce the Eiffel Tower and many skyscrapers to giant hills of rubble. If this seems farfetched, structural engineers recently explained why the Twin Towers in New York City collapsed so quickly once commercial jet liners were flown into them on September 11, 2001.

These NIST experts explained that these towers were designed as framed tube structures, which provided tenants with open floor plans uninterrupted by support columns or walls. These long steel support beams were sprayed with fire resistant paint. This protection turned immediately into dust once hit by the high temperatures of the exploding jet liners. The steel melted, causing the sagging floors to pull inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the columns initiating the collapse of each tower, sending floor-by-floor cascading in a downward spiral like falling dominoes to the ground. It took less than an hour. People trapped in these buildings didn’t have a chance.

Consider the monuments built by the nouveau riche to publicize their new status in a manner to separate them from the less fortunate. I can recall a case of an estate of pristine grandeur that suddenly lost its luster, as the costly diligence of the required attention could no longer be maintained.

This happened to the owner once good fortune took a turn for the worse compounded by his addiction to trophies of affluence. This took the form of luxurious boats and exotic automobiles, elaborate entertainment, and expensive holidays combined with unwise investments. In a short five years, wealth evaporated to be replaced by liabilities with the estate now in various states of being repossessed by Nature.

The ornate electronic entry gate is now red with rust and pealing golden paint. The long winding cement drive, embroidered by a lawn of manicured green, set off by fountains and sculptures, is now fractured with a migraine of snaking cracks and crevices. The grass is now snarled and curled with a growing crop of ubiquitous weeds snuffing out the less muscular seed. The roof to the main house has collapsed in on itself, while the walls are full of the tearing plaster while adorned absurdly with original paintings and sculptures. The doorknobs, light fixtures, and other mundane features need attention, as does the plumbing. It is confirmation of the transitory nature of life without resolute determination.

ENTROPY & LOVE

Alas, if man tarries but for a moment, Nature is ready to replace him. It should give man pause to note what he thinks is, isn’t; and what he thinks isn’t, is, as everything, including himself, returns to its original state in Nature.

This is an over simplistic way to describe “entropy,” which is a complex law of physics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A state of entropy is one in which there no longer is any energy to do work. When we expire and are reduced to the dust of chemicals, we are in such a state, as is everything else once the energy level is reduced to zero, or a state of stasis.

Matter is energy, as Einstein has proven, and matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed into one form or another. But once it is transformed it is already in a state of decay, or racing to its original form. It led one philosopher to say, “As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.” It is also the reason the Bible states, “Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.”

This is being formulated on my walk since returning from Minnesota where my wife, “Beautiful Betty” (BB) and I visited our latest grandchild, a girl, only two weeks old, and her twin sisters, who turned three in January, all of whom are lovely beyond belief. We also visited BB’s father in his nursing home, who is 91, and suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Entropy would seem close to him but at a distance from the girls.

The twin girls are so bright, so full of energy, so creative, and so loved by their parents that it made our hearts sing. The twins’ tiny two-week-old sister is quiet, delicate, and loved. It helps that the mother is a trained teacher of preschoolers as is their maternal grandmother.

It had been more than four decades since I had children of my own, and so I was reacquainted with how vulnerable a human life is; and how easily it could be extinguished without constant and loving care. It gave me pause to realize that this is reality. That child in the arms of her parents is as vulnerable and dependent for constant care as is her 91-year-old great grandfather.

BB’s father receives constant attention and monitoring in the nursing home. We observed this as we spent hours at the home every day of our seven-day visit. We saw the manner of care, the recreational activities – he made a birdhouse for us, and the thorough maintenance of the facility -- new carpet throughout, repainted walls and rooms, and a new flat screen television in the main lobby. We also observed the patience of the professional staff in all aspects of dependent care.

We all grow old, infirm, and move toward entropy, but love is a powerful bridge to that inevitable state of deterioration. It is a tribute to society to have such a place as this.

BB played dominoes with her father twice. He won the first games 2 – 1, and on another day, 3 – 2. She tried to play checkers with him but he could not conceive what the game was about as there were no dots or numbers or words on the black and red squares. He could read print in the newspaper, and always noticed his name, Thompson, on a woman’s door as he passed by it in the hall, a woman he does not know.

On another occasion, he was moving along with his walker and stopped at the nurses’ station while I was sitting in the room observing him. The nurse was quite pretty. “I could stand here all day,” he said. The nurse, apparently used to this attention, said with a wave of her hand, “Move on Everett,” and he did.

My father-in-law and this newly born child are at polar extremes of entropy, requiring special attention to survive, but at differing levels of potential energy. He, a private man, prefers his own company to anyone else’s. This we are told by his counselor. Like a child in its innocence, she informs us, he says what comes to mind, which often offends.

He might tell someone they are fat, ugly, too slow, or remind them that they are bald. This could be especially cutting as he is still handsome, strongly built, and healthy with a head of thick white hair. Despite his condition, he has retained his penchant for observation and has not lost his sense of humor.

He told me I needed a shave when he noticed my beard, and told his daughter that I was awfully tall, and had big feet. While BB was checking on his medications with the nurse, he looked about the room at the men watching television. “Did you notice that they’re all bald?”

I said, “Yes, I noticed, but you have a full head of hair.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess it’s because they don’t feed their hair.”

When his daughter returned, I told her what he said. “Did you say that, dad?”

Looking at her he smiled broadly, “My hair grows every time I look at a pretty woman.”

Alzheimer’s has failed to erase his sense of humor.

ENTROPY & LIFE

It had been a blessed but tiring week seeing the new baby, the sparkling twins, their devoted parents, and BB’s father, a reminder of the transitory nature of life. Moreover, we experienced the transitory nature of a midwestern spring with a reluctance to move from winter to spring. We were greeted with a cold rain as we made the sixty miles trek from Princeton to the Minneapolis airport in our rental car.

Once on airside of the terminal, a woman from Winnipeg, Canada, sat down across from us waiting to board NW’s 747. She was on her way to Tampa to visit her daughter and son-in-law. As often happens when around people, I go into a sneezing jag.

“That’s an allergy,” the lady said.

“I don’t think so,” I answered, “it only comes on once in a while.”

“What do you think causes it?”

“I’m allergic to people.”

She laughed. “That’s amusing. It would interest my daughter and son-in-law.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, you see they’re psychologists.”

“So am I.”

“You’re a psychologist?”

“Yes, the Ph.D. kind.”

“So are they.”

“That’s a long haul, many years of study.”

“True.”

“And you don’t like people?”

“It’s why I went into industrial/organization psychology rather than clinical.”

“What’s that?”

“My client is the organization, not the individual. People are just data points in my algorithms.”

She laughed again. “You have quite a sense of humor.”

Remembering the nursing home, my father-in-law, and his quick mouth, I said, “Oh my God! I see what the future is going to be.” Then we were called to board.

DENOUEMENT*

William Faulkner in his Nobel Laureate speech in Sweden in December 1950 said man would not only survive, but would prevail. We experienced some evidence of this declaration on this flight home to Tampa.

The rainy weather in Minneapolis persisted, flooding the tarmac and delaying our takeoff. Once in the air, we experienced turbulence immediately, which not only persisted but also became increasingly unsettling. It continued even as we reached our cruising altitude.

“Something is wrong,” I said more to myself than anyone. BB held my hand. Bad weather is one thing, I thought, but this doesn’t feel right.

Then the pilot captain announced that we would be landing in Milwaukee. This was unscheduled as this was a nonstop flight to Tampa. He promised to explain once we were on the ground, but not before fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars accompanied our plane as it taxied to the terminal.

The mind conjures up all sorts of explanations usually centering on someone must be extremely ill, not wishing to think something is critically wrong with the plane.

The pilot to his credit told us candidly and succinctly that he was having trouble with the rudder and other stabilizing controls, which were not responding to correction, and for that reason, elected to terminate the flight in Milwaukee rather than continue. In that admission, he demonstrated a powerful brand of service leadership.

There were the understandable “oh’s” and “ah’s” to this announcement. He consoled us somewhat by informing us that a fully serviced 747 was in the next bay ready to take us on to Tampa.

Two hours later, with him as pilot, but with a different crew, we arrived safely in Tampa after a trouble free flight. I thanked the pilot and his crew, and God for our safe return. Unfortunately, other passengers seemed too preoccupied to express gratitude. They were tired; it was early Sunday morning. They may have missed connecting flights. Yet, it is hard to imagine once safe on the ground to be so distraught, especially after what had transpired. It is incredible and regrettable but not surprising.

People return to self-interest once they shed the anxiety of missing that possible bode of extinction from a manmade machine.

______________________

I read a fanciful novel ("Power Play" by John Finder) while in Minnesota. It is about executive intrigue and the quest for lighter materials of composite construction to replace aluminum in more fuel-efficient aircraft. A competitor’s plane went down of such construction. A lowly materials engineer discovered why.

The book captivated me because it touched many sensitive areas of my training in chemistry and engineering, my experience as a corporate executive, and my OD interventions as a psychologist.

The hero of the novel is this materials engineer in the bowels of the organization. He is invited to an offsite of the airline’s elite executive corps to make a presentation of his findings. You can imagine the hostility he encounters. That said it is his decisiveness, cunning and smarts that saves the day when the unexpected occurs, proving the company leadership completely inept.

The finale was his declining of an invitation to join the CEO’s executive team. He knew where power truly resides.

______________________

The pilot of our aircraft did a courageous thing. At the mercy of his discretionary powers, he made the right decision expeditiously, diplomatically, and decisively. At no point did his passengers become inordinately anxious. His prudence cost NW Airlines money, but he preserved its reputation.

He epitomized Faulkner’s boast of service leadership, not from the NW Air Lines Board Room, nor from the CEO’s executive staff, but from gut wrenching leadership in the heat of the moment, where leadership truly resides in this twenty-first century.

______________________
*Dr. Fisher sent a “Letter of Appreciation” to Richard Anderson, CEO, NORTHWEST/KLM Air Lines (May 2, 2008) to acknowledge this pilot’s discretionary leadership for Flight No. 440: Minneapolis-to-Tampa, April 24-25, 2008.