PUTTING THE HORSE IN FRONT OF THE CART -- TWENTY-FIRST CHALLENGE FOR THE ENGINEER AND AMERICAN SOCIETY

PUTTING THE HORSE IN FRONT OF THE CART -- THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHALLENGE FOR THE ENGINEER AND AMERICAN SOCIETY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 13, 2010

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AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV WRITES:

Every now and then you run into a word that gets you as a tar baby. I know it's another L* insult to the engineering cranium, but the word chreod is gaining currency in my dotage.

A dude named Waddington invented this word from two Greek words in 1940. Unfortunately the two words have multiple Greek words, which approximate the same thing.

My neighbor is Greek, so I asked him how to pronounce the word, since nowhere on google world does it clue you. The answer is an H sound where you breathe hard out while pronouncing it. The C is essentially silent. Don't worry nobody else knows how to pronounce it either, including the Greeks.

The D4P if anything is a chreod for prevention. Chreod adds "necessary" to methodology.

Chreod is married to homeorhesis. It is the necessary pathway (chreod) that D4P returns to when disturbed. It is recursion not repetition.

It turns out chreod is somewhat popular in other disciplines, like medicine, certainly not systems engineering.

Knowing who my audience “is not” has been a liberating milestone. Use the best-fitting words you can find.

_____________________

My daughter's family visited recently. Their two kids suck on telephone/internet gizmos at every opportunity when the parents are not engaging them directly. I kept getting on their case - total failure. Last night I attended a wake for one of my spouse's patients who died at 50. There were about 75 young ones there from the family. I observed the same behavior as my grandkids. They mistreat each other with microsecond attention spans and diversion to their electronic marvel. Have you noticed the same phenomenon in your world?

Bill

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

William,

Portmanteau, indeed.

In 1924, a year before he squared off against Clarence Darrow in the Scopes "monkey trial," William Jennings Bryan warned that a "scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what shall be taught in our schools, and, in doing so, is attempting to mold the religion of the nation." We all have traveling baggage, individually, professionally, and we seem to cling to it culturally.

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I have come to the conclusion that intellectually we crawl forward on all fours rather than stand upright and face the future. Perhaps it is because the baggage is so heavy.

The terrible WWI was behind our nation and the world when Bryan uttered these words. People looked about and came to blame science with its terrible weapons of warfare that killed and maimed millions and led to other subhuman atrocities. The antidote was a return to old style religion.

High school teacher Scopes was teaching Darwinian evolutionary theory of natural selection which led to the “monkey trial,” which Bryan won but science to this day has tectonically moved forward despite religious opposition.

We believe what we want to believe despite the evidence to the contrary, and when we are opposed fear raises its ugly head.
With fear, there is always a figment of truth for it to take tentative hold, and such was the state of the nation at the time science and Darwinian evolution clashed those many years ago, and so it remains to this day.

You wrote DESIGN FOR PREVENTION not as a threat to religion, but as an expository rendition of the problems and perturbations to engineers literally designing to prevent disasters.

D4P was written before the explosion off the coast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, a testament to the reality of engineering in the workplace, along with a dissertation on the traveling baggage that prevents engineers and engineering from moving forward.

The oilrig explosion recycled the fears of what oil pollution can and will do to the fragile ecological environment, but also to jobs and the economy of the region in terms of fishing and tourism.

Fear of running out of the staple, oil, that keeps our economic and societal engine running, given the international climate, has made a mockery of good intentions. While many are crying “foul,” there is no innocence here on any side of the disaster, and I mean any side. The oilrig explosion could have been prevented if there had been the will, the way, and the umbrage to step out of the shadows and rise off the mat. No one did.

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D4P is not written in Greek, but in comprehensible prose that reminds us that we are in a shipwreck status. We are in this state because of the way we think, relate to each other, and behave.

"Chreod is married to homeorhesis," you say, which is incomprehensible at first sight because it is unfamiliar language.

Looking up the word, “homeorhesis,” which is not in my dictionary, but on google, and in association with "recursion,” it makes perfect sense.

D4P is an evolving document to alert the engineer, indeed, us all to our deplorable situation and the factors contributing to the state of dysfunction and the recursion, not repetition necessary to make us stand upright and move in a trajectory forward.

D4P is not meant as a definitive document but as the launching pad to soar with the momentum that will marry engineering to a functional future. It is not the case today.

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If I may use a religious analogy, the D4P audience is not doctrinaire engineers, per se, who assume the religion of their discipline is the unvarnished truth, and who have not the will, the way, or the stomach to engage and soar beyond abstractions outside the discipline. D4P addresses the problems of culture, institutional and management infallibility, and anachronistic thinking. These are outside the discipline but still importantly if tangentially related to engineering.

"Chreod is married to homeorhesis," which is a problem for engineers because they have been programmed to crawl before authority, always paid a $ dollar more an hour than they can afford to take an upright stand.

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In retrospect, engineers on the oilrig could point out to the shoddy preventative maintenance, and many engineers have done just that. A theme echoes through their comments that they knew for weeks that something had to give, but what did they do? They did nothing.

Chreod, as you say, adds "necessary" to methodology, which is the premise of D4P. It would mean for those on the oilrig to have taken a stand, mutiny if necessary, to see that the rig was as secure as science and engineering could provide, which didn't happen.

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D4P is an important book. It is the distillate of a passionate career of identity with and caring for the discipline of engineering, its practitioners, and its importance to society.

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I hate to say it, but your audience is not engineers. Your audience is people that engage engineers in the business of engineering. It is professionals in such disciplines tangential to engineering, such as organizational development, people who have had long careers observing and watching leadership, management and organizational life deteriorate into a synthetic phenomenon of regressive consequence.

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It is strange how little I have heard back from engineers. You have attempted to address then in the cadence and language with which they are familiar. Your book challenges them, as it does us all, and we're not interested in being challenged. Shadows and ghosts that cannot be defined in words, but are approaching us from all sides, threatening our society, our nation, and our place in the world, and what do we do?

We do what your daughter's family does. What they did at the wake. We escape into electronic contraptions.

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I was telling BB only today that President Obama is criticized from all sides, as people fail to realize anyone in that office would be chopped liver.

You see I've come to understand -- that is why D4P resonates with me -- that corporations aren't the answer, CEOs aren’t the answer, management is not the answer, but the engineering community at large is the only answer.

Change must evolve from the bowls of the engineering community from the lowest technician to the highest-flying engineer for real change, your "chreod" to occur.

It is the same for the nation. Everyone is worried about Congressional slashing of benefits, entitlement, and other government concessions, especially as they relate to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and earmarks.

American voters voted out a bunch and voted in another bunch in the mid-term elections. Americans now expect miraculous change without sacrifice without any pain or discomfort on their part, and Congress goes along with this thinking. Congress will retreat into gridlock and blame “it” for doing nothing.

Nothing will change until people across the nation bite the bullet, take the pain, downsize their demands, and recognize they are in charge. Congress reacts to its constituency. Congress has no stomach or capacity to do anything much less the right thing without the support of the people.

Similarly, engineers as a body, and you have given them the text with D4P, to say to all their employers that this is where the rubber hits the road, and if you don't listen to us to our demands for D4P then try to get somewhere without wheels.

Am I encouraged that engineers will rise to the occasion? I have no choice but to believe that is a possibility because I don't want to see engineering or this nation implode.

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