THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE -- THE FOUND THEN LOST AGAIN "SOUL OF THE ENGINEER"

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE,

THE FOUND THEN LOST AGAIN “SOUL OF THE ENGINEER”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 10, 2014

The critique that follows is so typical of bright, gifted young engineers, full of idealistic fervor and professional dedication, and therefore all the more disturbing. 

Novelist Arthur Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine" is mentioned because the brain and the body, thinking and feeling, people and organizations are not often in sync with each other, and the relationship need not be so conflicting. 

It is the reason I have republished an essay written a score of years ago ("The Lost Soul of the Engineer"), providing a sample of the tension between engineers and technocrats.

For those interested, Robert Campbell plays off of Koestler's novel in his "Two Faces and Three Brains," which is the idea that our primitive or reptilian brain is built upon, not abandoned explaining many of our perturbations, including the dual conflict between our creative and self-destructive personalities.  Organizations, as it happens, demonstrate the same conflicting duality. 

In this short narrative of an engineer, you are introduced to the confluence and conflict that he experiences as a young engineer fresh out of the university.

You are shown how well workers and managers function as a team during crisis. 

You are also shown how important framing the problem before taking action is, and how hard this young engineer worked to manage the process, knowing he could not solve the problem, as problems are never solved, only controlled.  He demonstrated this insight with the remark: Leaks were reduced to below 200 and mostly minor leaks, serious leaks were fixed immediately.

Moreover, he and his manager were a team, while he discovered in the process that he had executive ability not only to manage the process but to lead a large disparate cadre of folks working the project to successful fruition.

Then what often happens happened to this young engineer to his surprise and consternation -- the company was sold to a bean counting firm and the working culture changed immediately.

This was apparently done without any thought of how disruptive and counterproductive it would be to the morale, motivation and disposition of the people affected.  The carpet bagging technocrats came in and took over, and workers could take it or leave it.

The engineer did what I advise:

When the culture you're in no longer suits you, since you cannot change the culture, you have no choice but to leave, and find a more suitable work situation.

That he did, his boss didn't.  His boss stayed the course and died.  It is situations like this the reason why I write my books.

JRF

THE FOUND, THEN LOST AGAIN "SOUL OF THE ENGINEER"

NOTE: This is an engineer’s account of his experience in his own words.

When I first went to work with the natural gas utility natural gas had just come from the West.  Hamilton was a steel city in a rapidly growing area not far from Toronto and conversion from manufactured to natural gas with twice the calorific value, dried out all the 50 year old gas mains.

The leak count was infinite and a few houses had blown up. A couple people had been killed. The company had exploded in size many times and there was no organization to handle it.

I had graduated in Chemical Engineering the year before and after a short stint with a corrosion control company I accepted a job solely responsible for corrosion and leakage control with the gas company at age 22. I didn't know any better.

There was only one leak surveyor, no corrosion technicians, no maps showing where the gas mains were along a couple thousand miles of city streets in Hamilton and suburbs and most of the leaks were not fixable. The pipes were riddled with leaks for endless miles and the supply system was a buried mystery, dependent on the memory of a few old timers.

So I had to come up with a plan to replace the whole city, bringing in new intermediate pressure gas supplies in an ordered way to replace the old system. Fortunately there were records of where repairs had been made in the past so these old gas main locations could be plotted on large scale city maps and with other inputs maps were gradually pieced together.

I was responsible for a drafting department of a couple dozen, a couple engineers to assist designing a new gas main grid, support staff issuing hundreds of gas main replacement contracts as well as new gas main extensions along with directing a contract construction inspection staff.

In short I was giving direction to gas company construction forces of a couple hundred, plus several hundred contract forces in addition to developing drafting, corrosion, and leak survey departments, all of us learning together as we came out of chaos.

This included developing formal systems of communication between all these groups as well as the sales and accounting departments. I was in my early twenties and was working long hours but everyone was because the need was so great and there was a great working spirit in the company then.

It wasn’t a boss employee relationship. We were in the thick of it together and there was absolutely no political infighting or top heavy bureaucratic controls. It just worked spontaneously.

After 7 or 8 years we got the leak count down below 200 mostly very minor leaks and ones that were potentially serious were fixed immediately.

It was just when things were running like clockwork that the company was taken over by a much larger sprawling company that wanted to centralize everything in a new head office a couple hundred miles away.

They were an operational disaster. Nothing worked right. They had blown up the Metropolitan Stores in Windsor for example. They churned out a computer stock report 4 inches thick that was useless, since it showed many negative quantities in stock. Max-mins were set by the Accounting Department so Operations had no control of the material supplies they needed to do their job.

They would recover scrap pipe to sell at less than the cost of recovery to build a slush fund so they could buy needed supplies independently at the local hardware store.

A head office staff bureaucracy of hundreds choked the whole company. We would have lost control of our record and mapping systems and be back operating in the dark.

Our computerized stock system was tailor made to replenish the stock on each truck each night to be ready for the next day. Each truck was an extension of the warehouse. We would be left with a 4 inch thick printout from head office that was useless and lose control of material purchases.

So that is when my interest in organization structure began in earnest.

In my late twenties they were sending down teams of “Staff Experts” to figure out how to centralize and reorganize us. These experts were not responsible for anything themselves. They had no line authority over me so it turned into a prolonged dispute and I had an exceptional boss and friend who supported me.

The CEO of the parent company was an Accountant so it was decided that a financial argument was needed. I had the resources to put on average about 8 to 10 people on the project to assess every formal and informal communication in the whole company, count every telephone call, every filing reference, every copy of every form, every link needed between every working group in the company essential to the integrated working of the whole company.

It took about 9 months. The final report, summarized into a couple hundred pages of charts and tables, showed that what they wanted to impose would not meet our communicative needs and we would lose control. It would take a supplementary system to implement it involving considerably more people, not to mention the countless thousands of pieces of paper that would flow into a black hole in Head Office. It was neither financially nor operationally justifiable.

The report was factual and could not be discredited. It stalled the Head Office “big wheel bosses” but I knew it would not stop them.

I left at the end of the year. They did back off implementing some of their measures. My boss was removed to the small town of Brantford and died of a heart attack several years later.

I don’t think such a detailed study of a company’s formal and informal communications has been done elsewhere. Because of the grid like mesh of tangled communications it is very difficult to do in a company of any size. All large companies have serious organizational problems. They can be ameliorated by mutually considerate and cooperative behavior but it is not a full solution. It was out of this difficult task that insights into the cosmic order came.

*     *     *

THE LOST SOUL OF THE ENGINEER! PART TWO: Profile of the Engineer versus the Technocrat

THE LOST SOUL OF THE ENGINEER!

PART TWO : Profile of the Engineer versus the Technocrat

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 8, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is the second part of an article published in the Short Circuit magazine, The Newsletter of Engineering Empowerment, Spring 1993.

The ultimate desire of the engineer is to bring the future into the present.  The technocrat fights to reserve the status quo culture of the present.  The social systems epitomize the existing culture – the shared beliefs, values and expectations – of the majority.  It is a psychological wall that resists change until breakthroughs occur. 

When breakthroughs do occur, technocrats are quick to invent language – supportive belief systems with suitable tantalizing hooks – consistent with the existing culture’s proclivities to rush to purchase new products if not embrace actual change itself.   Seldom do the architects of cultural change, which inevitably follows, share in the spoils.  Johannes Guttenberg’s (1398-1468) invention of the movable type printing press in the late 1440’s pulled medieval Europe out of the Dark Ages, but quickly left the inventor bankrupt.

Engineers’ arrogant disregard for things not technical proves a damning disease.

This malady is compounded by basking in each other’s reflected sun.  This is further complicated by the pettiness of comparing and competing in imitation of each other, while allowing themselves to be programmed to conforming patterns: from competing for grades in school, status on the job, then thrown off their axis by a complement of rewards and recognition, flattery and approval rather than finding fulfillment in the management of their creations.    

The engineer’s best friend is often a professional rival because of this inclination. The other engineer is admired if not envied because he can do what he does only better.  With such a temperament, such a person is found to be difficult to manage and impossible to lead.

Take for example, his proficiency in managing data and information, but his aversion to manage himself.  He functions best in a measured world with well-defined parameters and a discrete frame of reference. 

Consider these five dimensions intelligence, support, conformity, achievement, and decisiveness.  As we examine these, note how relatively minor subtle adjustments can tip the scale in favor of the engineer, adjustments that he is not likely predisposed to show.

INTELLIGENCE

The engineer has an uncanny ability to analyze, digest, assimilate, and utilize information put before him.  He has a great facility for information he can see, grasp and manipulate.  Information he cannot see or visualize existing is quite another matter.  His purview is data specific, anything beyond that is considered unimportant, and therefore not worth pursuing.

Stated otherwise, information that is not derived empirically does not exist because it cannot be quantified or replicated.  The engineer is interested in facts, not feelings, in hard data not soft data, nor is he interested in abstractions.  Yet, ironically, he doesn’t escape being impulsive, but is unlikely aware of the fact. 

Engineers are known to be compulsive buyers who justify the purchase after the fact.  Likewise, they are poor gamblers, risk takers, or stock market aficionados.  Many engineers got into “day trading” mania when that sickness swept the country, and lost their shirts. 

Since love, hate, security, freedom, tranquility, violence, success and failure are part of life’s emotional grid, one or more of these conflicting values can be expected to trip up the engineer at some time.  Cognitive intelligence needs the counterbalancing force of emotional intelligence.

The technocrat swims confidently in the muck as if it were fresh water for he is constantly fighting to justify his existence.   This finds his mindset dedicated to the proposition of making an impression rather than a difference.  He lives in the conflicting and contradicting world of soft data (impressions and feelings), data invariably irrelevant to the engineer. 

Survival demands the technocrat be highly creative in knowing where useful information exists, who possesses it and how to leverage it to his advantage.  He takes the product or technology of the engineer (e.g., the Eagle computer), and runs with it for dear life.  There is a prehensile, almost reptilian intelligence to a technocrat’s consciousness allowing him to see from the outside and inside of an issue or situation that is not at all apparent to the engineer.

SUPPORT

An engineer by the nature of his technology being his god expects support from all disciplines to his purposes without complaint.  He is surprised and mystified, restive and petulant when there are any glitches to this protocol, demonstrating a pervasive immaturity.

This is not true of the technocrat.  Glitches are part of his modus operandi as he reflects philosophically, stuff happens!  He is also used to being slighted and taken for granted.  Pride is a luxury he cannot afford as it is an outdated, outmoded and a useless concept to ponder. His natural propensity is to passive aggression which finds him taking insult and injury in stride but with a vengeance.  Rejection is the way to opportunity finding it better to be bold and brash to win an occasional victory than watch others get all the promotions.  The world of uncertainty and choices is his domain.

What the engineer expects the technocrats knows he must create.

Consequently, the technocrat is constantly in a selling mode, always politicking for the next advantage, weighing the mood of the working climate and the confidence level of all those in positions of influence.  Once he measures the disposition of those in charge and calibrates their vulnerability to exploitation, he moves quickly to rally support to his cause, subtly and stealthily recruiting a cadre of folks of different views, disciplines and needs.  He finds no need to be an expert in anything for his role is that of the consummate facilitator. 

Often this is a dangerous high risk game.  He has to maintain the appearance of being a “company man,” when his intent is that of identifying key talent, recruiting them to his scheme without having any authority to do so. 

Taking the initiative is second nature to him.  This finds him hooked on fads, organizational interventions that have a happy ring to them while having no problem with them being totally cosmetic, at the same time, seeming to be an enthusiastic supporter of the company’s business plan.  As the quintessential chameleon, his motivation is to keep his options viable while appearing to be all things to everyone.  His skill is a skin game in human relations.  Strange as it might seem most engineers from afar admire him and believe him legitimate.

CONFORMITY

Paradoxically, it is the engineer’s efforts that creates the necessity for change, but it is also the engineer (not the technocrat) who expects social constructs to remain unchanged.  Conformity is an engineer’s safe haven.  It is what he knows and expects and the guidance system to his performance. 

For the technocrat it is only a half-way house.  Seldom does a radical come out of the engineering ranks.  It is as unlikely to see an engineer at some protest rally as it is to find him wearing beads and tie-dye clothes.  It is the antithesis of his training, discipline and mindset.  Engineering is synonymous with empirical laws (first principles), familiar frames of reference, structures, paradigms and algorithms. 

Learning to be an engineer is a demanding pursuit leaving little time to challenge the concepts thrown at him.  Stated another way, the dogma of science is theologically repressive.  Consequently, the engineer is conditioned to be more loyal to data than to his own mind.  Compare this to the liberated engineer who dances in the world of Liberal Arts with a sprinkling of the humanities.  Inveighing as he goes is a matter of routine for him, balancing his cognitive and emotional sides, as he deals with “what is,” or reality, but for the effort he is no longer considered an engineer.

The technocrat doesn’t worry about allegiances, but operates essentially in uncharted territory, which is radically different from that of the engineer, who operates with a blueprint (CAD/CAM) and the comfort of his technology.  The technocrat gets the job done by bending if not breaking the rules seeing possibilities where the engineer is unlikely to venture.  He takes the engineer’s science and makes it commercial leaving the engineer to brood on the unfairness of it all. 

Once I was told by an unhappy engineer, who wanted to start his own business that his company always paid him more than he could afford to take the risk.  He felt himself trapped in the conformity and security of his profession, but found solace in putting the onus on economic verities as the cause, having little sense that it was a cage of his own making.

ACHIEVEMENT

An engineer has a strong personal drive towards excellence, which need not be related necessarily to achievement.  One of the consistent complaints of the engineer is that he is underutilized, as if that were the fault of the system.  But he is the system!  The fact that he fails to see this goes back to his sense of powerlessness.

The engineers on the Eagle Project were consumed with a drive to complete the task at hand.  Every action was orchestrated towards that end.  It was not a drive toward self-aggrandizement, but towards completion.  But completion for what, for whom?  And why not self-aggrandizement?

Solid achievement, while spectacular in this case, can however mask a deeper dilemma, a failure to feel in control.   

A project becomes the engineer’s life with his will and obedience to its demands at considerable sacrifice and personal inconvenience.  Who then is in charge?  Is the engineer on automatic pilot?  Whatever the rationale put forward the engineer’s actions indicate that his mindset is to put the project first, second, third, and everything else a distant fourth, and on hold.   Panic pervades the before and after void until the next project, if there is one.

The technocrat is spectator to this process sitting in the bleachers while scheming as to how best to exploit the project’s successful completion.  He sees the engineer as a kind of trained seal.  Moreover, it is no accident that the world of the technocrat appears upscale to that of the engineer’s sophistication and urbanity, as he pays attention to these aspects that lay beyond the pale of the work at hand.   

The technocrat luxuriates in his Armani three-piece button-down world, or chinos and sandals belying the competence or casualness that he aims to project.  What happened with Eagle at Data General is repeated daily around the globe in the engineer’s world.  The engineer is invited into the house he has built and made to feel like a trespasser.

            DECISIVENESS

An engineer is not decisive.  I think we have established that.  By nature, he is tentative, circumspect, always looking for more data to verify his findings, or to ensure the positive outcome of his decisions.  Perfection is the engineer’s bottom line.

The technocrat is of a totally different mindset.  He knows the language of management or corporate speak, which is money, and that only numbers matter on the annual report and balance sheet. 

The technocrat is a magician with numbers.  The competent level of the staff may be declining, but he will show impressive number for training given, employee conferences attended, awards earned, which mask actual performance or why the company is losing business.   

He operates in the high risk business of doing whatever it takes to put a positive spin on company operations.  He functions at the gut level and strives under stress, and ignores the engineer’s claim that he is “shooting from the hip” and is “a loose cannon.”  He does and is, but it doesn’t matter to him for criticism is like water off a duck’s back.

The technocrat makes decisions with a flare.  The point is he is not afraid of making the wrong decision: “It is better to do something than nothing.”  His thought processes while appearing overtly to be orderly can be covertly chaotic, as he believes a wrong idea if the troops believe in it will succeed, while the right idea if they don’t will fail. 

He gambles the house on his and other people’s ability to deliver as promised, especially engineers.  He keeps different mental books on file, one for management, and the other for everyone else.   He is a maestro at hedging his bet, playing show your ass and cover your ass games.  His decisions are made to further his career if they succeed, and to derail the careers of others if they fail. 

Management sees him as “high talent,” intently loyal while the engineer’s loyalty is seen as suspect, when this is likely to be the reverse of the facts.

THE DELICATE BALANCE

If the engineer looks like the pigeon in this modern game of enterprise my efforts have not been wasted.  Once I was consultant to a hi-tech organization with a $65 million systems engineering contract.  A large group of systems analysts showed no interest in performing the function of management for the group.  So, a technocrat was brought in to manage the group having no idea what these engineers did. 

Operations were barely into the first phase of the contract when a brouhaha erupted.  The supervisor had downgraded one of the system analyst cutting his pay and grade level, citing “poor performance and cavalier incompetence.” 

The basis for this performance appraisal evaluation was the fact that the engineer was always found tapping his pencil at his desk, whistling and smoking never being seen engaged in any work or exchanges with other analysts.  Clearly, a case of incompetence, right?

It turned out that this particular system analyst was the unspoken leader of the group, and the most respected man on the team.  He, alone, had made important breakthroughs on the contract.  When his colleagues heard of this downgrade, they walked off the job and threatened to quit.

Abruptly, this supervisor was removed.  Finally, one of the analysts reluctantly volunteered to take on the management job “for the duration of the project.”  Even with this development, these engineers didn’t get the message.

As Plato had observed, the engineer has the power of sight to see into his own soul, but he must be goaded into looking in the right direction.  For the engineer, the answers are not in his technology, but in himself. 

The engineer has created the modern world, but has spurned the responsibilities inherent in doing so.  He has done this to himself, but also to the rest of us.  He has allowed technocrats to take possession of his creations, what they don’t know or understand, and manage them at their will.  Fault not the technocrat.  He has taken possession of modernity by default.

The engineer has been finessed by his own stubbornness, by his own inability to establish a delicate balance between social and technical demands, between emotional and rational demands, between engineering and management.  His contempt for non-engineering has put him in a cage of his own making.  Only he can leave that cage by abandoning old beliefs and verities, and embrace new ways of taking charge of his genius.  The first step might be to invite a technocrat to lunch.  He can teaching him a great deal.

*     *     *

THE LOST SOUL OF THE ENGINEER PART ONE: The Mystique of the Engineer

THE LOST SOUL OF THE ENGINEER:

PART ONE: The Mystique of the Engineer

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 7, 2014

REFERENCE:

This was published originally in the Short Circuit magazine, The Newsletter of Engineering Empowerment, Spring 1993.

There once was a man who lived on his lawn in a mobile trailer while he built his dream house.  For some reason he continued to live in his trailer after the magnificent structure was completed, leaving it empty.

After a time, opportunists noted this oddity, and took possession of the house, and laid claim to the dwelling as if their own – possession being nine-tenths of the law.  At first, the bewildered builder was exasperated, then disbelieving, and finally full of angst, as he found that all attempts to redress this wrong were driving him deeper into litigious and moral depression.  He was the odd man out.

By the accident of circumstances, he stepped into a world not of his making, a world of words which was not his forte.  He was a maker, not a taker, a doer, not a transgressor.  His world was of predictable outcomes, not nefarious deeds, a world of moral certitude far removed from the reality of a pernicious society.  

Time passed and he took comfort in the fact that at least he had his trailer, even though the opportunists had fenced it in, separating him from the house he had built.  He did nothing.

Then one day, while enjoying his morning coffee, an eviction notice was served, giving him forty-eight hours to pack up and vacate the property, or else.  His world, and all that he held dear, was suddenly destroyed – and like Kafka’s The Trial (1925), he had done nothing wrong.  Or had he?

In Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the New Machine (1981), we are introduced to the genius of a superb team of engineers who take on the nearly impossible task of creating a new supercomputer in a finite period of time, only to find they were the equivalent of a vestigial organ once the magnificent machine – called “The Eagle” – was complete.

These engineers put their hearts and souls into the work, sacrificing everything, being made persona non grata in the end and they had done nothing wrong!

They, too, built their dream house, and left it to the wordsmiths and spin doctors to describe; and for corporate executives to take ownership.  Before long, marketing added their insults to injury, rechristening the Eagle, as “Eclipse MV/8000,” and getting it mentioned with suitable hyperbole in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but nary a word about this crew who had turned an idea into reality.

The final humiliation came in an elegant luncheon at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.  Untutored in the social amenities of high rollers in hype, uncomfortable in their ill-fitting new suits as the mandatory costume, confused with the showy formalities, the engineers sat helpless and hapless, not knowing whether to take the plate of salad on the right or on the left.  They all felt like fish out of water, as they were meant to feel.

Consequently, they hovered together like youngsters at their first high school dance.  Far from being awarded for this supreme effort, they were made to feel as outsiders, intruders, and compounded this by feeling they were being punished for what they had done. 

Those who were in touch with this contretemps took the message as intended, packed up their belongings, and went on to other things.  A year later, one Eagle engineer, reminiscing about the whole affair, said, “I felt like a hired gun in an old Western, sent in to rid the town of the bad guys, only to be run out of town once respectable citizens could again sleep easily at night.”

The engineer seems to have a fatal attraction for exploitation, and therefore for getting hurt rather than rewarded.  Is this masochistic behavior?  If so, why?

The Mystique of the Engineer

From birth, there are subtle forces at work conditioning us as to what we will become.  The engineer is the prototype of our technological culture.  He is more interested in studying the phenomena of nature, facts that can be replicated, occurrences reified, and circumstance observed or observable in nature.  He is far less interested in the ambivalence of people, including himself.

We know precious little more about ourselves today than that espoused by Plato in The Republic more than twenty-three centuries ago:

Education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put knowledge into a soul, which does not possess it, as if they could put sight into blind eyes …. our own account signifies that the soul of every man does possess the power of learning the truth and the organ to see it with; and that, just as one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world until its eye can bear to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the Good …. our aim would be to effect this very thing, the conversion of the soul … not to put the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be.

Today, we refer to the soul (psyche) when we are discussing the self or the mind.  Plato’s point is that we see what we want to see.  We see the fantastic explosion of technology and are both mesmerized and bewildered.  It implodes into our very consciousness.  

We wonder, “How will man prevail?”  But we are looking in the wrong direction – it is not in the gadgetry of a changing world outside ourselves where truth lies, but in the reality of man’s relationship with man.  For the engineer, this has become a personal and professional disaster.  The comfortable world of algorithms is not enough for him to survive, surely not enough for him to prevail.

Clearly, the engineer is the preeminent builder of the modern world – he has automated the workplace, ending the factory system.  Moreover, 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 has facilitated 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 has it left the engineer in the sharing of the spoils?

Once the system is invented and implemented the signs read everywhere, “No engineer need apply!”  How could this be?  How could the engineer with his clear view of the future, driven by a sense of duty and honor, a penchant for excellence and a keen perception of a rational world be left out of the sharing of the booty of modernity?

How has the engineer become a homeless soul?

No question, the engineering mentality has decisively influenced the present shape of technological society, and the consciousness of us all.  One characteristic of technology is that many things are going on at once.  This is as true of social systems (relational processes) as it is of technical systems (technological development).

The engineer has kept in touch with the technical, but generally shown an aversion even contempt for the social.  Yet his relations to both are critical to his success.  Unwisely, he has assumed that the challenges of the technical world exceed the complexities of the social world.  Actually, the reverse is closer to reality.  Our knowledge of the vagaries of human nature differ little with Plato’s time, while our knowledge of the universe far exceeds that known in the time of Galileo.

With more technical change in the past thirty years than the previous three hundred, modernity has driven our consciousness to the brink of despair.  I see this as a failure to recognize the soul mate relationship of the technical to the social system.

Denial of this fact generates a particular tension around complexity, often with the precipitous human response expressed in the statement, “Not my problem!”  It is accentuated with the surly rejoinder, “Let them (whomever “them” may be) worry about the big picture.  Leave me to my work!”

This implies that engineering work is free of ambivalence and ambiguity as engineering work has the clarity and certainty of 1+1 = 2.

Engineers have never been comfortable working with non-engineering functional groups.  Socializing (consensus building) is for those who have nothing better to do.  This attitude is reinforced by engineers showing a reluctance to develop good writing and presentation skills.

The approach, although traditional, has had precarious consequences for the engineer.  As social compression impacts the work situation, dissolving barriers between functional groups and disciplines work takes on the character of being personal, informal, and interdisciplinary with the implicit edict “You will have fun at work!”  

This masks a panic driven bottom-line urgency, which for the engineer, leads to dis-identity, self-estrangement and a sense of powerlessness.

The constant pressure of social irrelevancies (non-engineering bureaucratic demands) finds the engineer in rapid retreat from these disruptive perturbations and therefore from the essence of his work.

Meanwhile, the engineer’s counterpart, the bureaucratic technocrat, who actually thrives in this social ambience, and who plays the environment like a musical instrument, especially the high notes of political intrigue, survives redundancy exercises while the engineer is the last hired and the first to go.  

Increasingly, the engineer is being treated as an indentured worker, hired for projects, a vagabond with a modem and microprocessor.

Remember, the technocrat grew out of technology.  The most successful technocrats were once die-hard engineers feeling the necessity to leave engineering for economic survival.  Once they took the quantum leap, they came to find bureaucracy, unlike engineering, is not intrinsic to a particular goal although the rhetoric might suggest otherwise.  

If one has set himself the goal of producing a computer, there is no way of doing so except through discrete processes of technological production.  If, however, he chooses to be involved in licensing agreements and contracts for marketing and distribution, he enters the whole new arbitrary world “of the deal.”  There bureaucratic processes take over and the engineering world is subsumed under these processes and essentially left out when the spoils are divided.

The fundamentals of logic may dominate engineering-technological production, but bureaucracy takes over thereafter which is mired in vacillation and doublespeak.  Due to its nonchalance, bureaucracy develops a sense of humor about itself, giving it greater variability than possible in a strictly engineering (“This is serious business!) production sense.

But when the two interfaces – bureaucracy and engineering – are organized in a complementary cognitive style (Skunk Works™) work proceeds circumventing typical problems and exceeding expectations.  

Both interfaces are necessary.  Engineers would characteristically think otherwise, seeing the bureaucratic world filled with waste, stultifying intrigue, unproductive amenities, and time consuming rituals, while failing to see engineering’s contribution to this problem in failing to make work user friendly to non-engineers.  Failure for engineers to make connection with the bureaucratic world has been at both their peril.

In the non-engineering world, politics reign supreme with the genius of bureaucrats contributing to the muddle.  To wit the engineer measures things in terms of competence (ability to do the job); the technocrat in terms of influence (power).  The technocrat is a pyramid climber always campaigning for the next job; the engineer is always looking for results in the job to which he is assigned.  Therefore, the technocrat measures his ability on the impression he makes on those in power positions; the engineer on his capacity to perform productively and earn the respect of his engineering colleagues.

Finessing the engineer because his mind is facing in the wrong direction is a piece of cake for the technocrat.

Still, to the engineer competence is everything.  Being able to apply a particular skill to a task is crucial to his sense of worth.  An engineer is baffled by the technocrat’s bureaucratic style in saying so easily, “I’m not equipped to deal with (this or that),” having no qualms or problem getting someone else to do his bidding.

Time is of the essence to the engineer, while rules and time-consuming procedures are of the essence to the technocrat.  

Bureaucratic “competence” is tied to the idea of “nothing left out,” or the coverage of everything, even if much that is covered is nonessential or irrelevant to the project.  The outcome or results is incidental to the process as long as all the “t’s” are crossed and all the “i’s” dotted.  Technocrats are the inventors of documentation.

Bureaucracy is propelled by its own inertia furthering the notion that all behavior must be governed by a body of rational “policies & procedures” and where accountability, not competence rules.  

With bureaucracy the focus is on control not customer requirements or satisfaction, although, again, this is preached.  Meanwhile, social reality finds bureaucracy growing exponentially with the growth of organization.  This chases more than a few exceptional engineers out of mega-corporations.  But, alas, there is no escape.  The next company, if there is a next company, may be worse with even more sophisticated bureaucratic processes.

Denying these two interfaces, these two worlds, ignoring corporate’s penchant for rules and its non-systemic approach to operations, ridiculing its obsession with means and calloused disregard for ends, while battling its fixation with explicit abstractions (treating everyone as numbers), does not change the fact that bureaucracy occupies the house and carries the authority that engineering built.  

How did so resourceful a profession allow this to happen?  More importantly, what can be done about it?

*     *     *

NOTE:

PART TWO: Profile of the Engineer versus the Technocrat

(This will follow soon)

WHO STIRS THE DRINK? The Engineer Does, But It Has Been Stolen From Him!

WHO STIRS THE DRINK?  The Engineer Does, But It Has Been Stolen From Him!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 5, 2014

NOTE:

Another excerpt from TIME OUT FOR SANITY!  This book is to be published in early 2015.

The paradox is that insiders capture our attention while outsiders stir the drink. Outsiders write most of the books with insiders’ names on the jackets. Athletes and entertainers, politicians and other celebrities are too busy being busy, or too busy making money or making momentous decisions to write their own books.

The scribes in the early days of Egyptian civilization a few millenniums ago provided this service; the same was true during medieval times when kings and monarchs never bothered to learn to read, much less write, and now today ghostwriters provide this service. A consultant once gave me two boxes of his seminar performances and paid me $10,000 to whip it into a nonfiction book, which I did in four weeks. This has become something of the norm rather than the exception.

Incredible as it may seem, celebrated authors of fiction, can write the outline of a story and hire a complement of writers to author their books, of course with the celebrity author’s name prominently featured, and perhaps the hired scribbler’s name less prominently (but not always) displayed. Publishing has become a “brand name” industry with the majority of such books becoming bestsellers for the author’s brand name they carry.

Moreover, outsiders are more apt than not to write the speeches, strategy briefs, and tactical maneuvers of generals, CEOs, politicians, clerics, television commentators and educators. These scribblers remain essentially invisible but apparently mesmerized by their nearness to power and celebrity while, paradoxically, denying their creative verve while abandoning their own essence for so many pieces of silver. It is, after all, a job, right?

This is played out with bizarre finality in the engineering community. The modern world is a product of the engineering mind, no other. Yet while the engineer has created this world, it does not belong to him. It has been stolen from him.

Steven Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get HP to produce and market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.

Jobs, not himself an engineer, observed Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse, and was immediately intrigued. It took his breath away. He found himself leaping and jumping around the room, yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” He was saying to himself, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.

The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, or the persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.

In the 1980s, IBM was asleep at the wheel of the pc surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the pc computer business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete reengineering. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research (DR) whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for personal computers at the time.

But IBM could not come to an agreement with the firm’s engineering head. That would be Dr. Gary Kildall, creator of Digital Research, and its state-of-the-arts software operating system.  He was out flying his plane on that day. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, instead met with IBM representatives and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM. Her main concern was the “nondisclosure” agreement required by IBM, which would, as she saw it, have allowed IBM to hear about DR’s products, and then go out and duplicate them on its own.

Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates, and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.

To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do some stealing, posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer (SC). Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.

Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid Seattle Computer nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way with MS-DOS.

This is a common story throughout the history of engineer-in. Engineers have been finessed and baffled by opportunists since the discovery of the wheel. Engineers have shown a lack of moxie and sophistication when it has come to selling and profiting from their ideas. That is due, in part, because they reason from the general to the particular (deduction) or cognitively, whereas marketing types reason from the particular to the general (induction) or intuitively.

Moreover, engineering is a conforming discipline whereas the entrepreneur defies convention operating on instinct and intuition, and outside the box. No surprise, two non-engineers, Jobs and Gates were college dropouts who defied convention.

 The engineer deals with dead matter, whereas the entrepreneur deals with live matter, and subjugates himself to free creative design with the self actively involved in self-direction, alert to the will and fickle twisting of humanity as it insouciantly expresses itself. The strengths of entrepreneurs are in selling, not inventing or building. And so it has been to the present day.

In “The Lost Soul of the Engineer” (1993) I observed engineers have a fatal attraction to exploiters. This is the aftereffect of a conformist education of skills honed to engineering and mathematical precision that can easily be replicated and therefore are indisputable. The world of commerce is imprecise, contradictory, and disputable. It involves effective presentation, writing and speaking skills with a modicum of persuasion. Engineers tend to look on these requirements with disdain, and suffer for their failure to develop them.

The hard wiring of engineers is to stay and not stray from the consistency of the engineering discipline. While this may solve who controls the design phase, it leaves engineers viler-able to non-engineers who are likely to control the final product. They are outsiders in which insiders can exploit them at will, and unfortunately do.

Engineers deal with what is concrete and can be quantified. They develop their rational side, and ignore or deny their irrational side. The Jobs and Gates of the world embrace the irrational with gusto.

A consistent complaint of engineers is that they are underutilized. It never occurs to them that it is their fault. They expect their value to be self-evident and appreciated without any action or risk on their part.

Engineers are not decisive because they don’t see decision-making as part of their job. They are problem solvers that are easily thrown off stride by interdepartmental turf wars or company politics regarding perks and salary concerns. Consequently, pay them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit and you own them.

Their tentative nature surfaces when placed in a position of authority showing a mania for data collection to verify the most routine of decisions. It is no accident that major corporations manned by engineers seldom show the flexibility to deal with sudden disruptive change.

Engineers-as-leaders fall back on what they know, failing to trust their instincts, their counterintuitive hunches often putting their behavior on a collision course with the unexpected. Take the topsy-turvy American automotive industry. It is dominated by CEOs with engineering backgrounds, and is struggling.

As Plato might observe, engineers have the power to see into their own soul, but much prefer looking in the opposite direction. These technology creators have spurned responsibility for its chaos. They have allowed technocrats and entrepreneurs to possess, exploit and manage their creations. Fault not exploiters as they have come to this advantage by default.

Obviously, not all engineers are outsiders. But the general perception is that they have allowed insiders to run with their ideas and often into the ground. We see this in automobile exhaust emissions, nuclear waste, pesticides, the weapons of mass destruction, indeed, all the toys and tools of the electronic age. Engineers have taken a subservient role corrupted by their debilitating passivity, when they should be in charge and managing the process.

Contempt for things non-engineering has put them in a cage of their own making, and society with them. Society is sick because it is out-of-control. It is out-of-control because the designers and builders of the modern world are waiting for someone else to demonstrate moral authority. The age of science has often seen scientists and engineers acting like children, and we with them, passively consuming our own waste and being sickened for the inclination.

This plays out in a bizarre way. We applaud scientists and engineers for short-term cures of diseases that are essentially illnesses associated with pervasive toxic social behavior. We are playing catch up when we are only running faster and faster in place. We look for definitive answers when problems, at best, can only be controlled, never solved.

*     *     *

ONE MAN'S JOURNEY FROM YESTERDAY TO TOMORROW and what it means to him!

ONE MAN’S JOURNEY FROM YESTERDAY TO TOMORROW

And what it means to him!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 30, 2014

A READER WRITES:

From what has gone on in Ferguson, Missouri with an 18-year-old African American shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer after an altercation, watching television, I find I harbor mixed emotions about this tragedy. 

A grand jury found the officer not guilty of any crime, after which riots occurred in Ferguson, and literally across the United States, instigated by people with no connection with this Missouri community, and certainly no access to the grand jury testimony that exonerated the police officer.  The incident killed the young police officer’s career, as he has now left the police force. 

I wondered if we are truly a mean-spirited, cruel, and violent species and that this is part of our Nature?

When does our evolution peak?  You saw the separatism of the races to the extreme in South Africa with apartheid, and wrote a compelling novel (A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) about that experience.  Are we selectively indifferent to the violence that separates us?

St. Andrew's in Scotland is finally admitting women as students due, I’m sure, to the fact that a woman is president of the University.  Perhaps we are not very far on that path of evolution after all.  I’d appreciate your take on the subject.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It is only my opinion, and has no more weight than that.  I frame the situation as you describe it more broadly than you have indicated, and so ask your indulgence as I attempt to get my arms around this most significant problem that impacts our collective destiny. 

When we talk of violence, gratuitous violence or purposeful violence, which in fact does exist to protect ourselves, our property, our heritage, our sensibilities and our families from being marginalized or destroyed, we are entering the world of philosophy and philosophical speculation. 

Over my lifetime, and through the process of pondering several lifetimes before me through my reading, I have found us, as a society and as a people less “self-directed,” and increasingly “other directed.”

Paradoxically, as we have become more individualistic and free, we have at the same time been victimized by convention, where the “other directed” thrive.  Our response to being “other directed” finds us in a cage of our own making.  Society has become that cage.

“Self-direction” can be defined as leading a life that is essentially self-determined on the basis of choices made, experiences realized, and quality assessments of life, liberty and happiness.

Being “other directed” involves leading a life of dependence or counterdependence on others or institutions for our well-being, sacrificing the freedom, the will and the power to significant others to make those choices for us, which amounts to voluntary enslavement.

THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE

The social media and 24/7 cable news has made the “other directed” essential entertainment that connects us to each other in comfort and complacency, reducing us to the image and likeness of a commercial stereotype.

Being "other directed" is endemic to our three major religions as they have devolved: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  They took self-direction and self-appreciation away and assumed responsibility for our worldliness and filled the void with dogma and belief systems. 

Curiously, religion has lost its edge, and with it, its self-direction, falling prey to "other direction" in an attempt to be relevant and poised for the future, surrendering this advantage to the guile of the media.  

We are like puppets on a string responding to media diction and dictates. 

Religion in crisis has become more political and less purposeful, more obsessed with survival than dedicated to its mission, unwittingly fallen prey to media as predator. 

How could it be otherwise with industrialization and democracies on the one hand on cruise control, and wars and dictatorships destabilizing with a vengeance on the other?  There is precedence for this.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Great change occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, and in America in the 20th century.

Radical social and political change has brought about an upheaval in Western culture and thinking.  This has been accelerating and doesn't seem to be slowing down. 

People of all matter of beliefs and social practices are lost in the frenzy.  

We cherry pick our problems which are only symptomatic of our collective state of confusion finding us in our “other direction” essentially operating on automatic pilot as a coping mechanism, surviving on secondary information from the media, social network and the Internet.  Stated another way, we are controlled by media and media outlets.  Ergo, as a consequence, we are in control of nothing, including ourselves.

Violence, and this missive is based on your response to the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, always hides the real cause of the violence. 

Everything that transpires after the fact has little to do what previously occurred.  That was as true of Ferguson, Missouri as it was true in the case of the preemptive invasion of Iraq after 9/11.  Reason takes a holiday as emotions take control.  

That said we are an animal, the best and least of us, yet no more beast than we ever were, but no less so.  Gratuitous violence today differs little with that in the time of Jesus.      

We act shocked with the scandals of Catholic priests abusing children who were in their trust.  We look at Israelis and Palestinians and see both sides equally ineffective and wonder what is wrong.  We decide that Islam is a bad religion judging an entire society of people by its radical fringe of Jihadists.    

This is cherry picking.  Media is good at cherry picking.  We are good at validating the cherry picking by behaving as media paints a picture of "what is," which often is "what isn't."  Instant "truth" is always a lie because it hides the truth in the lie.  

Philosophy has traditionally penetrated our confusion and promoted understanding of where we are, what we are, and what we value, and why, as it gets inside the why that we have become to who we are right now.  Philosophy moves slowly but methodically.

But, alas, philosophy has retreated into specialization and spontaneity like everything else.  No longer is philosophy “self-directed,” but is now mainly "other directed" into systems (like how religions are now perceived) so complex they mean little or nothing to us.  

Validation comes from professors in philosophy earning tenure at some university, preferably some elite university.  It has not always been like this.

During the Enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th century, Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley spent time appealing to our rational side and looked at the prospects for the modern man to find contentment and purpose in his being.

This was a time of feudalism, the imperial dominance of Roman Catholicism, which was unraveling, a time of empire and the aristocracy, which was also fading.  Philosophers of the Enlightenment period saw man as a thinking being capable of self-direction, out of nature but part of nature with a balance of spiritual and cognitive possibilities.

Not surprising, once man came to realize and understand his potential, once he believed in self-direction, a series of revolutions in the 18th and 19th century occurred to unshackle man from the iron chains of the enslaving and demeaning status quo.  This led to among other revolutions the American and French Revolution. 

The philosophy of revolution of the 20th century twisted self-direction into other direction with Nazism and Communism. 

While more than 100 million souls perished in wars of the 20th century, self-direction was now superseded by the crafty manipulation of other directing propaganda by Germany and Russia.

War always disrupts the social fabric not unlike a child leaving home and rebelling against the dictates and domination of the parents.  

Revolution has one voice but many authors: Jefferson, Paine, Burke, Rousseau, Godwin, Marx, Proudhon, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci.  The world these philosophers envisioned had the spirit of the Enlightenment but not always its mind.    

Thus followed the Counter Enlightenment period, the dark and uncertain world that shattered the earlier triumphs of the march of reason.

We are still in the Counter Enlightenment period, which has been dominated by philosophers of "romanticism and existentialism," philosophies that question the "good life." the presence of "God," "Free Will," and the idea of "Happiness." 

These are the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Freud. 

What these philosophers held in common, apart from their distinct literary talent to express their thoughts in comprehensible and often compelling language, was a singular contempt for religion and the prospects of the soul.  These thinkers saw man on earth as on an island, alone, in the darken jungle of despair with no prospects beyond this life for anything.

They lived in the "other directed" world where no one has control of destiny, or anything else, so why try?  This is it!  Period!

Yet, of the more than 7 billion souls on this planet earth, three quarter of them believe in a monotheistic or polytheistic faith, in other words, in religion.  It is apparent they feel the need for a sense of someone or something beyond the human experience with which to identify and to seek connection.

THE INFORMATION AGE

A small sliver of the world's population believes and thinks otherwise, yet it is this sliver that controls the Information Age and all its outlets. 

With young people today, essentially unaware of what I have just summarized in a few words, which is the foundation of our Western civilization, are influenced largely by media and the instruments of media in what is considered more or less as the tangible world of "Science and Utility." 

Young people have been turned into "things," for everything is a "thing."  Education is a thing, life is a thing; the emphasis is on the empirical useful application of things. 

The Information Age is a thing that Bentham, Russell, Dewey, Popper, Kuhn and Wittgenstein would approve of, a cadre of philosophers of mainly atheistic temperaments.  

For them there was no God, no soul, no religion, and therefore the violence of man's nature; his pettiness, envy, greed, licentiousness, and immaturity were considered by products of this nonsensical preoccupation with religion.  Indeed, religion has been found the source of modern man's dilemma, the citadel of violence, and wasted lives.  Other directed individuals and groups have an uncanny gift for projecting the blame on something or someone in a vulnerable state.

Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Karl Schmitt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas projected what modernity was all about, and what man must (or should) do to corral the beast that he is, and make him a more useful social being. 

Should you read these compelling thinkers, and they are compelling, you would see little evidence much less acknowledgement of the spiritual side of man's character, and how vital it is to life and living.  Man to them is a thing in a system with the focus on the system and how man is likely to behave in that system. 

In the postmodern world, the world of tomorrow, a world with a state of mind and attitude that is still in its formational stage, a world that I came back from South Africa to discover in 1969, a world that saw the end of the "American Century" some thirty years early," a world of old ideologies declining -- that includes all the great religions -- and new belief systems emerging of popular culture led by the likes of Dylan and Madonna, while the world was declared flat and nations reduced to a "global village."  None of it was true, but it sounded as if it were true, and so it became part of the lexicon.

The dystopia novels of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1924), Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) and George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) are now coming to fruition as the nightmare they predicted.

To be fair, there is hope if philosophers such as Michel Foucault can see their ideas penetrate the categorization of humanity into such stereotypical groups such as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the upper class, middle class, and the poor. 

My atomistic, individualistic nature has been subjected to such categorization by those who know me and those who think they know me. 

What I am and what I have always been is a poor boy from Clinton, Iowa who has read a lot, seen and done a lot, but has never abandoned his roots, while having the propensity to go against the grain of popular beliefs.

*     *     *