Season 2 Wrap Up: De-engineering of Technical Roles and Engineering Education & Philosophy

In the final episode of Season 2 of the Risk! Engineers Talk Governance podcast, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss the de-engineering of technical roles in organisations and engineering education and philosophy.

They reflect on their experience as expert witnesses at a recent hearing where technical knowledge was lacking in person, and they highlight the importance of having engineers involved in and/or advising on technical roles. They also discuss the de-engineering of organisations and the shift towards a more compliance-focused approach. They touch on the need for engineers to have a global view and the importance of questioning and thinking critically. 

Also discussed is the lack of emphasis on ethics in the engineering profession and the need for a holistic approach to problem-solving and the role of engineering philosophy in driving change. The episode concludes with a reminder of the importance of thinking and the need for engineers to embrace a philosophy of change.

If you’d like to learn more about Richard & Gaye, visit www.r2a.com.au. 

Please submit any feedback or topic ideas to admin@r2a.com.au – we’d love to hear from you. 

Transcript

Megan (Producer) (00:00):

Welcome to Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. In this episode, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis wrap up a few topics they've discussed throughout Season 2 and chat about de-engineering in organisations and engineering philosophy. Please enjoy the chat and if you do give us a rating. Also, don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. If you have any feedback or topic ideas, get in touch via admin@r2a.com.au and look out for Season 3.

Gaye Francis (00:37):

Hi Richard, welcome to our last podcast for Season 2.

Richard Robinson (00:41):

Welcome Gaye.

Gaye Francis (00:42):

Today we're not really sure what we're going to talk about. There's a few topics that we've sort of touched on in the podcast throughout this season and there's been some comments about de-engineering and engineering education, engineering philosophy, so we thought we'd make this a little bit of a mismatch.

Richard Robinson (01:02):

Well, and I think the core reason why it sort of popped up is when we were at the VCAT (Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal) hearing acting as an expert witness, the member actually asked the major hazards facility and the council and the major hazards regulator to provide information.

Gaye Francis (01:17):

Some technical information.

Richard Robinson (01:18):

Technical information. And what we sort of discovered was they all sent lawyers. There were no technical engineering type knowledge people there at all.

Gaye Francis (01:29):

Just clarifying that they weren't in the session, but our understanding was that the facility, the major hazard facility, had gone back to their technical people to confirm the understanding, but they were not represented as such at the hearings.

Richard Robinson (01:44):

And likewise with the major hazard regulator, the actual technical people giving the technical advice weren't there. They were being represented and interpreted by lawyers.

Gaye Francis (01:54):

Correct.

Richard Robinson (01:58):

And when it actually came down to the final hearing, in fact, I was the only technical expert witness there, which surprised me greatly because I would've thought the council, for example, would've thought to have their own technical expert witness and that was not the case. They were actually represented by a lawyer and a town planner officer.

Gaye Francis (02:21):

Who were both consultants to the council.

Richard Robinson (02:22):

Who were both consultants to the council.

Gaye Francis (02:24):

I think the other one was that they actually commented and said it during the hearing: Oh, we don't have that technical expertise.

Richard Robinson (02:31):

Correct.

Gaye Francis (02:33):

On a technical matter, which was a bit of a shock.

Richard Robinson (02:35):

Which was the whole point of the exercise. And obviously the town planner and the lawyer's knowledge of town planning, legal and past cases, and all that sort of thing, is obviously something which we had very little knowledge about and chose not to comment on at all. But when it actually came to the technical matters over-pressures and how these things would happen and what sort of controls you could put in engineering design and safety design, all these other matters, it simply wasn't considered, so far as we can tell from their point of view. Now, when you stand back and look at this, this is something that's been happening in local government for some time and we've noticed this all over the place. I mean, once upon a time you used to have the town clerk who did the administration and a municipal or city engineer who ran the outside things, but that means they also did planning permits, building permits and everything.

(03:24):

These days that's all been disaggregated and so now you have the building permits basically run by building surveyors and the planning permits run by town planners and you have no holistic overview of what can be done or how things could be done to manage things. And so when some curious recommendation, from our point of view, pops out to say the way to manage risk from an explosion overpressure is just to reduce the number of people that live there, rather than building the building so it can withstand and prevent the hazards from actually causing pain and suffering to people - it just wasn't contemplated so far as we could tell.

(03:59):

Now this is something that's been popping up all over the place. It actually has higher level consequences for your society. What seems to happen in local government, at least, is that all the engineers have basically been pushed into water and wastewater and sewage and stormwater, but they've all been pushed into silos. There's no overarching philosophy, engineering philosophy put in.

(04:21):

Now you might ask the question, what's engineering philosophy? I do have to report that as a group, engineers really haven't been that interested in the subject. I tend to mention it every now and then to you and you sort of roll your eyes at me, to be fair.

Gaye Francis (04:33):

Richard has been trying to write an engineering philosophy book and course for, I've been working with him for over 20 years and I think he's been trying to do it in all of that time since I've been working with him.

Richard Robinson (04:44):

Well, yes, and I keep trying different universities trying to get them interested and to say they're not particularly interested in me, but that's the way universities have gone - if you don't have a PhD these days, you really don't get much of a look into any of these courses, as we have discovered. It doesn't matter how intellectually useful, what you're saying is so far as we can tell.

Gaye Francis (05:01):

It is an academic qualification.

Richard Robinson (05:03):

Yeah, that's right. And I guess in that sense there used to be a fair transfer between industry and tertiary education and engineers. I haven't seen that occurring as much as it used to. I can quite distinctly remember I was at Monash as a student doing engineering, they actually appointed a professor who was definitely industry based and they did that as a matter of policy as I recall correctly. Whether that's still happening or not, I get the feeling it's not, I think academia has become very closed, let's put it that way.

(05:38):

Anyway, the point about all this though is you see what's engineering and what's engineering philosophy and what's engineering education about now? This is something I've had a bit to do about, I mean a long time ago before we started the risk engineering, well, it was the Loss Control section of the Management Branch of Victoria Division, which turned into the Risk Engineering Society, but we're also doing things running engineering education programs for engineers; CPD, basically, for engineers, and we got a lot of very interesting speakers, one of the talks was Bernie Callan giving me help on a couple of things too, because he was interested in the subject as well. But I also dug out some papers by Sir John Monash. He gave a very interesting paper on engineer education, his retiring address as the President of the Victoria Institute of Engineers, and he was explaining how the need for engineers to have sort of a global view on what was going on, and this was before he basically went off to the first World War and became a very successful General, because, again, he had a very global view of how things should be thought about.

(06:40):

Now, from my point of view, engineering philosophy has always been the philosophy of change, meaning if you don't like it, change it. And one of the characteristics of engineers, and I know I've talked to a number of spouses of engineers and one of the things they always observe about them, they've said, is when something they don't think is quite right, they go and fix it. They go and do something about it. That's one of the characteristics that they've always observed.

Gaye Francis (07:03):

I think it's a curiosity and ability to question things if you don't, you don't just take it as the status quo.

Richard Robinson (07:10):

But that's one of the problems we've been having with engineer education because we've been running some post-grad programs for different universities at different times and one of the things we've noticed is some of these graduate engineers we've been getting haven't been as curious or wanting to change as much. They just want whatever the information is so they can go and apply it, and want it to be a cookbook recipe and, if you like, that's one of the frustration we have with the whole ALARP business, from our point of view, there's a process; you use quantified risk assessment, use a target level of risk, if you don't satisfy your criteria, then you do something rather than sort of saying, is there something else that needs to be done?

Gaye Francis (07:45):

I think that's being extended more into industry as well. A number of clients that we talk to and potential clients that we talk to: What's the answer? What's the process to get the answer? And risk's one of those subjects that it's not a cookie cutter approach, it's not black and white. You will get subtly different answers to every problem you apply it to. And so you've got to think and thinking is hard (we touched on this in another podcast) and we've found that people want a process. What's the process that I need to do to get the answer? And I don't know whether it's because it's gone down a more compliance or an audit type process, black and white, it's right or wrong. But in risk it's not right or wrong. It's about thinking it through and putting in the best option that you can.

Richard Robinson (08:39):

Well, I think that's the point. Remember how we had promoted the Professor of Public Policy and Law from Cambridge University, David Howeth, and the point he made was, and this is where the big law firms in the UK and US have gone to, and that it's law as engineering and what he meant by that, and they're literally following the engineering design process: A client turns up they've got a problem or they want to do something, in the circumstances what are the options? Well, what are the options? And in the circumstances, which is the best? That's a straight-out engineering design option. It's not a cookie cutter approach in the sense of 'here's the process, we'll go through and we'll definitely get you the best answer', because you don't what the options are until you look for them. And then we don't what your circumstances are and so what might actually be the best thing to do at that time. And it can change.

Gaye Francis (09:27):

Yes.

Richard Robinson (09:29):

But that's the best advice you're going to get. Now that is what the Consulting Engineers used to do, but they've stopped calling themselves Consulting Engineers who've turned into Consult Australia. I don't quite understand what that is. And they've dropped their code of ethics. I mean for those of you don't remember these things, I do, but because I used to talk to Ben Fink, the Managing Director of GHD, he was very strong on this, to be a member of the ACA, the Consulting Engineers, the majority ownership had to be engineers who were corporate members of Engineers Australia. And the reason for that was to ensure that the code of ethics of Engineers Australia, the consulting engineering practice had to comply with the code of ethics of Engineers Australia, which basically said you had to put the interest of a client first. Once you just become owned by general shareholders, it's all about the money for the shareholders. Nobody cares about the ethics.

(10:18):

If to pull a plug on the job is the commercially intelligent thing to do for your shareholders, then you do that. Whereas from a consulting engineering viewpoint, you have to finish the job in the best interest of a client, even if it meant you might lose some money. And you can only do that if the majority of the directors are actually bound by a code of ethics. And then the question becomes what's a profession? Well, generally it's applying a code of ethics and if you can't apply a code of ethics, then what are you?

Gaye Francis (10:46):

But I think that has dropped down even in Engineers Australia, the code of ethics is not as promoted as it once was.

Richard Robinson (10:53):

Well, Ben Fink made it absolutely crystal clear to me, although he said there was three, although I think there's actually five. Stick to your area of competence, no kickbacks, he who pays you is your client, be responsible for your own negligence and give credit where credit's due. And wow, has that one been gone missing lately?

Gaye Francis (11:11):

Yes. And that was instilled in Richard and being Richard's business partner that had been instilled in me from a very, very young age as an engineer, young engineer. I think what we're also seeing, and maybe this is the reason why people are looking for more that cookie cutter approach and those systems and processes in place, is the idea that organisations are being de-engineered. We are coming across a lot of people in engineering roles or technical roles that don't have a technical background.

Richard Robinson (11:41):

Correct.

Gaye Francis (11:42):

And so they're looking for processes and systems to put in place to be able to understand, but they don't have the background to be able to question. Is that the right idea?

Richard Robinson (11:56):

That's one way of saying it.

Gaye Francis (11:59):

Of those in technical organisations. So we've come across quite a lot of people that are running big technical projects that don't have any technical background.

Richard Robinson (12:11):

It can be done if you have the right technical advice, but that means you're going to have the right people working with you.

Gaye Francis (12:15):

So it's about that team approach. Again, you can't do these things in isolation.

Richard Robinson (12:20):

I suppose there's two other points I'll just make in passing. There was this thing, I think it was the University of Wollongong actually who started it and then the medical faculties took it over, but one of the things they sort of said and it was a frustrations I had when I was doing engineering was that you were taught all this science basically and you were basically made an applied scientist, in effect, and all the ethics stuff and all the legal stuff that you need to know to be effective in practice, you learned after you'd got a qualification of some sort. And you'd just been pumped science at you and you didn't really understand what use it was going to be, and I've got to say an awful lot it wasn't of a great use the way my career went, it never made sense to me.

(12:58):

Now, the University of Wollongong, I think it was, decided that what they would do first was the first thing they ever give a bunch of engineers in first year the first thing you got was a design exercise and you found out what you needed to know in order to make it work. And then you need to work out, well, if I need to know this, I'd better go and study that. And that's what the medical faculty started doing. They take a bunch of first year students and show them some poor soul on a bed who's not well and they say: What's wrong with them?

Gaye Francis (13:26):

What are you going to do?

Richard Robinson (13:27):

And force them to understand what they needed to know in order to bring about a successful conclusion. I understand the medical, that's one of the reasons why we started an education branch in Victoria because we were trying to expand that sort of understanding to the local universities. Don't think it actually succeeded, although every now and then sometimes you see a spark of life in a different place you weren't expecting. But this overall philosophical view, it does seem to me to be important, still is. And the other way I think it might've popped up, if you start the engineering society as a whole, one of the consequences of trying to fix that is to start registering engineers. I would've preferred to be the other way around that the engineering philosophy was still endemic in society and the engineers weren't registered. But if the only way to actually get the engineering philosophy back into the system is to register them and force it back into the system that way, then that might be a necessary consequence. But I'm still not absolutely sure that's going to work.

Gaye Francis (14:23):

But that's not what they're using registration for engineers for. It's a liability.

Richard Robinson (14:29):

No... But it has that consequence whether or not that's what was intended. And certainly the way the engineers were going about it, it's more about being a status thing rather than a functional thing. Whereas I'm more interested functionally. But it's like us, we don't find that being registered in Queensland or Victoria is essential to us because from the point of view of signing off on the design, which is where the crunch really comes, we can't do that anyway. And by the time we've finished doing our due diligence approach, everybody's got to have agreed that it's a good idea and then the individual design flows from that.

Gaye Francis (15:01):

Yes. So I think taking all of this and wrapping up our last podcast for the season, it's really about engineering is about that philosophy of change and being able to change things. And to be able to change things, you've got to think.

Richard Robinson (15:16):

Well, Karl Popper in is a book Objective Knowledge, he makes the point, he gives an example of a mechanical engineer and said: Look, when you're designing a society, no mechanical engineer would design a car without testing it hard and running it through all sorts of things. You don't just get the design, get it right the first time and everything works. You work hard to make it function. I mean, (Elon) Musk just got his rocket off again, they both blew up, but the separation that got into space, it really is a progressive evolutionary design and I suspect the next one will actually get there. This takes time and it's hard work. Societal change and issues require the same effort. And for the life of me, I've never understood how that understanding which sort of exists in philosophy, generally, isn't understood to apply in engineering philosophy. Philosophical terms too. But that's just me, obviously not everybody frets about this stuff.

Gaye Francis (16:19):

Alright, so I think on that note, we might finish our podcast for today. Richard, Thank you for joining us for Season 2. We hope you've enjoyed it! And we will be back for Season 3 very soon.

Richard Robinson (16:33):

Thanks Gaye.

Gaye Francis (16:34):

Thanks Richard.