It's Time - The American Engineering Association

By John G. Voeller P.E.

There are many groups of professionals that act as a national voice on issues they are perhaps best able to address. Such groups are sought by government, education, the media, and public service organizations to help society understand the issues and plan best actions. At a conference in Washington at the National Academy of Sciences, I listened to a group of people from different parts of industry discuss the difficulty of getting government commitment, attention, funding, press, etc.; the trappings of a segment of society devoted to a general professional sector. In this case, the sector was the engineering community. Many of the attendees represented societies of engineers of different types. The conversation was cordial, the desire for attention not rooted in personal agenda, but a need to create momentum for environmental, social, and cultural initiatives to better our world. As I listened, I began to build a mental picture, which I tend to do so that I can step back from something and see what it looks like when I "squint" at its overall shape and shadow.

What I saw was a fuzzy shape that could have been a giant boulder or a pile of pea gravel or pebbles. The pebbles were the many separate research, social, academic, knowledge, and conventional wisdom packets that go with the many different engineering societies and organizations. As I listened to people complain about the ability of "engineering" to get the attention of the press on critical environmental issues, for example, I wondered which pebble the press was supposed to touch. I wondered how the press could dip their intellectual hand into the pile of pebbles and come up with a coherent picture. In fact, I wondered how the press, a legislator, a cause, or anything else could converse with the pebbles without incredible effort and intense entropy. Then I "squinted" to see the boulder.

The boulder was a solution. An engineering amalgam. The lawyers have the American Bar Association, the doctors have the AMA and the dentists the ADA, etc. So why not engineering? One attendee quickly informed me that there was such a group and that their representative was there. However, several in the room quickly pounced on this item by indicating that the group was not for any such purposes and represented only a few of the groups. This was quickly supported by another attendee who indicated she was attending as the representative for no less than 45 electrical engineering societies and groups.

The Human Component

As the blur in my "squint" began to focus, I then saw a human component. I saw hundreds of engineering students proudly arguing which discipline was harder, better, got paid more, etc., and I quickly saw the same foolishness transcend into a similar but more damaging segregation in the firms that would employ them; the "this" department and the "that" department. Even in firms without an explicit "this" and "that", the separatist thinking was perpetuated by the HR people and their simplistic view of engineering as it was fifty years ago. Most of all, I saw the engineering societies assisting in this "partition vision".

The focus came a bit clearer and it was apparent that if we had a boulder, all of engineering could become a social force for good, a greater influence on policy and action, and a voice for practiced analysis of effectiveness, appropriateness, risk, and reward in complex areas such as application of technology and alteration of approach. I remembered the Challenger disaster where the guidance of engineers was overruled by other agendas to dramatic effect and where the brilliant clear thinking of a Richard Feynmann explained the error of those agendas with a simple O-ring and a glass of ice water. How many other situations of understood or calculable phenomena has our society traversed when decisions are made either in absence of engineering knowledge or without engineering guidance having a strong enough voice to make itself heard?

A Simple Solution To The Problem

So the answer was simple. Doctors still have dozens if not hundreds of specialties (pebbles), and they have groups specific to their concerns, but they also have a common voice from which to speak and be heard as a boulder. We need an engineering boulder. Well, maybe we need a technology boulder. The IT gang doesn't have a common voice mechanism yet either, and their involvement in our world is becoming intense and immense. Since the two are so tightly intertwined, maybe we need an applied science boulder. Oops... That's most of the research and the National Academy of Sciences or a few others are now candidates for that boulder, given the preponderance of "applied" in science today. So maybe the right boulder is engineering and we stop sneering at the term software engineer.

Though some believe such a group already exists, it does not. A quick perusal of the quotes gathered by the media from experts in any situation where technology and engineering is the issue will show many individuals and no consolidated organization representing them. It will often show names of organizations that are specialist groups, which is fine as long as the world is viewed simply. As we understand the complexity and interdependence of the critical phenomena of our world, we will need to examine new social and scientific issues with a multi-discipline objectivity that only a summary organization can provide. It also then becomes the appropriate guide and driver to a new view of engineering thinking which is complexity-based

We already have situations in the planned advances in technology areas such as process control systems with intimate intermingling of artificial life, labs on a chip, intelligent devices that learn over time, etc. These will require much more understanding of the total picture to make their specification, application, operation, and maintenance viable in a commercial setting. The combined engineering body becomes the wellspring for this perspective. A perfect example of this is the recent explosion of new engineering analysis tools called "multi-physics", which allow us to leverage the true multi-discipline picture of natural phenomena that is teaching us many new things about our world.

The American Engineering Association's Time Is Now

The idea of an American Engineering Association is long past due, but now more critical than ever. When one asks a scientist with only lab experience to discuss the impact of a certain chemical on the ground water, the answer is likely to be unusable because of its high theoretical and low practical component. Too often, the seeking of an educator by the media to discuss a real-world question involving application yields results that are too general and that do not start by stating the assumptions the responder is making. We need an AEA to help society understand assumptions, technical vocabulary, and interdependency across disciplines.

One should ask a few simple questions. What is the single most common thread between the average engineering degree and its corollary Ph.D.? It is that both involve focus on a single discipline. What is the difference between the same two degrees? It is that the average engineering degree is a low level of focus on one discipline layered over a general base education across disciplines, whereas the PhD is an ever greater level of specialization on a tiny subset of the general education breadth. The scientists are leading us to the next world of powerful understanding and utilization of complexity and other advances that transcend simplistic discipline thinking. The role of engineering to apply the discovered science will require a broader perspective, even in the way we interact with and help guide our society.

The AEA will not change the world, but it can be a powerful force to help educators adjust their curriculums, to help the regulators and standards makers work in the larger contexts, and help society leverage more powerful tools and perspectives to solve the difficult problems the next generations face. It's time.

About the author: John G. Voeller, P.E., is Senior Vice President, Chief Knowledge Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Black & Veatch, a large international engineering firm. ENR awarded Voeller their 1998 Award of Excellence, their highest honor for individual achievement in the construction industry. He can be reached at voellerjg@bv.com.

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©  Copyright 2007, The Construction Sciences Research Foundation, Inc.  Updated January 12, 2007.