Opinion piece by Jason Gallagher MIEAust.
Jason Gallagher MIEAust is a structural engineer and Deputy Chair of the College of Leadership and Management Queensland. As Director of Joseph Consulting, Jason works with engineering and government clients to empower their leadership and help develop strategic and operational insights.
With signs pointing to another year of subdued growth, we must innovate. Innovation within our industry often focuses upon ‘engineering solutions’. This is what we are good at and comfortable doing, as engineers love solving problems and designing things. However, we must also use this subdued growth period to innovate our bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is slowly suffocating our industry. While most of the key ideas behind our approvals, safety and project procedures are excellent, our bureaucracy is full of contradictions. For example, many engineering companies pride themselves in having great staff, with outstanding human resource processes to recruit the best people. But once recruited, procedures are imposed upon them like they have no ability to complete the job they were recruited to do.
Let’s look at two industries that have embraced innovation and consequently been freed from the suffocation of bureaucracy – taxis and cricket.
Uber has disrupted and turned the highly regulated taxi industry on its head. How? Uber cleared their minds and looked at the core service of the taxi industry – driving people from A to B. They then asked the question: if we had a blank canvass, how could we provide this core service for people today and into the future? The result was a system that focused on engaging highly motivated people and equipping them with a means to easily provide their own personalised taxi service. It also appears that they bypassed existing regulations in doing so.
Two questions arise from this example. Do we clearly understand our core engineering services? If so, starting with a blank canvass, how can we deliver them to our clients today and into the future?
The game of cricket has a long and rich history. Yet, crowd numbers in Australia were declining until the advent of the T20 format. T20 is the same game, yet each team only has 20 overs to score as many runs as possible. While the traditional game focused upon ‘good cricket shots’, with elegant and fluid strikes, the new T20 format focuses on the batter identifying a gap between the fielders and using any shot to get the ball into the gap, thus maximising the number of runs scored and consequently increasing the pace and excitement of the game.
The key lesson from this example for us in the engineering sector is to consider ‘reformatting’ our projects to let new and effective work methods grow and develop.
Importantly, as new innovations emerge we will need brave engineers: brave engineers to lead, to advocate and to bring the change our industry needs.
The author is keen for readers to email any examples of engineering service delivery that successfully balances the need for approvals, safety and project procedures with the agility that is critical for the future, as well as any examples where project approaches have been ‘reformatted’ to let new effective work methods grow and develop.
Main image: iStock.
Image insert: Jason Gallagher MIEAust.