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Capitalize on Constraints: Create a Common Sense Checklist, with Guru Madhavan, Senior Policy Advisor, National Academy of Sciences
Engineering offers this durable, reliable and an efficient platform to think about a variety of very different and complex challenges. There are some people who don’t even know when to approach constraints or think of constraints. But good engineers capitalize on constraints. They know how to exploit those to achieve useful outcomes and I think that’s a good quality for us to learn, adapt, and apply to our lives and businesses.
One of the most famous engineers, George Heilmeier, who was known for his catechism he must employ that checklist to achieving innovations. And some of them are really basic questions and I think people often run away from engineering thinking it’s really complicated, scary and everything. But it is pretty close to common sense. And asking really basic questions. If something flops you ask why. And then you don’t get an answer ask why five times and achieve it and that’s something Toyota engineers use as part of the design process.
But what George Heilmeier did was establish a set of principles or guiding questions like okay, what are you trying to do? You’re able to articulate it without any jargon than that would be very helpful. I mean if you do it who cares. How are you going to achieve it? What are the limits of the current practice? And what are the evaluations, like the midterms and the final exams that we call for the approach that you’re taking. These seem very simple. They’re just organized in a way that enable you to do something more purposeful, useful and achieve something that has utility and could perform over time.
The structured way of thinking and ability to appreciate that constraints are a given. You cannot run away from them. But how do you perform despite them, as well as making efficient tradeoffs with available resources. This is what engineering is all about and I think at its basic we could all gain some valuable insights from the engineering profession. That there would be practiced engineers are not. I think that’s going to be helpful. But in a way we’re all engineers at one point. We all used to break things apart and put them together and at some point we just stopped cultivating the mindset.
I think we live in a super specialized society, specialties gain a lot more respect than generalization and so forth. I think it would be a good value add for education to create systems level thinkers.