Engineers have a lot to answer for...
...according to local chief poohbah engineer, Prof Jorg Imberger, Chair of the Centre for Water Research, and head of the Dept of Environmental Engineering at UWA.
In his lecture last week at the UWA Summer School 2001 - From the Kindergarten into the 21st Century - Jorg left no doubt about how engineers, driven by economic rationalists, have really messed up big time in the recent past. They must stop doing so.
The 20th Century rate of stress upon the natural environment was slow enough to allow nature to heal itself within 3 to 4 generations. Now, the same degree of change occurs within one generation - neither the planet nor society can possibly restore a happy equilibrium in that time/space frame.
Engineers, said Jorg, have reached the peak of their profession, where they can make decisions faster and more thoroughly than ever before - using their highly developed linear, unidimensional, growth driven, and wealth driven thinking.
Which is good news for designing bridges but bad news for designing better multidimensional solutions to the now multidimensional issues of transporting goods and people quickly, efficiently, and without killing each other or the planet.
Unfortunately for these Undertakers to the World (Jorg's phrase), our most urgent problems needing fast solutions do not require linear, unidimensional, growth or wealth driven thinking. That old thinking cannot create the new solutions.
We need to instruct engineers, says Jorg, to come up with a new system where the need for growth is questioned; a system where the goals or drivers are, according to Jorg: sustainability, creativity, biodiversity, and cultural diversity.
The gauntlet is down; engineers, consider yourselves challenged. Time to shift your highly honed thinking to outside your shiny metallic very square and rigid box and help the world find a better way of doing things.
The ec-rat mind believes time is money and therefore rarely allows time for creative, not while the meter is running, which for most engineers today seems to be 60 hours a week minimum.
We will never create the necessary new system, or find the right answers, as long as we rush pell-mell toward the next buck.
Wake up and remember who we are, says American keynote speaker David Kundtz (dk@stopping.com). We need quiet stillness to rest our rational minds and encourage our creative thought processes, so we can hear our own wisdom.
Even the most stressed-out exec can find moments of stillness. Stillpoints, says David, are those brief minutes in between events in the day, when you cease your activity, breathe, focus and be still. No matter how brief, they feed our creative thinking.
Stopovers are longer times of doing "nothing," such as walking on the beach, sitting in the park, observing the world without an agenda.
Grinding Halts, he says, are long changes of pace to refocus our life, through lengthy holidays, illness or midlife crises, and so on.
C'mon Aussie engineers - get still, get creative, and get us out of this mess.
Business News 25 Jan 2002
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