We need to know it all

Students and many engineers think that … However, research demonstrates, and expert engineers will tell you that … Technical expertise (individual skill) is

what distinguishes an engineer. You have to know your technical ‘stuff’ or you will lose the respect of your peers and boss.

Asking for help is a sign of giving up, a kind of cheating – a last resort. If you don’t know it, look it up in texts, online, at the library, Wikipedia (if you can get away with it), and never admit that you don’t know.

Good engineering works because knowledge is distributed in the minds of different people: it is not necessary to know everything, but you do need to know how to find someone you can ask and how to get them to help you.² Above all, when you don’t know, say so.

What is your anxiety level about your own technical knowledge? How comfortable do you feel about your technical knowledge that you had to learn at university?

Write your own comments on this. If you have a word processor, write your com-ments and then have them ready to copy and paste into The University of Western Australia learning management system (UWA LMS) later.

If you lack confidence in the technical knowledge that you had to learn at univer-sity, or if you feel that you don’t really remember it accurately, that you would be hard pressed to explain entropy in the context of the second law of thermodynamics, then you have probably made a realistic assessment.

Don’t worry. One of the strengths of a university education is that you learnt at least some of the maths and the other technical stuff once, which means that you could learn it again if you need it. It also helps, without you necessarily being aware of it, when you find yourself in an unfamiliar situation. Exposure to mathematics and engineering science theory actually helps you make sense of these situations more quickly if the theories provide useful insights.

It takes courage, especially when you are young, to admit that you don’t know something that might seem very basic. That’s why many young (and not-so-young) engineers choose the web, even Wikipedia, as their first point of reference. There is nothing to be ashamed of: everyone else has experienced similar feelings of utter ignorance and helplessness.

With over 260 different engineering disciplines, how would anyone know where to start? Since no one can immediately predict which discipline they’re going to end up in, how can any engineer know what they need to learn next?

This chapter can help answer that question. As we shall see by the end of this chapter, much of the working knowledge needed by engineers lies in the minds of the people who work in the engineering enterprise. Accessing that knowledge effectively is the key to success in engineering. Learning and building new knowledge is also a vital part of the picture that we will return to in later chapters.

DEFINITIONS

We will need to understand more about what we mean by ‘knowledge’, but first, we need to understand the notion of an engineering enterprise.

Practice concept 18: An engineering enterprise

In order to understand engineering knowledge, it is essential to explain the idea of an engineering enterprise and, in doing so, define engineering differently from the tradi-tional notions that emphasise only the practical application of science.³An engineering enterprise is an organisation that depends on the application of specialised knowledge that emerges from engineering schools and allied communities of practice. An enter-prise is not the same as a firm or company. The people involved can come from several different firms, all collaborating with the same purpose – delivering a product, a service, or information. Even the customers, clients, and end users are part of the enterprise:

without their knowledge of how to use the products and services, as well as their will-ingness to pay for it, there would be no enterprise. The investors who provide finance also play an integral role. The people in the enterprise are not all engineers; in fact, there may be very few engineers and they may represent a very small minority of the people involved. Engineering relies on many different people collaborating, including the financiers, clients, end users, consultants, and even government regulators.

Engineering, therefore, is much more than what engineers do.

Engineering enterprises use tools, machinery, energy, information, and compo-nents to transform materials and information into deliverable products, information, or services by using special knowledge contributed by engineers. The aim is the pre-dictable delivery of reliable products, services, or information, all provided through the most economic use of financial capital, human effort, and material resources possible.

The products, information, and services are often provided as inputs to other engineering enterprises in a complex web of connections linking companies and people in a network that, these days, extends across the planet.

Figure 5.2 helps to illustrate these connections. It shows six engineering enterprises linked to each other in what is called a value chain. The outputs of each enterprise, collectively, have greater value than the inputs. The diagram is highly simplified:

Figure 5.1 An engineering enterprise.

Figure 5.2 Simplified diagram of an engineering value chain: refer to text for explanation

only the principal flow of products has been shown. With the help of machinery and energy, limestone rock at a quarry is transformed into crushed limestone powder and transported to a cement plant. The main product of this plant, cement powder, is combined with granite chips, sand, water, and special additives and transformed into wet concrete at a batching plant. The wet concrete is carried by special cement trucks to a nickel refinery that is under construction. Here, the concrete is combined with steel, pipework, reactor vessels, and instrumentation to construct the nickel refinery.

The refinery, when completed, will process crushed nickel-bearing ore from a mine into nickel concentrate: a powder containing a much higher proportion of nickel. The powder is transported to a port where it is loaded into ships that transport it to a

faraway city (not shown), where electric arc furnaces convert the powder into metallic nickel, which is supplied to . . . and so on.

Figure 5.2 shows an extreme simplification: each enterprise provides just one prod-uct to the next. In reality, every enterprise has most, if not all, of the other inputs shown in Figure 5.1. The quarry uses mining, crushing, conveying, and loading machinery that, in turn, require fuel, electricity, and spare parts. The cement plant also requires water and energy in the form of fuel (oil, gas, or powdered coal) and electricity. Ash and other minerals are roasted in a large rotating kiln with powdered limestone, producing cement clinker. Crushing, conveying, and processing machinery had to be installed at the cement plant, along with instrumentation, controls, and product storage silos.

Furthermore, all these elements require ongoing maintenance and spare parts. Trans-port and logistics⁴engineering knowledge, the ability to transport and store materials and components, is an integral part of this network of enterprises.

Each enterprise provides information, products, or services that are more valu-able than the inputs. Each relies on special knowledge, mostly focusing on just the operations performed in the enterprise. Engineers work in many of the firms that are involved, but not necessarily all of them: many engineers are consultants who come to provide advice only when needed. Engineers also work in banks and invest-ment firms that provide financial support for these enterprises. They help insurance companies assess the risk of financial losses from fires, breakdowns, and accidental damage. Engineers also work with consultancy firms that provide technical advice to the enterprises and also for government agencies that regulate their operations.

A consultancy, for example, collects a mass of information. Consultants with special expertise⁵ know how to find, extract, and combine only the particular parts of that information that their clients need, and they also know how to present it in a form that is meaningful for their clients. A manufacturing firm employs people that know how to transform information, components, and materials into products using energy. A construction firm transforms materials and components into buildings, which requires the significant use of human effort, information, and energy. All of them require financial capital, as well, representing the confidence of investors to provide money long before it is returned, with the expectation of making a profit in the end.

A small firm that is just starting up, particularly in engineering consultancy, needs human capital – accumulated know-how and expertise, as well as a list of prospective clients. Eventually, the consultants will earn higher fees, once their reputation has been established.

How does the special technical knowledge of engineers influence the engineering enterprise that depends on it?

Remember the aims of the enterprise? Predictable delivery of reliable products, services, or information, all provided through the most economic use of financial capital, human effort, and material resources possible. First, engineers provide the planning and organisation needed for predictable delivery. Second, engineers can quickly produce cost-effective designs and make accurate predictions about the techni-cal performance, cost, safety, and environmental impact of proposed solutions. Third, engineers provide the special knowledge needed to ensure that products, services, and information are reliable enough to meet the needs of clients and end users long after they are provided. The expectation that products will meet their needs, a human per-ception, is vital, because it results in the willingness to pay for the products. In other

words, the products must represent a sufficiently greater value than the combined inputs to economically sustain the enterprise. Fourth, engineers apply their ingenuity to minimise the use of financial capital, human effort, and material resources needed to sustain the enterprise. Fifth, engineering knowledge provides reassurance for investors, reducing the perceived risks and uncertainties, increasing the perceived value of the enterprise, and stimulating the willingness for investors to build and sustain the enter-prise in the first place. As we work through this book, we will learn more about how engineers do all this.

Sometimes, when you look at some of the engineers’ activities individually, it can be difficult to understand their value. Take, for example, an engineer who checks spec-ifications and incoming components to ensure that they comply with safety standards.

Considered by itself, the work seems to have contributed no real value. The engineer has not contributed any design or performance improvement, planning, organisation, reliability improvements, or cost reduction. However, in the context of an enterprise, the engineer has reduced the perceived risk of failure simply because the checks have been made, even if no non-compliance was found. In doing so, he has increased the economic value of the enterprise. We will learn more about this in later chapters. For the time being, we need to understand the vital significance of technical knowledge and how it helps an engineering enterprise.

Knowledge and information

Within this engineering enterprise framework, we can begin to build a map of the types of knowledge that are needed by the people who work in it.

However, we need to review what we mean by knowledge. Defining knowledge is something that philosophers have debated and focused on for thousands of years.

Some philosophers have even specialised in discussing the kinds of philosophy that might be helpful in engineering.

What do we mean by knowledge? Some philosophers have focused on knowledge as a product of rational thought in the form of written statements of truth that are independent of any particular individual. Others have explained knowledge in terms of beliefs held by an individual as the result of experiencing the physical world.⁶

In this discussion, we need to focus on the latter view, because we are interested in the knowledge held in the minds of individual engineers that enables them to influence the operations of an engineering enterprise.⁷

A useful starting point is to consider that knowledge is ‘justified true belief’. It is ‘justified’ in the sense that the person has taken personal responsibility to establish the truthfulness or validity of the belief.⁸The belief, therefore, has some basis in the experience of the person, and perhaps other people who the person believes to be reliable informants.

Information, on the other hand, is data: the content of messages exchanged between people, machines, and systems. Information and knowledge are not syn-onymous. We receive an enormous amount of information every day, but a relatively small percentage becomes knowledge that we retain and most of it is discarded. Try and imagine, for a moment, quantifying the informational content of every conversa-tion you have ever had, everything your eyes have ever seen, your ears have heard, your skin has touched, your nose has smelt, your tongue has tasted, the books you

have read, the movies you have seen, and the courses you have taken.⁹ Now, how much of that is still part of your knowledge? Perhaps a lot of it, but certainly not all of it.

In creating new knowledge, we interpret information in the light of our prior knowledge. Philosophers, education psychologists, and learning scientists have studied this process extensively.

One of the most important kinds of prior knowledge that we rely on is our lan-guage. As we shall see in coming chapters, the idea of language as a convenient set of symbols with agreed upon meanings is a bit too simplistic to explain human com-munication. However, it will do for the moment, provided we understand that we are continually learning about new meanings. We cannot take it for granted that the lis-tener has the same understanding of a word or symbol as the speaker. Therefore, as we interpret new information in the light of existing knowledge, we have to understand that our prior knowledge base is continually evolving.

Knowledge develops in our own minds as a result of interpreting information that we receive every day. Much of our knowledge develops as a result of social interactions with other people, including parents, teachers, friends, and peers. As we discuss our own views and beliefs with other people, new ideas and perspectives grad-ually emerge as a result of these interactions. This is particularly important within an organisation like an engineering enterprise, where the quality of the knowledge being developed and applied by people in the organisation is a critical factor in its overall success.

Practice concept 19: Types of knowledge

Philosophers, psychologists, and many other writers have helped by describing several different kinds of knowledge.¹⁰

Explicit, codified, propositional knowledge

Most of the knowledge that you learnt in engineering school falls into the category known as explicit or propositional knowledge, also more broadly defined as ‘codified knowledge’. A proposition is a simple statement that can be verified as being either true or false. These are examples of formal propositions:

‘There are 242 pages in the geopolymer application field guide.’

‘Young’s modulus, E, is the ratio of applied stress divided by the resulting strain in an elastic material.’

Explicit knowledge is relatively easy to propagate and distribute. It can be written down in a language that appropriately educated people will understand, with a fair chance that their interpretation, based on their own prior knowledge, will align fairly closely with the intentions of the author. Explicit knowledge can be transmitted by using symbols, such as words. In written form, explicit knowledge can be transmitted without any meaning being lost. However, as soon as someone has to listen to or read, and then interpret the words and symbols, some of the knowledge is inevitably lost or changed because of the variations in prior knowledge between individuals. As Collins explained, all human language use is, in effect, translation.¹¹

Explicit knowledge can be taught to young people who have less advanced or mature prior knowledge. This is not easy: considerable effort on the part of both pupil and teacher is needed, as you probably appreciate.

Your experience at university should have been enough for you to realise that acquiring explicit knowledge from another person, the Internet, or a book, can be unreliable and time-consuming. I am sure you can remember long hours of study for examinations, as well as the ache in your stomach upon finding exam questions that you still could not answer. Transferring knowledge, even explicit, codified knowledge, is not easy and is prone to errors and misunderstandings.

Other kinds of knowledge are even more difficult to transfer.

Procedural knowledge

As you would appreciate from your studies, it is one thing to acquire explicit knowl-edge, but quite another thing to effectively use it. We can refer to the latter as procedural knowledge: knowledge that is needed in order to effectively make use of explicit knowl-edge. Sometimes, procedural knowledge can be conveyed using explicit knowledge, in the form of a list of instructions. However, it is not really useful until one has practised the sequence of instructions and reached a stage when one no longer needs to refer to them.

You can study a textbook on mathematical statistics and acquire explicit knowl-edge that is relevant for the analysis of data resulting from experiments. Once you reach that stage of understanding, you can probably pass an exam.

However, you need to solve many practice problems in order to acquire the pro-cedural knowledge that would enable you to competently apply statistical techniques to analyse your data so that you can confidently draw statistical conclusions from it.

In your final year or capstone project at university, you may have learnt this for yourself. While you may have passed exams in maths and other engineering science subjects, applying that same knowledge for yourself in a project may have required a lot more trial and error, learning, and maybe a good deal of frustration. In other words, developing procedural knowledge is not easy.

Implicit knowledge

Implicit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge that has not been made explicit.

Philosophers disagree on how much implicit knowledge can actually be made explicit, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with this difficulty.

From a practical point of view, implicit knowledge includes things like knowing where the nearest bathroom is located. It might be written down on a plan of the building somewhere, but we don’t usually have building plans lying around in order to figure out where the nearest bathroom is. Instead, we ask someone else, ‘Could you show me to the nearest bathroom, please?’ Most of us can remember where we need to go after the first visit, so we don’t need to write it down. We could if we wanted to,

From a practical point of view, implicit knowledge includes things like knowing where the nearest bathroom is located. It might be written down on a plan of the building somewhere, but we don’t usually have building plans lying around in order to figure out where the nearest bathroom is. Instead, we ask someone else, ‘Could you show me to the nearest bathroom, please?’ Most of us can remember where we need to go after the first visit, so we don’t need to write it down. We could if we wanted to,