Who is Clint Steele?
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AboutI have done my best to ensure that everything I produce on global engineering is well reasoned and well supported so that you know it is something that will help you improve your engineering ability. However, it helps to know more about the person that you are taking advice from so I thought it would be a good idea to go over this first before reading the rest of the book. This will be a bit of a biography so if you’re not too big a fan of hearing people’s life stories, and you just want to get to the useful stuff, then by all means skip this page.
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I was not born wanting to be an engineer.
I actually had little idea what I wanted to do when I was younger and as a result I went through a few ideas: fitter and turner because that is what my father was; chef because I loved eating and learnt to cook earlier on in life; TV reviewer because I also loved watching TV; police officer because the cops on TV seemed to have an exciting life; electrician because they were paid well and the work was not too hard; maybe even crane operator because it too paid well and my cousin did it. Only recently I found out that it was possible to be a professional Lego builder – if I’d known that some decades ago….
This lack of direction had a serious affect upon how well I went at school. Throughout the early years I was almost always in some special class for kids who weren’t getting it. I usually did well in maths and I always did well when it was time to write stories, but my English skills left a bit to be desired. Every report card said that I was easily distracted. Unless I enjoyed it or could see some benefit (and I never really could), then I never really wanted to do any school work. Once I was in secondary education I was always worried that I might be kept back a year and studied hard enough to just pass. Maths was still saving me and anything related to writing was a complete failure, except for mythology because I liked the topic.
Dramatic change came at the age of 14 when, on a family holiday, bored out of my head in the bush with my family, I came across a hot-rod magazine. If I recall correctly it was bought to help alleviate boredom for me or my brother. This particular magazine was fairly heavy on technical issues. It still had the pictures of all these customised cars, but it also had sections on how to get more out of a car’s engine and suspension system. It was not the notion of going fast that got my attention so much as the idea that you could be strategic in the way you put a car together if you knew how everything worked. It was that idea of using the knowledge of mechanisms (that I later learned was basically physics) to actually determine how a car would perform that captivated me. That was when I decided I was going to be one of those people who designed cars.
So who were these people? Engineers I was told. How do you become and engineer? You need to study at university. What do I need to do to get into an engineering course at university? You will need to study maths and science subjects in high school and do reasonably well at them.
It is amazing what a difference a little motivation can have. I never did that well in any other subject related to literature or art in high school, but I did well enough to get into an engineering degree. After this experience I realised how hard school can be for a young person who doesn’t know what they want to do afterwards. If you do have direction and know where you’re going, then count yourself very lucky. Not many of us have that.
I was lucky enough to go to a university that required a total of 12 months industry based engineering experience before graduation. I was lucky again to get work positions in design and development, which was all that engineering was as far as I was concerned at that time. Not only that, but I got my chance to experience the auto industry to see how it operated. I also worked for a smaller company that made soft rock drilling equipment. Because of the second company’s size and the high turnaround rate required, I was able to see a number of my designs made and used by the customer. I got to see a few of them come back for changes too. It was only 12 months, but it certainly did a lot to develop my engineering design skills and to think about what actually made a good engineer. If you ever have a chance to work as an engineer while still studying, then take it. The work experience will make it much easier to understand the importance of your course content, and this will motivate you in your studies.
It was in my final year of my undergraduate studies that I was introduced to probabilistic design. The lecturer was ex Xerox, which had been heavily involved in the transfer of quality ideas from Japan to the US and also conducted some of its own research into design for quality. The essence or goal of probabilistic design was robustification – where a design is optimised so that it is less sensitive to errors from manufacturing, wear or random effects from the environment. Given that this was an extension to the whole concept of using understanding to adjust a system so that it performed better, I was hooked, and I enrolled in a PhD, which I started the following year. That took a long time.
After all that study it was time to enter ‘the real world’. Once again, I was pretty lucky to get another role in design and development. It actually took a while, I got quite a lot of knock backs from companies that were sure that I was not going to be practical enough given that I had a PhD.
All those rejections were good for me really. The job I ended up with was not only a lot of design and development, but it also involved production issues, quality and warranty issues, and service issues. The best thing about that aspect of the job was that it showed me the diversity of jobs that engineers could do while also showing what was similar to all those jobs. There was another aspect to the job that was informative, the people I worked with. Even though it was a small company, it took its engineering seriously, and there was a diversity of engineers that I worked with. I recall an engineer who was successful because of his tenacity – no matter the issue he just wouldn’t give up until he found the solution and he was sure it was the right one. Another engineer was incredibly thorough, and all decisions were well founded and almost impossible to question. There was also an engineer who had worked in the same role for years and developed a collection of near unconscious guides in his mind that could help inform all his design decisions. And then there was an engineer who would come up with a basic idea, make it and then tune it until it worked. This was just a collection of the other engineers that I worked with so you get an idea of diversity within engineering that this role showed to me.
This diversity was nothing compared to what I was going to see next.
For a year or so a friend from university had been asking me to come and work for his company in China. He had a design consulting firm there. He was getting the customers, but he had issues with the Chinese engineers understanding what the western clients wanted. I had been to India and South East Asia, but never China so I was keen. However, I was always in the middle of something that needed doing within my current role (at that time). Soon enough though, there was an opportunity and I took it.
Sometimes we like to think that engineering is universal, but I can tell you from personal experience, and as I argue in the book, that it is not. The basic end goal is the same, but the way it is viewed and the way it is achieved can vary. And this variation at times can cause some serious issues.
At this time I could not put my finger on it, but there was something different. You just couldn’t be sure that you were on the same page as the other engineers. The only thing that got me through was that I had had enough experience to realise that you need to find numerous ways to double check that everyone thought the same thing. It was like feed forward versus feedback control. When you’re in your own culture you can use feed forward. You can just say whatever is on your mind and be pretty sure the message is understood. But when you’re in another culture you need to always make sure you get feedback to ensure that the understanding is correct. If it isn’t, you send a slightly different message and check that. I also noticed that some people just couldn’t do this without first having an aneurism. I knew how to survive in a different culture as an engineer, but I really didn’t know why there was a difference in engineering in the first place.
I planned on staying in China for a year or two, but the global financial crisis put a stop to that. The customer base dried up, and there was no work for me so back home it was.
This was another period of unemployment. However, serendipity raised her head again. At the same time the role for the engineering design lecturer (or professor depending upon the university you are at) became available and it was recommended to me by one of the other lecturers there. Given that I had a PhD, experience teaching and experience in design I got the job. However, it meant that I needed to find some research topics.
I could recall going to a lecture some years ago where the presenter was talking about the change in focus on engineering research was toward the way engineers think and developing these skills earlier in engineering students instead of just hoping they will develop some years after graduation. I was also wondering about why there was a difference in engineering between countries and why some engineers could work with others while others could not. And there was my research topic – what makes engineers think a certain way and how do we develop engineering wisdom?
Having a topic to research was one thing, but now I needed to work out what had been done and how I was going to add to the research. I had always had a passing interest in engineering practice theory and research, but now I needed to understand what had been done and work out how I was going to become active in this area.
The first thing that really brought me to writing this book was a paper by a researcher Nigel Cross about engineering design expertise. In this paper the author summarised interviews with two world class engineers and identified the three characteristics that they had in common and made them the engineers that they were. Based on my own experience I could see how these were common to the good engineers that I had worked with, but not developed to a level that they could be. Probably because they didn’t know that they could or should develop these three characteristics within themselves. At that point I knew the kinds of things I needed to develop in my students. The question was: how?
The second thing that made me decide to share what I know about engineering was my research into Chinese and western design teams. It actually dawned on me after I was reading the interview summary with a Canadian electrical engineer who then worked in China and thinking about what a Chinese friend had said to me about his thoughts on why there was a difference. It suddenly became apparent how the western background made western engineers think and operate in a way that was different from the way a Chinese background made Chinese engineers think and operate. It was pretty good working that out, but the key was that a good portion of our engineering skill is a result of our background. That means that we do not need to simply accept our ability as it is. Instead, we can work to make ourselves better engineers.
Now that I knew how backgrounds affected engineering ability I was able to try ways of developing key skills in my students. This in turn led to more research into teaching engineering wisdom to engineering students. I discovered these keys to being a better and global engineer somewhat by accident. That’s probably why not many others (no-one as far as I can tell – it seems I am the only one who has researched how background affects engineering behaviour) share this knowledge with other engineers. Those who do know about this have only stumbled across it if they were lucky. However, once you get it, it is easy to improve your ability so I figured there is nothing but benefits from sharing this. And that is why this website was set up and other items to better explain global engineering were produced.
I actually had little idea what I wanted to do when I was younger and as a result I went through a few ideas: fitter and turner because that is what my father was; chef because I loved eating and learnt to cook earlier on in life; TV reviewer because I also loved watching TV; police officer because the cops on TV seemed to have an exciting life; electrician because they were paid well and the work was not too hard; maybe even crane operator because it too paid well and my cousin did it. Only recently I found out that it was possible to be a professional Lego builder – if I’d known that some decades ago….
This lack of direction had a serious affect upon how well I went at school. Throughout the early years I was almost always in some special class for kids who weren’t getting it. I usually did well in maths and I always did well when it was time to write stories, but my English skills left a bit to be desired. Every report card said that I was easily distracted. Unless I enjoyed it or could see some benefit (and I never really could), then I never really wanted to do any school work. Once I was in secondary education I was always worried that I might be kept back a year and studied hard enough to just pass. Maths was still saving me and anything related to writing was a complete failure, except for mythology because I liked the topic.
Dramatic change came at the age of 14 when, on a family holiday, bored out of my head in the bush with my family, I came across a hot-rod magazine. If I recall correctly it was bought to help alleviate boredom for me or my brother. This particular magazine was fairly heavy on technical issues. It still had the pictures of all these customised cars, but it also had sections on how to get more out of a car’s engine and suspension system. It was not the notion of going fast that got my attention so much as the idea that you could be strategic in the way you put a car together if you knew how everything worked. It was that idea of using the knowledge of mechanisms (that I later learned was basically physics) to actually determine how a car would perform that captivated me. That was when I decided I was going to be one of those people who designed cars.
So who were these people? Engineers I was told. How do you become and engineer? You need to study at university. What do I need to do to get into an engineering course at university? You will need to study maths and science subjects in high school and do reasonably well at them.
It is amazing what a difference a little motivation can have. I never did that well in any other subject related to literature or art in high school, but I did well enough to get into an engineering degree. After this experience I realised how hard school can be for a young person who doesn’t know what they want to do afterwards. If you do have direction and know where you’re going, then count yourself very lucky. Not many of us have that.
I was lucky enough to go to a university that required a total of 12 months industry based engineering experience before graduation. I was lucky again to get work positions in design and development, which was all that engineering was as far as I was concerned at that time. Not only that, but I got my chance to experience the auto industry to see how it operated. I also worked for a smaller company that made soft rock drilling equipment. Because of the second company’s size and the high turnaround rate required, I was able to see a number of my designs made and used by the customer. I got to see a few of them come back for changes too. It was only 12 months, but it certainly did a lot to develop my engineering design skills and to think about what actually made a good engineer. If you ever have a chance to work as an engineer while still studying, then take it. The work experience will make it much easier to understand the importance of your course content, and this will motivate you in your studies.
It was in my final year of my undergraduate studies that I was introduced to probabilistic design. The lecturer was ex Xerox, which had been heavily involved in the transfer of quality ideas from Japan to the US and also conducted some of its own research into design for quality. The essence or goal of probabilistic design was robustification – where a design is optimised so that it is less sensitive to errors from manufacturing, wear or random effects from the environment. Given that this was an extension to the whole concept of using understanding to adjust a system so that it performed better, I was hooked, and I enrolled in a PhD, which I started the following year. That took a long time.
After all that study it was time to enter ‘the real world’. Once again, I was pretty lucky to get another role in design and development. It actually took a while, I got quite a lot of knock backs from companies that were sure that I was not going to be practical enough given that I had a PhD.
All those rejections were good for me really. The job I ended up with was not only a lot of design and development, but it also involved production issues, quality and warranty issues, and service issues. The best thing about that aspect of the job was that it showed me the diversity of jobs that engineers could do while also showing what was similar to all those jobs. There was another aspect to the job that was informative, the people I worked with. Even though it was a small company, it took its engineering seriously, and there was a diversity of engineers that I worked with. I recall an engineer who was successful because of his tenacity – no matter the issue he just wouldn’t give up until he found the solution and he was sure it was the right one. Another engineer was incredibly thorough, and all decisions were well founded and almost impossible to question. There was also an engineer who had worked in the same role for years and developed a collection of near unconscious guides in his mind that could help inform all his design decisions. And then there was an engineer who would come up with a basic idea, make it and then tune it until it worked. This was just a collection of the other engineers that I worked with so you get an idea of diversity within engineering that this role showed to me.
This diversity was nothing compared to what I was going to see next.
For a year or so a friend from university had been asking me to come and work for his company in China. He had a design consulting firm there. He was getting the customers, but he had issues with the Chinese engineers understanding what the western clients wanted. I had been to India and South East Asia, but never China so I was keen. However, I was always in the middle of something that needed doing within my current role (at that time). Soon enough though, there was an opportunity and I took it.
Sometimes we like to think that engineering is universal, but I can tell you from personal experience, and as I argue in the book, that it is not. The basic end goal is the same, but the way it is viewed and the way it is achieved can vary. And this variation at times can cause some serious issues.
At this time I could not put my finger on it, but there was something different. You just couldn’t be sure that you were on the same page as the other engineers. The only thing that got me through was that I had had enough experience to realise that you need to find numerous ways to double check that everyone thought the same thing. It was like feed forward versus feedback control. When you’re in your own culture you can use feed forward. You can just say whatever is on your mind and be pretty sure the message is understood. But when you’re in another culture you need to always make sure you get feedback to ensure that the understanding is correct. If it isn’t, you send a slightly different message and check that. I also noticed that some people just couldn’t do this without first having an aneurism. I knew how to survive in a different culture as an engineer, but I really didn’t know why there was a difference in engineering in the first place.
I planned on staying in China for a year or two, but the global financial crisis put a stop to that. The customer base dried up, and there was no work for me so back home it was.
This was another period of unemployment. However, serendipity raised her head again. At the same time the role for the engineering design lecturer (or professor depending upon the university you are at) became available and it was recommended to me by one of the other lecturers there. Given that I had a PhD, experience teaching and experience in design I got the job. However, it meant that I needed to find some research topics.
I could recall going to a lecture some years ago where the presenter was talking about the change in focus on engineering research was toward the way engineers think and developing these skills earlier in engineering students instead of just hoping they will develop some years after graduation. I was also wondering about why there was a difference in engineering between countries and why some engineers could work with others while others could not. And there was my research topic – what makes engineers think a certain way and how do we develop engineering wisdom?
Having a topic to research was one thing, but now I needed to work out what had been done and how I was going to add to the research. I had always had a passing interest in engineering practice theory and research, but now I needed to understand what had been done and work out how I was going to become active in this area.
The first thing that really brought me to writing this book was a paper by a researcher Nigel Cross about engineering design expertise. In this paper the author summarised interviews with two world class engineers and identified the three characteristics that they had in common and made them the engineers that they were. Based on my own experience I could see how these were common to the good engineers that I had worked with, but not developed to a level that they could be. Probably because they didn’t know that they could or should develop these three characteristics within themselves. At that point I knew the kinds of things I needed to develop in my students. The question was: how?
The second thing that made me decide to share what I know about engineering was my research into Chinese and western design teams. It actually dawned on me after I was reading the interview summary with a Canadian electrical engineer who then worked in China and thinking about what a Chinese friend had said to me about his thoughts on why there was a difference. It suddenly became apparent how the western background made western engineers think and operate in a way that was different from the way a Chinese background made Chinese engineers think and operate. It was pretty good working that out, but the key was that a good portion of our engineering skill is a result of our background. That means that we do not need to simply accept our ability as it is. Instead, we can work to make ourselves better engineers.
Now that I knew how backgrounds affected engineering ability I was able to try ways of developing key skills in my students. This in turn led to more research into teaching engineering wisdom to engineering students. I discovered these keys to being a better and global engineer somewhat by accident. That’s probably why not many others (no-one as far as I can tell – it seems I am the only one who has researched how background affects engineering behaviour) share this knowledge with other engineers. Those who do know about this have only stumbled across it if they were lucky. However, once you get it, it is easy to improve your ability so I figured there is nothing but benefits from sharing this. And that is why this website was set up and other items to better explain global engineering were produced.