​half animal, half human, all engineer

Or Intuition in engineering

In chapter 18 of “The Prince” by Nicollò Machiavelli, he notes that for a prince to achieve great things he must appear pious and to keep faith, but at times he must rely on force to achieve greatness. He goes on to note that writers of antiquity told stories of how Achilles and other great princes of Greek Mythology were given to a centaur (half man half horse) to be raised. This taught them how to act like men, and keep faith, but also how to be ruthless at times and use force, like a beast. But which beast? Sometimes he should be cunning like a fox to sense traps. Sometimes he needs to be powerful and forceful like a lion to defend himself against the wolves.
This is an example of the “And” winning over the “Or”. You will often fail if you always think you need to choose one option over the other. Instead, to succeed, you need to work out the best way to leverage each option at the right time.
So can this concept apply to engineering?
Beasts never engineer, at least not in the sense we are talking about. So does that not mean that as an engineer we should always be using the erudite and human approach? And that in turn means that there is no “And” in this case.
In the engineering context, the equivalent of the way of the beast is intuition.
We should, most of the time, be relying on the core of engineering expertise:

• Framing the problem so that it becomes one we can solve.
• Using first principles to designate the values of variables.
• Thinking systemically – getting as much information as possible from others and the broader system.

These are essential for the Global Engineer – it will prevent issues from differences in practices arising.
However, are there times when you can use your intuition?
Intuition works when you have been working on the respective system repeatedly for some time. So much so that you have trained a part of your brain on that topic – like AI, but the original.
So that’s when you can – but in cases like this you are not really being an engineer – you are not doing anything ingenious.
Are there times when you should use your intuition?
If you have limited resources and there are other aspects of the respective challenge that require proper engineering, then those aspects that are familiar to you, and allow for intuition, then that would be a time you should. But still don’t expect it to be an optimum solution you develop.
Think now about times when you used intuition correctly and incorrectly in engineering. Was the reason for failure that you had not yet had enough time to develop it?