Who Are You Designing For?

Last week I spent 2 days on my TBOSIET course, which was - to say the least - an interesting experience. In short I spent 2 days fighting fires, escaping from smoke filled buildings, hauling fully clothed men into liferafts and getting spun around (upside-down and underwater) strapped into the body of a helicopter. Apart from all the spluttering and risk-less, self-induced panic, the experience was rather humbling. Why?

Because no amount of theory could have prepared me for my own reaction to being disoriented, out of air and trapped (in both the smoke evacuation and then more dramatically in the upside down chopper).

Where is Your Focus?

The life of the desk engineer is a strange one. You sit in the office and make decisions. You develop ideas and implement change where the biggest direct impact of your work is whether or not you meet your deadline or make your budget. Rarely are you exposed to the end products resulting from your brain power, because we are often separated from the practical application by layers of seniority, quality assurance, time delays and location differences.

Sure, if we work at a plant and make a decision to change out a valve, then we get to see that impact. But often our jobs provide such a separation between our calculations and the hissing, humming, flowing implementation of our toils that we don't end up with adequate confirmation that our work is useful.

In one of my recent posts I link to a wonderful talk (turned into a clever animation) on what drives us to do better in our jobs and lives. It illustrates that we need autonomy, mastery and purpose to successfully create happiness in our careers. The last of these - purpose - is difficult to define in terms of deliverables and project budgets, which are often our measurement tools. I venture that finding purpose in our jobs requires an understanding of the impact that your work is having on a person, facility or company.

Sadly, seeing that materialization of our efforts is not an opportunity that is afforded to us desk engineers as often as we'd like. This is why it is up to us to remind ourselves that we are not just doing a calculation.

Each time we make an assumption, each time we round or goal-seek or make a judgement call, there are real, tangible, honest-to-goodness implications of the decisions that we make.

To Illustrate? A Quiz

Question 1. When evacuating from an upside down helicopter, you will get extremely confused about where you are. Even following the evacuation instructions will leave you choking unless you:

1. Flail like a madman.
2. Get out as fast as you possibly can.
3. Do not move your arms or chin.
4. Hang onto the guy in front of you.

Question 2. When challenging yourself by wearing blackout goggles for the final upside-down choking episode, you will find that (two are true):

1. It is easier to determine which way is up.
2. You cling to the procedures like a leech.
3. You find it harder to hold your breath.
4. It was a bad idea to wear the blackout goggles after all.

Question 3. When a group of stoic people get together to put themselves through deliberately stressful situations, what percentage of them eventually shelf their pride and talk about how scared they were?

1. 10% - most of them were good swimmers anyway, so they weren't scared.
2. 50% - half were only putting on that they were tough to begin with.
3. 80% - people become vulnerable after stressing out with strangers.
4. 100% - everyone has their breaking point for needing to talk it out.

***

Putting aside the fact that the stats in question 3 are completely made up (which should be a hint as to the only acceptable answer), would any of my desk-based assumptions have helped me to really understand why the statistics of surviving a helicopter ditch aren't that favourable? I highly doubt it. My desk, with my textbook, containing my statistics, is a world away from the bottom of that pool. But at least spluttering in the pool is a large step closer to understanding the actual application of my numbers.

Often there is a substantial disconnect from the calculation you are performing and the application of the result by the end user. The question is this:

How often do you remind yourself of the connection that exists between the work that you do and the people it impacts?

Oh, and my answers to the quiz were 1(3), 2(1) and (3) and 3(4) although I'm sure these questions would look different to one of my fellow helicopter occupants.

Images courtesy of motivac and Daniel Waisberg.