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3 Habits at 3 Levels for Change

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Mark Somerville and I have an article out on Huffington Post entitled Three Habits at Three Levels for Improved Engineering Education. The article starts as follows:

Students in advanced economies today want to become anything but engineers (A.B.E.) and often choose to become lawyers, physicians, or businesspeople instead. Even those who do study engineering sometimes leave because (1) they are unable to align their aspirations with the subject matter as taught, and (2) a hostile, dismissive, or indifferent educational culture discourages the young people it is charged with educating.

Changing these things isn’t easy, but to use New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg’s phrase, we can use the power of habit at three different levels — at the personal, organizational, and system levels — to bring about change that attracts and retains bright young people to become the engineers our planet needs.

It goes on to suggest that the three habits are as follows:

  1. Noticing, listening, & questioning (NLQ). Related post here and HuffPo article here.
  2. Dot connecting. Connecting people across an organization to achieve lateral aligment.
  3. Collaborative disruption. Connecting with people outside your organization, even competitors, to build support for a common change.

Read the whole article here, and read four other HuffPo articles here.

HuffPo Piece–Below the Waterline: A Deep Dive to Rethink Engineering Education

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There’s a new piece up on Huffington Post here called Below the Waterline: A Deep Dive to Rethink Engineering Education.  This pieces discusses the ways that education concentrates on particular facts and figures and processes (above the waterline), but neglects deeper issues of reflection and learning (below the waterline):

Focusing above the waterline and filling young minds with known facts and knowledge used to be sufficient for engineering education. In the past, engineers were category enhancers, making existing products and technologies faster, better, and more efficient, so mastery of the known used to be enough. Today, however, engineers do so much more. They are no longer category enhancers; they are category creators, bringing to fruition things that don’t yet exist. As such, because we don’t know what future solutions will be needed, we can’t merely pour existing knowledge into students’ heads, hoping that this will be enough; rather, we need to educate deep, lifelong learners so they can adapt, create, innovate, and lead the world to a better future.

Read the whole article here or other articles by Mark Somerville and myself here.

Retooling Engineering Education Culture with the Keystone Habit of Listening

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Cover page of Duhigg's book, The Power of HabitI’ve been reading Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (here) and i was struck by a story about Alcoa Aluminum and Paul O’Neil’s installation turnaround of a dysfunctional culture one person at a time.  More detail is available in the book, but the short version is that O’Neil insisted on a focus on safety at a time when profitability was challenged.  Many thought O’Neil was deranged and expected him to spend time working more directly on cutting expenses and increasing margins, but O’Neil was crazy like a fox, and he knew that a focus on safety would act as a keystone habit to realign the culture with exactly those things that would make the company profitable.

Ever since reading these passages, I’ve been sitting in the question as follows: What keystone habit or habits would effect the same kind of foundational realignment of engineering education culture?  After some reflection, I’ve concluded that the answer is listening.  The reason the current state of engineering education affairs sustains itself is that teachers aren’t listening to students, students, increasingly, aren’t listening to teachers, and as a result, their is almost no feedback to drive change in the needed directions.  The creation of listening universities, listening colleges, and listening polytechnics around the world would create the possibility of real change without the usual pitched resistance or backsliding once change is in place.

Over the last 18 months, ThreeJoy has developed a new kind of short interactive training seminar called NLQ or noticing, listening, and questioning. NLQ can be used in a short standalone mode or in concert with other building blocks to create a very effective change enhancing program for a variety of educational transformation outcomes.  Contact deg@threejoy.com for more information, and start creating the listening school of the future, today.