Australia's Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, said its time for engineers to step up and be thought leaders.
He encouraged engineers, and those who train and mentor them, to raise the aspiration for the contribution they can make to public life in Australia.
“The first engineer whose name is known to history is said to be Imhotep, oversaw the construction of the Step Pyramid in the Ancient Egyptian city of Memphis. At the time, it was the largest building ever constructed, at more than 60 metres high; complete with temples, living quarters, courtyards and 13 false doors,” Finkel said.
“It remains the world’s oldest known monument of hewn stone: a 4500 year-old testament to inspired engineering.”
So great was Imhotep’s creation that he was worshipped as a god for the next 3200 years.
“We could say that the engineering profession doesn’t stand on a pedestal quite that high today,” Finkel said.
As the old joke goes, “every technological success is a great scientific achievement, and every technological disaster is an engineering failure”.
Finkel said it is very easy to take the people who put the planes in the sky and the electricity in the grid for granted.
“And yet I would be very surprised if Imhotep wouldn’t trade his pedestal for the power he might enjoy today, if he could have his time again,” he said.
“Go to any bookshop, and the business shelves are flooded with bestsellers promising to teach the secrets of the engineering way.”
Finkel said that so many of the Pharaohs of the third millennium are engineers: from Jeff Bezos at the helm of Amazon, to Sundar Pichai at the helm of Google, to Xi Jinping, President of China.
“So much of their success, in turn, comes down to the ingenuity of their crack teams of engineers – teams with global impact out of all proportion to their size,” he said.
“Engineering is the way hard things get done and the assurance that we’ll do them even better tomorrow. It’s the ancient discipline on the ascendant in the modern world.
“As an engineer come neuroscientist come Chief Scientist, I know that I don’t have to persuade engineers to take an interest in public policy problems,” Finkel said.
“It’s not in an engineer’s nature to sit in a traffic jam and not emerge with a prototype urban congestion plan.
“In my vision for 2025, the Master of Engineering is the equal of the MBA, if not the premier qualification that head-hunters for corporate boards want to see.
“Engineering concepts are applied with the same fluency in Parliament and the media as economic jargon is today – and the terms aren’t just co-opted, but understood. And engineers are encouraged and supported to step up as thought leaders in business and government alike: knowing how to make their knowledge useful at the tables where decisions are made.”
Finkel said aspiration shouldn’t be confused with arrogance. To be effective, he said a leader needs to grapple with the messiness of human affairs and build confidence in unconventional solutions.
“It can’t be done by pure engineering logic, but it can be done by perceptive engineers,” Finkel said.
“After all, we’re Imhotep’s descendants. We’ve got monuments of our own to leave behind.”
Finkel features in a special innovation feature in the November edition of CCN Magazine.