Technical compliance means nothing if you haven’t genuinely engaged with the people who live with the consequences.
As told to Joe Ennis
Growing up, my family really encouraged curiosity. And I really leant into it; I was always building LEGO or pulling things apart to see how they worked. I built a mud road in our backyard in Adelaide when I was five or six. Looking back, civil engineering was an inevitable career path.
What wasn’t inevitable was finding myself at 22 running a $90 million road project in Papua New Guinea, responsible for 400 local staff and nearly 20 expatriate staff.
I wasn’t long out of university, trained for consultancy. University also pumps you up a bit, positioning the engineer as the font of all knowledge. But working onsite for a contractor in PNG, I realised very quickly that I had technical knowledge, not practical knowledge. And there’s a big difference.
I was managing supervisors 20 to 30 years older than me. Some were patient mentors. Others expected you to get up to speed quickly or get out of the way. Either way, I had to confront the fact that I “didn’t know what I didn’t know”.
One moment that crystallised this for me was on a Bailey bridge repair. A local supervisor named Gerry – who had little formal education and spoke only Tok Pisin – was configuring the counterweight for a bridge launch. His approach appeared random and I was worried it wouldn’t meet the required safety factors. So I went away and did the calculations. Turns out he’d got it spot on, and did so for every subsequent bridge launch.
It reinforced a simple lesson: never judge expertise by appearance, language or education. Knowledge and experience appears in many guises. Some of the most resourceful, inventive people I’ve worked with were PNG locals who had very little formal schooling but immense practical intelligence.
I also learnt quickly what happens when you don’t actively listen to the local community. In one case, a culvert was installed where locals had warned it would flood their vegetable gardens. The culvert was installed anyway, so they simply took matters into their own hands and dug up sections of newly built road as a form of protest. It wasn’t vandalism – it was about survival and agency. When you’re a subsistence farmer and a drainage decision threatens your food supply, that’s not an inconvenience; it’s existential.
It reinforced for me that technical compliance means nothing if you haven’t genuinely engaged with the people who live with the consequences.
Those experiences fundamentally changed how I engage with stakeholders today. I learnt to stay three paces away from someone with a machete and keep an eye on the person with the throwing axe. Whether it’s in community consultation or solving a problem with a junior colleague, I try to understand the context before landing on a solution. PNG taught me that if you don’t engage and actively listen early, you’ll pay for it later – in trust, in time or in rework. Listening isn’t a courtesy; it’s a critical part of good engineering leadership.
Key lessons
- You don’t know what you don’t know. Humility is as important as technical competence.
- Context is critical. Engineering decisions don’t exist in isolation. They affect real people with real consequences.
- Active listening is not optional. If you fail to genuinely engage with stakeholders, you’ll pay for it later.
Adrian Vesnaver FIEAust CPEng EngExec is the National Branches Liaison Lead on the Engineers Australia College of Leadership and Management board.
This article was originally published in the May 2026 edition of create.
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