Saying a task is “not within my expertise” is a symptom of hesitation to leadership, according to Engineers Australia National President Dr Raj Aseervatham FIEAust CPEng EngExec ahead of World Engineering Day 2025.
I often tell an engineering story from many years ago that remains a touchstone to my passion for change in engineering. It belongs to my small library of personal parables; we all have them.
As part of an owner’s team (that is, the group taking the risk and investing the finance to improve our asset), we were seeking to design, finance and build a pipeline and desalination plant to carry high-quality water from the ocean to a mine site in a semi-arid, but moderately-populated, region. Water sources locally were sparse.
Our highly credentialled engineering consultants had a quality conceptual technical design to increase the capacity and efficiency of mine throughput for the next decades. We were delighted with their progress.
We asked if the design could be further enhanced to provide water to the many villages in the region. In addition to being a good thing to do with some future dividends for the communities, it would improve our social licence to operate, and of course gain political support in timely project approvals. Altruism was not the only driver.
The response from our engineers was posed in the form of a question. How many extra megalitres per day were required?
While that is reasonable enough to ponder, I’d like to pause the story there. Our request should have opened a door to social and socio-economic curiosity. For example, what were the needs of the villages? What were their aspirations? What agriculture, or indeed manufacturing, could be enabled with sustainable sources of water?
What intergenerational value could be created through sustainable water supply? What water quantity and quality parameters were necessary to unlock that value? What was the point of peak opportunity, and when did diminishing returns raise their regrettable heads? Could such diminishment be countered?
What I heard instead was shorthand for “We’ll build it, sure, just tell us in numbers what you need”.
Yet these were complex issues whose solutions could be enabled through the very engineering our meeting was centred upon. No-one had a magic number of megalitres (yet) to offer. Perhaps the engineering design should include the thoughts of the community, social scientists, agronomists and others. Perhaps immersing in pressures, flows, boosters, materials, waterhammer, maintenance, capex vs opex and the like could be combined with a broader leadership curiosity.
Of course, these points were gently raised in the meeting and, after some quick recalibration by our consultants, we progressed our aspirations with a substantial variation to the work package. Engagement and studies were carried out in the community. An enhanced design was eventually achieved.
Still, the event stuck in my mind for many years after. And it is, by no means, the only such event I can recall. I only remember it so vividly because of the comical expressions of mild disbelief in the faces among my team. Social scientists call that an emotional anchor.
There has long been a cultural danger, in engineering, that engineers reflexively determine that social and socio-economic curiosity belongs elsewhere – perhaps in social or agricultural sciences, in this case. The danger of this cultural setting is that engineers can, in a kind of auto-setting, eschew societal leadership in favour of being technocrats.
“That’s not within my scope” or “That’s not within my expertise” are catchphrases I have heard from engineers throughout my career.
In my view, this is a voluntary diminishment of engineering prowess. A reflexive abdication of leadership.
Leadership hesitation
Engineers are trained to work within scope. To set boundaries to problems so they can be solved readily. The breaking down of a complex problem to solvable components and then integrating those solved components into the whole solution is, thematically, one of the super-powers of engineering. So the phrase “not within my scope” has its origins in our foundational training.
Engineering holds the key to so many of society’s problems. Yet, scope-bound discipline, if not mindfully exercised and recrafted to be societally impactful, can lead to unwittingly blinkered thinking.
I am often challenged on this. “It’s unethical to extend beyond our expertise”, I am counselled. And I agree. But a good leader seeks to understand a problem, and then finds and marshals people smarter or more expert than they are to help solve the problem. Of course, the leader is not the definitive expert; leaders rarely are. “Not within my expertise” is, I believe, a symptom of hesitation to leadership.
One of the most consistent and significant woes I hear from engineers is that they are not valued enough in society. There are indeed several reasons for this, and several barriers to be overcome. Engineers Australia is tasked with reducing those barriers.
But one barrier that is within each and every engineer’s ability to overcome is to engage more willingly and deeply on the human or societal problem, not just the technical. This, together with the engineering prowess that is already banked in society, has the potential to elevate engineers to leadership recognition, and assign commensurate value to the profession. One engineer at a time, yet with a groundswell of compounding value.