Understanding complexity, delivering solutions. In a nation built on engineering, Australia needs more engineers in its boardrooms.
Australia is an engineering nation. More than half of the country’s industry value-add comes from just six engineering-intensive sectors, according to Engineers Australia’s Engineering Tomorrow report.
Our prosperity, resilience and living standards are shaped by engineering decisions in our energy systems, transport corridors, digital infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Yet the people who design and deliver these systems are largely absent from the rooms where national decisions are made.
Just 9 per cent of federal politicians hold a science or engineering qualification. In the boardroom, engineering, manufacturing and construction experience account for just 7 per cent of board appointments, according to the 2025 Board Diversity Index. While accounting, law and finance dominate boardroom discussions, the disciplines that manage risk, scale systems and translate complexity into practical solutions are underrepresented.
“Not having an engineer in the boardroom of engineering-intensive sectors creates a potential blind spot,” said Dr Raj Aseervatham FIEAust CPEng EngExec, immediate past-President of Engineers Australia. Our national decisions increasingly involve systems that are technically dense and economically consequential, he said. Without engineering judgement in the room, boards risk making decisions that look efficient on paper, but fail under real-world conditions.
The engineering mindset – pattern-based, evidence-driven, commercially literate and focused on human need – is critical to good governance. Engineering brings risk literacy, often forged through billion-dollar projects. Engineering bridges technical feasibility and economic value. As our economy becomes more complex, these strengths are strategic assets.
Boards and governments don’t just need engineers because of their technical knowledge. They need engineers because engineers change the quality of decisions: they ask different questions, spot different patterns and see the downstream consequences that others miss.
Three fundamentals
The word “engineer” hints at the mindset behind the discipline. The Old French engin gives us the practical application – a builder of devices and an operator of complex machines. The Latin ingeniator and ingenium evoke innate talent, invention and clever creation. Combined, they describe a profession born of both machinery and imagination: the person who understands how things work, and the person who devises something new when they don’t work.
Engineers have always used science, mathematics and invention to meet human challenges. The tools shift with each era – from stone to steel to software – but the underlying instinct to solve remains. For Aseervatham, three foundational habits of thought – an “engineering mindset” – shapes how engineers solve problems and how they lead.
Characteristic #1: Seeing the real human problem
Engineers characteristically say they are problem-solvers. But Aseervatham takes it a step further: “Why is that a problem? Why does it exist? And often it begins with a societal or human need, preceding a technical scope.”
Aseervatham is emphatic. Technical brilliance can be “a seductive but dangerous thing”. When engineers become “immersed in the technical wonder”, they risk forgetting why the work exists at all. The strongest engineering solutions, he argues, are rarely the most elaborate, but are anchored in a human or societal problem.
And this is precisely why engineering leadership strengthens governance: engineers return decisions to the real-world need.
Characteristic #2: Using evidence and analysis
The instinct to apply precision and pattern recognition is often innate. “As an engineer, you’re seeing how processes or operations work in patterns, and then looking for curious variations,” Aseervatham said. “You see how something works a thousand times and then doesn’t work for the one thousand and first. You look for those patterns and ask why. And then you apply that skill to complex systems.”
It’s a world view based on what is observable and repeatable – drawing a line outwards to see what it means at real-world scale. This ability to mentally scale a system gives engineers a different kind of judgement in leadership settings. They’re not swayed by isolated incidents. They note signal over noise. They’re wired to spot outliers, diagnose failure modes and ask analytical questions to inform everything from infrastructure planning to big capital decisions to risk mitigation across long time horizons.
Characteristic #3: Seeing value beyond cost
The third discipline tends to emerge later in an engineer’s career, Aseervatham said, as they move from designing components to shaping systems. “In engineering, scale is associated with a dollar sign with a tail of zeros behind it.” At that point, purely technical judgement is not enough. Decisions require economic reasoning, although not in the accountant’s sense.
“Understanding cost is necessary, but not sufficient.” The harder question is: “Why is that cost worth bearing for the impact that it creates?” This is the shift from calculating cost to understanding value.
Aurora of benefits
The engineering mindset is whole when all three principles meet, centring solutions on the human problem, using data, analysis and technical rigour to solve it, and weighing the variables so the solution is viable in the real world.
Not all engineers have this mindset. Some remain “scope takers” throughout their careers, Aseervatham said. They are handed a brief and they deliver – precisely, often brilliantly, but within boundaries drawn by someone else.
Leadership emerges when engineers become “scope makers”. Scope makers step beyond the technical edges to consider the broader system – the community impacts, the budgetary consequences, the unintended effects, the hidden opportunities.
This creates an “aurora of wider benefits”, a halo effect beyond the technical that lifts engineers to the status of leaders. They bring a way of thinking shaped by systems, grounded in real conditions and oriented to long-term value.
Australia’s prosperity has always relied on engineering minds in the field. Its future depends on having more of them in the boardroom.
This story was originally published in the February 2026 edition of create magazine with the headline “All in the mind”.
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