Applied Minds

I bought this book "Applied Minds" by Guru Madhavan.

This book  explores the unique visions and mental tools of engineers to reveal the enormous influence they wield in transforming problems into opportunities. The resulting account pairs the innovators of modern history—Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Steve Jobs—with everything from ATMs and the ZIP code system to the disposable diaper.

Dubai's Burj Khalifa—the world’s tallest building—looks nothing like Microsoft’s Office Suite, and digital surround sound doesn’t work like a citywide telecommunication grid. Yet these engineering feats have much in common.

Biomedical engineer Guru Madhavan’s overview of the “engineering mind-set” dives into the world of problem solvers, innovators and inventors. He explains a lot about urban planning, medical research and advances in the finance industry. Madhavan highlights key terms and concepts by introducing a cast of more or less illustrious personages. Examples from history, different continents and a variety of disciplines bring his arguments to life. His storytelling from inside engineering is more revealing than his lighter conclusions about how engineers think.

Guru Madhavan introduces a flexible intellectual tool kit called modular systems thinking as he explains the discipline's penchant for seeing structure where there is none. The creations that result from this process express the engineer's answers to the fundamental questions of design: usefulness, functionality, reliability, and user friendliness.

Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment.

Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.

What you can assimilate from this book - One Thought - Engineering Mindset

• How to approach problems with an “engineering mind-set?

“Engineering Mind-Set”

Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval was an 18th-century engineer who worked for the French military. Gribeauval was obsessed over technical detail. He often imagined different ways to improve various instruments and devices.

At the time, cannons were crucial weapons of warfare, but their weight made moving them across battlefields prohibitive. Gribeauval introduced a height-adjusting mechanism, cast-iron axles, larger wheels and leather straps that enabled soldiers to move, adjust and aim French cannons more easily, thus improving their overall force and usefulness. He was not a military mind, but he demonstrated how engineering can find solutions in any field.

“Science, philosophy, and religion may well be in the business of pursuing the truth as it looks to them, but engineering is at the center of producing utility under constraints.”

Gribeauval’s mix of approaches and techniques encompassed the three core elements of the engineering mind-set:

“Engineers are expected to produce the best possible results under the given conditions.”

1. “Structure” – Detect problematic patterns and visualize the unseen. Ask questions about limits, risks and payoffs to define your concrete aims.
2. “Constraints” – Become aware of everyday limits. Determine the best possible solution under the given circumstances.
3. “Trade-offs” – Prioritize design choices. Accept the “inescapable tugs-of-war” between what’s obtainable, what’s doable, what’s in demand and the limits you face.

Gribeauval honed his technical innovations by applying the essence of the engineering mindset to a cannon. He overcame adverse weather constraints and instituted design trade-offs to increase the weapon’s force and usefulness. He used “modular systems thinking” by mixing and matching his various talents in a structured way.

“Every model is limited by its assumptions and criticized for reducing reality to simple equations.”

“Optimizing”

Optimizing means working continuously and repeatedly on different models and their improvements. Models guide your decision making by making the pros and cons of your solution visible. Imagine that the city of Stockholm, known as “the Venice of the North,” asks you to help with its rush-hour congestion problem. You suggest the obvious: Build another bridge. Does that solve the problem, or does it only buy more time until congestion becomes unmanageable again?

“Public behavior plays a pivotal role in the success or failure of infrastructure design projects or policies.”

After reflecting on this challenge, Stockholm’s city officials hired a team of IBM engineers to help create an alternative solution. The engineers collected traffic data, took hundreds of thousands of photographs, and analyzed traffic jams using advanced mathematical modeling. The team’s findings and final advice took everyone by surprise: Charge rush-hour commuters tolls to decrease inner-city congestion and to encourage use of public transportation. When more people use public transportation, carbon emissions drop and a city becomes greener and more livable.

“Enhancing Efficiency”

Engineering strives for concrete goals, such as efficiency improvements or simplification. Engineers apply “matrix thinking” by organizing their ideas in tabular format and combining each cell in every possible horizontal, vertical and diagonal permutation. His tendency to reconfigure set-ups periodically drove Clarence Saunders, founder of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, to create a self-service market in 1916. Instead of waiting in line for traditional behind-the-counter service, shoppers could walk through product aisles at their own pace and convenience, compare and choose goods and pay at the cashier. Shoppers liked their new freedom, and Saunders boosted sales by 400%. Piggly Wiggly launched self-service shopping, which is now the norm.

“As we have come to rely on standards, it has become easy to engineer ultracomplicated systems.”

Another example of enhanced efficiency is the automated teller machine (ATM). The ATM started as a “function-based invention” that a frustrated bank customer created. John Shepherd-Barron, a Scottish engineer, arrived at his bank just a few minutes after it closed. The branch manager would not reopen the bank for him. Shepherd-Barron believed you should have access to your bank account at any moment of the day. He invented a mechanism – modeled after a chocolate candy vending machine – to dispense money directly to the customer. ATMs let you bank around the clock, access your account in convenient locations and withdraw cash when you travel. The ATM is “high-tech” and “high-touch,” and it saves you time and hassle.

“In systems thinking it is an axiom that every influence is both cause and effect.” (Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline”)

“Standardizing”

Alexander Fleming first discovered penicillin by chance in 1928. But the drug didn’t become widely available until Margaret Hutchinson’s clever adaptation and standardization of the “deep-tank fermentation process,” which enabled production in sufficient quantities to save thousands of lives in the 1940s. Fleming, celebrated throughout his life, received the Nobel Prize and a big state funeral; Hutchinson passed away in her home without recognition. “Adaptation is a pre-eminent form of creation, though it’s seldom recognized at the same level.”

“Transduction” is similar to adaptation. It describes how you transfer elements of one organism in evolutionary biology into another to generate new qualities and variation. Henry Ford and his group of engineers, for example, did not invent the automobile. They “transduced” it into a mass-produced household commodity. Standardization leads to systems of heightened complexity, as with commercial aircraft and their uncountable parts and the subassemblies that varied manufacturers produce. Standardization has a downside: Complex systems become incomprehensible, and simplified solutions become harder to find.

“The main difference between the economic way of thinking…and the engineering way of thinking perhaps resides in how ideas are implemented.”

“Solutions Under Constraints”

When you engineer a solution, constraints appear in your path. Consider the Ganges River, which flows through all of India. The natives lovingly call it “Mother Ganga” because they regard the river as a holy source of life and a sacred burial place. Pollution levels are high in the Ganges, partially due to the traditional practice of cremating the dead directly over its waters in hopes of helping the deceased achieve immediate salvation.

“As citizens of high-performance cultures, we are expected to engineer useful choices.”

If you sought a sewage treatment solution for the river’s pollution, you’d encounter several limiting factors. One “negative constraint” is the people’s religious practice; another “physical constraint” is finding available space to introduce sewer lines in this densely populated country. “Economic constraints” include raising sufficient funds for the project. Locals might be reluctant to use treated waste water for their rituals. You’d also search for “positive constraints”: new settings that allow you to create solutions without boundaries.

Planning a massive project like the Olympics likely means more negative than positive constraints. You get the go-ahead five years in advance, and the clock starts ticking. Time is one of your negative constraints. The city’s infrastructure limits your options further, as do existing expectations that you conform to the brand of the Games. Being the chief engineer for such a project is daunting. People involved in software engineering consider constraints from a different perspective. They apply the technique of “denormalization” – designing a new, ideal system as if there were no limits – and then introducing restrictions and concessions.

“A technical disaster could include a number of malfunctions, but good engineers focus on finding and fixing the root causes.”

“Empathizing”

What works in engineering might give you headaches if you applied it to politics. Politicians are highly emotional and tend toward compromise; engineers value structure and think constantly about trade-offs. Consider policy making as extremely inefficient, with more emphasis on the process than on its outcomes. Engineers prefer “systemizing” – understanding objects – over “empathizing,” which is the ability to understand people. Achieving a healthy balance between the two provides the most effective outcomes.

“Prototypes foster adaptation to new forms, new expectations and new offshoots of technologies.”

Imagine you enter an elevator on its way to the ground floor. You press the button for the lobby and get off when the elevator stops. In your mind, you have arrived at the lobby. But someone else called the elevator on its way down, and you find yourself on the fourth floor. Psychologists call this a “frame mismatch,” because your “mental model” made you believe the next stop would be the ground floor. Social life and politics are full of variables that won’t necessarily confirm your mental model. Because of that, listening to people, empathizing and understanding their problems are part of an engineering process.

“Prototyping”

When you cook a meal at home, you engage in prototyping: You add a bit of salt, then taste it. You find it isn’t salty enough, so you add more salt before continuing with garlic, pepper and other spices. In a similar way, engineers use these forms of prototyping as professional tools to tweak their creations, such as new products:

“Engineering does rely on natural laws and scientific evidence, but it also helps generate new bodies of scientific knowledge.”

• “Functional prototyping” – Refine your ideas step-by-step, knowing that your incremental improvements build on one another.
• “Conceptual prototyping” – Start with a vision in mind and apply different models that bring you closer to your solution while filtering out ideas that don’t work.
• “Aesthetic prototyping” – Senses and emotions guide your product development; technical and functional considerations come later.

“Evolution is not goal oriented, whereas engineering is.”

During prototyping, test your product to create new input for further development. You need data for testing, but testing produces new data. Within this loop of “test-driven development,” assume you can always perfect your product along the lines of the Japanese “wabi-sabi” approach: Highlight the imperfections and improvement opportunities in everything.

“Learning from Others”

Good engineering starts with the customer in mind. Understanding user needs is invaluable when developing a new product. Draw from your own real-world experience, employ an ethnographer, or systematically analyze your customers’ interests and concerns.

“Anyone can claim to optimize something in words, but in practice it’s a different story.”

A product has a “responsive design” when it relieves end users of daily stress. For example, a chemical engineer at Procter & Gamble came up with the idea of producing disposable diapers. Feeling pressure from the acquisition of a new pulp mill and frustrated with washing his grandchildren’s cloth diapers, he saw a potential solution in combining resources and invented the Pampers disposable diaper. Other companies had worked on disposable diapers before. Pampers succeeded because it continuously applied the breadth of its customer feedback – from parents, doctors and business people – to enhance the product.

Xerox, the digital imaging company, regularly invites users to join its team of developers for “co-innovating” sessions. There, people in the room dream up new products with the dictum that every new invention must be useful for customers. If you neglect customers, your product might look great, but cause trouble and frustration for the end user. This happened to Toyota when it launched the RAV4 SUV without a cup holder. The most senior engineer at Toyota remained unaware of the problem until a distributor took him on a drive. They stopped at a gas station, bought a large, hot beverage and got back into the car. That’s when the engineer discovered he had no place to put his cup.

Key Inputs

• “Structure,” “constraints” and “trade-offs” are the core elements of the “engineering mind-set.”
• Use structure to evaluate and detect problematic patterns.
• Become aware of everyday constraints and strive for the best possible solutions.
• Set priorities and make trade-offs when deciding what’s accessible, achievable and necessary.
• Engineers create practical solutions by “optimizing” and “standardizing.”
• Use “matrix thinking” to explore new combinations while improving efficiency.
• Develop a healthy balance between “systemizing” and “empathizing.”
• Whether you engage in “function prototyping,” “conceptual prototyping” or “aesthetic prototyping,” imperfection is your starting point.
• A “responsive design” relieves end users’ daily stress.

Learn from filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, whose engineering mind-set led toPsycho and other classic movies. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was an engineer, too. His cinematic productions invest deeply in fine technical detail with the aim of creating thrilling movie experiences that feel more tangible than reality. His famous shower scene inPsycho depicts Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense, invention and montage – the rapid editing between new and different images to create a sense of a single, unfolding event. You never see the murderer’s knife actually touch the body of the victim, yet the filmmaker’s engineering craft makes you believe you saw a bloody murder. Hitchcock’s movies succeed because he crafted them meticulously on paper, as do architects who complete their skyscraper blueprints to the last detail.