Life Is Pain, Highness. Anyone Who Says Differently Is Selling Something

Following on from last week's "Princess Bride" themed article, here's a useful bit of guidance from The Dread Pirate Roberts. It's life advice as well as professional guidance, especially in this age of fake news, and alternative facts.

I covered a number of subtypes of related errors in the "Mistakes" chapters of my books: "Following The HiPPO"; "Running From The Tiger"; "Believing Salespeople"; "The Plant Works ... Most Of The Time"; "Let The Newbie Design It"; "Why Call In A Specialist"; "Who Needs A Process Engineer"; " Ye Cannae Change The Laws Of Physics, Jim"; "Overreliance On Modelling and Simulation"; "Lack Of Consideration Of The Natural Stages Of Design"; "Excessive Novelty"; " Lack Of Attention To Detail"; "Lack Of Consideration Of Nonsteady States"; "Uncritical Use Of Online Resources"; "Lack Of Appreciation Of 'Technician Level Knowledge'"; "Lack Of Willingness To Go And Directly Look At Process Problems". I could go on. In fact I do, at some length. But anyway, all of these errors have something in common. Wanting the difficult business of process engineering to be simple.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could avoid the pain of accepting the multidimensional difficulty of our discipline by making our decisions someone or something else's fault? Tigers, HiPPOs, Hysys, those who taught, managed and trained us. Such arguments might carry a little weight for engineers in training (though UK law offers no such latitude), but a professional/chartered engineer shouldn't be making excuses. The essence of engineering is dealing with uncertainly in an environment of competing interests to achieve a specified aim. Failing but having an excuse /scapegoat is no substitute for succeeding.

Wouldn't it be nice if that nice salesman really had a miracle product which would solve all of our problems, including the seemingly insoluble ones that have dogged the area for years? Wouldn't it be nice if a magic model told us all we need to know? Wouldn't it be nice if science could really tell us just what was going to happen on a plant? Wouldn't it be nice not to have to leave the office/control room and appreciate how much more complex even the best run real plants are than models. Yes, that would be super, especially if your plant is somewhere like the parts of the Arabian Gulf, India, Pakistan and South America where wet-bulb temperatures are above 35C for significant periods (hot enough to kill even a healthy adult in hours). But wishful thinking is not a strategy, as I was discussing with a client yesterday. The map is not the terrain.

Wouldn't it be nice if process engineers were the real snake-oil salesmen, pretending that what they do is difficult? Wouldn't it be nice if there really wasn't any problem at all, or at least that any perceived problem was pretty minor really? Wishing away hard problems is no more a solution than wishing them easy to solve. If you don't believe me, I can't suggest you try a strategy like " The Plant Works ... Most Of The Time"; " Let The Newbie Design It"; "Why Call In A Specialist" or "Who Needs A Process Engineer". These are in my "Beginners Mistakes To Avoid" chapter for a reason. 

Wouldn't it be nice if you as a client organisation could pass on your responsibility to provide design information, to properly specify the plant you want, or stand by your signoff of design deliverables? Wouldn't it be nice to simply make everything the responsibility of the contractor/designer? Even things which they cannot possibly know or control? It might seem nice, and there's a level on which you can make it happen, the relative power of clients and contractors in many sectors being what it is. But this doesn't lead to a working plant. It's just another way to fail, but have an excuse and scapegoat.

Process engineering is hard. Believe it. I've studied, practiced and written about it for thirty years, and I'm still seeing new ways of failing at it. It always involves managing real risks, significant uncertainty, and worst of all, people who don't know what they don't know. Thirty years of practice have given me a reduced area of unknown unknowns. My list of known unknowns is however far larger then it was when I started.