Moving From Siloing to Meshing

Most of the world fully understands this simple fact.  Gone are the days when you could separate various academic and professional disciplines into tidy little boxes.  Engineering has been slower than other professions and parts of the economy to accept this fact - we still like our little boxes of codified information and practices in order to make sense of our messy world.  But here is the thing that engineering needs to get on board with - our global landscape has grown much too complex for such an outdated approach, requiring instead a merging of disciplines.

Nothing says "meshing" more than global warming and climate change.  As reported this week, 2014 broke another heat record.  As the New York Times reported today, the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1987, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human activity and poses profound long-term risk to civilization and nature.  No one engineering discipline or practice area will have all the answers to the global warming and climate change questions.  What will be required is a new way to think, organize, and manage the colliding of information, domains, tools, ideas, practices, and philosophies that were previously deemed exclusive and untouchable.

Another "wicked" problem is our declining infrastructure and the need for smarter and more resilient bridges, water treatment plants, and dams.  Civil engineering will not have all the answers to a world demanding smarter infrastructure - nor will computer science and engineering.  What offers our clients and communities the deepest solutions are the "spaces-in-between" the worlds of civil engineering and computer science.  The biggest boast we can give to future engineers is helping them to develop transformative mindsets that seek out new and creative solutions to old problems in a world of transdisciplinary meshing.

Your success this century as an engineer depends on your ability to forget siloing and think about the merging of disciplines.