When you look around Squamish, or a city you are visiting, do you sometimes think about how the town was put together over time, the systems that make it work or the people involved in their creation?
Some people may think about the politicians who steered a vision or made decisions, or the planners who helped guide those directions. Or the people who make sure your roads are plowed and your poop continues to flow downhill. I often think about the engineers.
The people who, guided by strict regulation and the functional objectives of safety, cost and practicality, design, analyze, build and test the complex systems and structures that allow a society to function.
I must admit, I am conflicted about engineers. They are ubiquitous in the service of our daily lives and critically important for our future.
They are admirably intelligent, have gone through years of schooling, and are members of one of the most highly regulated professions with strict and established codes of ethics. They are critical to humankind’s survival as they are the ones who connect scientific discovery and invention into applications that directly affect our quality
of life.
So why do I usually want to strangle them…metaphorically speaking, of course.
Most engineers are predominantly left-brained — academic, science-oriented and logical. They often lack the creativity of someone who is right-brain dominant. And they also seem to be deficient in emotional intelligence,
or EQ.
Perhaps an engineer with some EQ would have designed our intersections with Highway 99 with school kids and other walkers in mind, or concluded that a pump house on a cliff above a family home is a really bad idea or a green shore living dike instead of sheet pile is worth the extra effort and creativity. I could go on. Maybe we’d get out of the box empathetic solutions instead of cookie-cutter infrastructure that seems to lack a social and environmental conscience or moral imagination.
Maybe there are too few women in this most “manly” of professions. Maybe more people with overwhelmingly left dominant brains are attracted to this type of work.
Maybe the rest of us haven’t been successful at pushing for a better conclusion when an engineering solution lacks a social or environmental lens.
Whatever the reason, engineering schools from Harvard to UBC to Monash in Australia are starting to realize that EQ — self-awareness and regulation, social skills, communication, motivation and, perhaps most importantly, empathy — need to be fundamental in the engineering curricula and should be what we expect in these most revered professionals and what they build.
A little societal engineering EQ is long overdue.
Patricia Heintzman is a former Squamish mayor and councillor, and is a member of the board of governors of Capilano University.
