Keywords

In this chapter, I recommend that students and young engineers train themselves to see, or be open to potential areas of opportunity, whenever and wherever they might arise. The chapter offers what I hope is an interesting “What if?” speculation for older and younger mechanical engineers – What if we focus our energies on creating solutions more systematically, growing diversity of thought on our teams and paying attention to the non-technical aspects of engineering, and that we deliberately teach students and young engineers supportive habits of mind and skills from the start?

Like several of the authors in this volume, I’ve had a diverse and tenured background within engineering. First as an engineering student at Penn State and then a practicing professionally registered engineer, which led to becoming a professional engineer and then a graduate student, which led to a PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder and becoming a faculty member within mechanical engineering at two very different institutions.

A great deal has changed from a technological standpoint since I started as an undergraduate engineering student at Penn State in 1983. When I began my studies, I didn’t own nor use a desktop computer. When I completed my engineering undergraduate degree, I had taken one computer science course where I learned to program in FORTRAN but never used computing again in any of my other classes. I still remember how exciting it was to set aside my typewriter and use an Apple Macintosh classic cube computer at Pattee Library on the Penn State campus to create my resumé before graduation. Today, mechanical engineering (ME) students use some form of computing in nearly every class they take, and their educational benefits are significant. The changes that have occurred from a technological standpoint since I graduated college have been life-altering, and engineers have played a primary role in how these technological advances have manifested. Considering the accelerated pace and continuing nature of these changes, those of you who are just beginning your engineering coursework or profession should expect even more profound impacts of technology in the course of your career or lifetime and ideally, many of you will be a part of this development. Within engineering, technological advances present opportunity areas for engineers which are embraced and proactively taken on by those in the field, in contrast to other highly aligned areas which seem to be ignored.

Ironically, in other areas that align with, closely relate to or even support engineering work, the advancements made within engineering practices, education, and in the profession itself seem to have lagged behind. These areas are what I’ll call opportunity areas for engineers, and although there are some companies, agencies, and universities where significant advances have been made in these aligned areas, in general, there is a great deal of opportunity for more widespread advances. Based on my experience, three of these opportunity areas are:

  1. 1.

    Creating innovative solutions, rather than problem-solving

  2. 2.

    Embracing diversity of thought

  3. 3.

    Seeking out new tools and methods with a curious and open mind to support non-technical opportunity areas

I imagine what it could be like if engineering students were deliberately taught these non-technical topics in engineering curriculum to begin building foundational knowledge and capacity in these areas, and where they learned in vibrant, inclusive, effective learning environments and then transitioned into professional work environments that had similar characteristics. While the idea of advancing significant culture change across the entirety of our work and learning environment may seem somewhat galactic in scale and leave you with a sense of “what can I do” about impacting such change, it is important to realize that most major change starts with you, and a few others like you. Margaret Mead, a prominent anthropologist and activist during the 1960s and 1970s, captured this best: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” I’m hopeful that reading this chapter will invigorate and energize those of you who are already members of small groups of people working towards advancing engineering to become more creative, innovative, and inclusive. For others, perhaps reading this chapter will give you something to consider and strive towards when the opportunity presents itself.

Creating Innovative Solutions, Rather than Problem-Solving

There are important and numerous distinctions between work that focuses on solving problems and the process of creativity, or innovation, which drives significant change and advances. The distinction between problem-solving and the creative, or innovation, process is simple, yet at the same time it can be profound. We can easily recognize this distinction when made consciously aware of it, but we tend to navigate absent of being intentional of its implications: Perhaps this is due to the intense focus we give to the short-term versus the long-term, the urgent versus the important, or the simple versus the complex. Robert Fritz describes the difference between solving a problem and creating a solution in his book The Path of Least Resistance::

When you are solving a problem, you are taking action to have something go away: the problem. When you are creating, you are taking action to have something come into being: the creation. [1 , p. 11]

Take, for example, the simple and common practice people have towards their weight. Many people simply would like to “lose weight.” They see their overall physical nature as overweight and therefore want to lose weight – they see weight as the “problem” and as such by losing weight want to make it “go away.” Most realize that after such attempts this is not an ideal or sustainable solution. Conversely, a vision of creating a healthy lifestyle comprised of eating healthy, physical exercise, personal growth, quality relationships, and building self-esteem all lead to a sustainable solution for what was originally considered a problem. Losing weight is a quick fix, short-term, simple approach aimed at solving a problem. Creating a healthy lifestyle is a “systems approach” which takes more time and effort and results in creating an improved overall environment and lifestyle which can last a lifetime. This simple example illustrates the differences between the two approaches and, more importantly, the difference in what remains at the end of the process: in one case, the problem may have been solved, albeit temporarily and certainly not at the root cause level, in the other approach, a new and sustainable lifestyle and environment has been created. Something new has come into being [1].

A Technical Example

Consider the significance of this distinction (application of the creative/innovation process) in the music industry, in just the last 20 years. In 1999, a college freshman at Northeastern University in Boston, named Shawn Fanning, was looking for a way to readily share music. Using compression algorithms designed for storage of library material, he developed code that compressed, stored, and made it easy for the sharing of music. He dropped out of college and founded Napster, a company that despite legal issues with copyright regulations can be credited with redefining the music industry. By combining the features of existing programs (Internet Relay Chat’s instant-messaging system, MS Windows file-sharing functions, and the searching capabilities of various search engines) to create new software that included all of those features [2]. Until then, company giants such as Panasonic and Sony dominated the industry. The hundreds of engineers who worked for these companies focused on problem-solving issues such as miniaturization – what seemed like significant breakthroughs involving transitioning from albums to the cassette and ultimately to the CD. This was simply a form of miniaturization. While these companies generated significant revenue, as they sold each newer compact product of music, it left the “business model” of music unchanged. However, the solution developed by the founder of Napster completely disrupted the music business model. Industry response to Napster was to force it to shut down with injunctions regarding copyrights. It did not, however, stem the evolution of digital music storage, and with the resolution of copyright issues, it led to innovations like the Apple iPod. Today, it is rare to buy a CD, or even an entire album of music, rarer still to listen to it on a traditional stereophonic system. In 20 years, the entire industry was redefined by a creative solution devised through the work of a creative young person, and then a small group who focused on sharing music more readily, and this became their vision.

Unlikely Partners Experience

In the Napster example, it’s interesting that Shawn Fanning was 18 years old when he began working on a vision that ultimately redefined the music industry. I am often inspired and humbled by the intelligence, focus, drive, and openness of engineering students in my classes or who work in one of my funded research projects. Over the years, I recognize increased abilities of my students to operate at the connection between two different disciplines or where “disciplines converge.” An example of disciplines converging is architectural engineering, which is a discipline which exists between the intersections of architecture and engineering; my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in this area. This program engaged both the analytical left brain and creative right brain. Students’ growing abilities to manage converging disciplines is exciting because this is where innovation and creativity are boundless. I hope that in the future, we will see the emergence of more non-conventional degree programs, such as engineering with psychology or computer science with fine art or biology with organizational behavior. But even in single discipline courses, elements from very different disciplines can be introduced. One of my favorite past educational experiences was when I team taught a series of classes within a modern poetry class with a faculty member from English, Professor Anne Coon. Our collaboration helped to establish the Unlikely Partners project at RIT [3]. We focused on how electrification (or the distribution of electricity), which began in the 1890s in New York City (NYC), impacted the language used by poets, especially those living in the city or in the areas which were greatly affected by the coal mining needed to keep up with electricity demand. As a thermodynamics professor, in the modern poetry course, I taught non-technical students how coal is used to create electricity and the environmental impact associated with early coal mining.

Because poetry is like a mirror into our society’s soul, we explored what was happening within the lives of the people within NYC and the coal country of PA as these rapid changes unfolded. For example, as more wires were hung in NYC in order to meet demand for lighting in a market with little to no regulation or electricity codes, sunlight actually began to be blocked on some city streets, that’s how many wires were present overhead. As workers sought to keep up with demand, some were electrocuted because of faulty electrical lines and an overabundance of them, and people within the city were horrified by the results. These unfortunate incidents eventually led to adoption in 1915 of the country’s first electrical code, the New York City Electrical Code [4]. My colleague from English explored how these changes influenced the language used by poets, and how terms such as “incandescent,” “illumination,” and “electrification” began to appear in their work. Exploring this topic in such a convergent manner between thermodynamics and modern poetry was an exceptional learning experience for all of us. It changed the way I taught the concept of electrification in Thermodynamics to ME students. In addition, the experience helped to shape how I’ve created courses related to thermodynamics, sustainability, and public policy [5,6,7] as well as features within the thermodynamics textbook that I co-author [8].

An Application in Culture – West Point

Creating innovative solutions to improve your health or redefine the music industry or enhance the learning experience for college students are offered in this section to demonstrate the possibilities that become available through creating innovative solutions rather than through solving a problem. My final example focuses on creating a culture within a large, complex organization. The design of the actual environments where we learn and work is rarely ideal and often challenged by our behaviors, processes, and habits as opposed to created through intentionality of how it can be a highly effective, productive, and synergistic system or place for us to influence both what we do and how we do it – collectively. What we each bring to the environment, including our passion and intelligence, can be leveraged to affect the creativity of the group. Interestingly, this distinction, once recognized, helps not only advancements by the group in their area of focus but can provide significant benefits to all aspects of one’s life. It enables the synergy of “one plus one equals three (or more),” in learning groups, work environments, technological breakthroughs, and relationships.

I first realized the significance of working within an intentionally designed environment during the years that I served on the faculty within the ME Program at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. This distinctive environment was intentionally designed to create a culture based on a set of well-established values and it has been in existence since 1802. The 5 years that I spent at West Point provided me with a unique and enlightening experience, as one of the few non-military personnel in such a role and someone who had previously been exposed only to civilian university culture. All new instructors in the ME program at USMA went through a six-week teaching “boot camp” experience over the summer before they began teaching. This was helpful to the department because of their high annual turnover rate; 60% of the faculty are active duty military who have completed an MS degree at a civilian university, and upon graduation, they teach for 3 years at USMA before rotating back into the regular Army. Therefore, every year there is a relatively large cohort of new faculty within the ME program.

During my tenure at USMA, I learned a great deal about teaching, assessment, and working on effective teams, while I conducted undergraduate research in advanced thermodynamics. I also had the opportunity to create the first Society of Women Engineering student chapter at West Point, and I served as its first faculty advisor. Due to the unique context of West Point, I was able to deepen my technical knowledge in thermodynamics while learning from military officers who possessed deep knowledge in technical military applications. West Point provided me with a unique and excellent insight into leadership. I understood the intuitive importance of leadership prior to this, but as I became acclimated into the USMA environment, I began to recognize and experience leadership attributes first-hand in my colleagues, department head, and students. My West Point experience helped me to deepen my understanding of inclusion and how it “looks” when it works and when it does not. It is important to note that this unique environment “works” for the vast majority of people who work and study there, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

Upon arrival at USMA, I was the only woman in my teaching boot camp cohort and the only civilian. After I got over the initial culture shock, I started to become aware of the strength of the values, mission, and purpose that has been created and established there. The culture is purposeful and intentional. It is the by-product of the creative process that starts with a vision and is fulfilled through alignment at all levels such that everyone there both understands and follows accordingly to make it what it is. It is an example of the power of leadership around purpose, mission, and vision. West Point is able to achieve this through its long history, focus on leadership and mission, and its military orientation, and it would be impractical and ill-advised to assume that it could be replicated at a civilian university. However, elements of the West Point model could be adopted and would sit in stark contrast to everyday typical learning and working environments, many of which have mission and visions, but where little intentionality and alignment to ensure such “ideal” environments actually exist.

I continue to serve on the USMA ME program’s external advisory board and witness how the culture continues to evolve. When I worked there, I was one of ten civilian women on the faculty of about 600 – 90% men, 85% active-duty military – and I could recognize the need for improved gender inclusion within the environment. Because that organization is military, a needed culture change initiative would need to originate with military leaders. As a civilian, junior faculty member, I did not have the positional power to initiate this type of change but I did have the desire to begin taking a more active role in shaping my academic work environment and the culture if needed. My tenure at West Point and the years spent as an engineering student (BS and PhD) and practicing engineer before graduate school are the experiences that shaped and fueled my passion for organizational transformation and change for creating more effective, inclusive, and vibrant learning and working environments.

Embracing Diversity of Thought

When working in a group, embodying the desire to achieve diversity of thought among group members is strengthened by an understanding of what this means, what it looks and feels like, its advantages and how each member can work towards achieving this state. It is also key to recognize that the concept of inclusion is a prerequisite for diversity of thought and that both are prerequisites for exceptional or “vibrant” working and learning environments for the group, where the collective intelligence of the group far exceeds the sum of individual member intelligence. Ideally, the group is within an overall organization that also offers a vibrant or highly effective working and learning environment. I will share with you some examples of how I’ve worked towards creating and promoting vibrant working and learning environments – the work is challenging, strategic, and requires a high level of systems thinking in creating innovative solutions.

In 2003, I joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) as the inaugural Kate Gleason Endowed Chair and Associate Professor within the ME Department. I was thrilled to be joining the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, the only college of engineering in the US at the time named for a woman (see the first chapter in this collection – “Energetic Trailblazers: Kate Gleason, Edith Clarke, and Mária Telkes” – for more information on Kate Gleason). In my new role, half of my time was dedicated to addressing gender diversity opportunities within my college. I began to research why engineering continued to lack gender diversity and associated implications of the underrepresentation. I’ll share thoughts on this before exploring how I’ve worked towards creating inclusive learning environments.

In the US, women are under-represented in the field of engineering. This issue is widely known and its causes have been studied and analyzed for over three decades. Governmental agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Health (NIH) recognize this under-representation and its implications from a self-interest perspective, as described in this quote from a 2000 report to the US Congress.

For the US to remain competitive in a global technological society, it must take serious steps to encourage [women and minorities] to enter [science, mathematics, engineering, and technology] fields… It is time for our nation to examine and reaffirm its policies of equal opportunity and access for all. [9]

NSF, NIH, and many other government and private organizations have funded projects that aim to improve understanding of the problem and to create research-informed solutions to address the issue. However, there has been slow progress in increasing the representation numbers. As of 2018, women have accounted for more than half (56%) of domestic undergraduate enrollment at all institutions, this trend has remained steady since 2000. Looking at graduate student enrollment in 2018, compared to 77% of the graduate students in psychology (increase from 70% in 2000 and 52% in 1980), only 25% of the graduate students in engineering (increase from 19% in 2000) and 32% of the graduate students in physical sciences and computer sciences (up from 28% in 2000) were women. Representation of women within the labor force has increased more significantly. In 2019, women constituted about half of the population employed in science and engineering (up from 23% in 2000). However, in comparing unemployment rates by gender, women’s rates are higher than those of men are in each major age grouping in both 2000 and 2019 [10, 11]. Because this problem is persistent and complex, researchers study various aspects such as underlying factors of the issue and the solutions that work as well as how to best measure and define success.

Forming a Vision Around Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity

Over my career, I have existed in the midst of this journey. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be a woman undergraduate and graduate student in engineering, what it’s like to be a professional engineer in the private sector, and what it’s like to be in academe as an engineering professor. I have enjoyed learning how to become an engineer, how to practice engineering, and how to teach and conduct research in engineering. However, I realized very early in my undergraduate years that the reason that I was one of the only women students in my classes and the reason why I had no women STEM professors was not because of some inherent lack of intelligence or abilities in math or science but due to gender. There were environmental factors that led me to question whether women belonged.

In retrospect, while I was an engineering student and in the private sector before graduate school, I realize that I survived and thrived in engineering in part because I learned to accept elements of the culture that served me well while ignoring or downplaying the parts of the culture that didn’t, when possible. I did not think that I had the ability to change the culture, but I did have the power to decide to stick it out. I recall a few times when it was impossible for me to ignore what was happening to me, and I found navigating these issues in the professional work environment much easier than as a graduate student. In my second year of graduate school, I faced a significant issue with a faculty member following the birth of my child, which led to my questioning if I really wanted to be in academe. This experience showed me many ways in which the environment needed to change in order to become inclusive for someone like me. My learning environment at that time was the opposite of a place where I could thrive. Luckily, I had received an NSF Graduate Fellowship that allowed me to transfer to another university where I could conduct innovative experimental research that was fascinating. My family and I moved halfway across the country with an infant to allow me to continue my studies. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, I found myself in an academic environment where I could thrive and where there was very little about the culture that I had to ignore. My course work in the areas of renewable energy and pattern recognition and research into artificial intelligence, building controls, and thermodynamics were amazing. It was an ideal learning environment for me and I loved living in Boulder. My decision to remain in academe after challenges encountered in grad school turned out to be a very good decision. But sometimes it was best for me to move on.

My decision to leave West Point after 5 years on their faculty and join RIT in 2003 gave me the opportunity to actively pursue and lead various change initiatives with the goal of promoting a more inclusive working and learning environment at my university. Appointments over this time have included: Founding Director of AdvanceRIT and PI of the NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) and IT Catalyst grants (2008–2020), the Co-Chair of the President’s Commission on Women (2007–2020), the inaugural Faculty Associate and the Senior Faculty Associate to the Provost for Women Faculty (2010–2018), the Founding Director of WE@RIT (2004–2011) and as mentioned previously, the inaugural Kate Gleason Endowed Chair (2003–2009). The NSF ADVANCE program is a federally funded program created to address the under-representation of women faculty in STEM disciplines. As of fall 2018, the NSF has invested $315M in ADVANCE projects and awarded over 70 Institutional Transformation grants [12 ]. NSF ADVANCE IT grants are inherently large in scope with significant budgets (over $3M) and lengthy with timelines of at least 5 years. Under my leadership, RIT received an IT grant in 2012 as detailed in the following sub-section. IT grantees “develop systemic approaches to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic STEM careers” [13]. Activities of ADVANCE funded projects include mentoring programs, professional development workshops, work to promote equity in academic workplace policies and procedures, and workshops to support the creation of a more inclusive climate and culture for women faculty [12, 14].

In these roles, I have gained significant insights that shape my vision and strengthen my belief in the importance of equity, inclusion, and diversity within our working and learning environments. Each is beneficial in very practical ways to the mission of universities and research backs this up. Recent research shows that differences in how people perceive, analyze, and apply information, also known as cognitive diversity, relates directly to other types of diversity including differences in gender, social class, and race [15]. Ample research has shown that work environments that achieve high levels of perceived equity, inclusion, and diversity are more productive, innovative, and creative. Research has also shown that people working in diverse groups are better prepared to explain their perspectives as well as more open-minded, diligent, and active in their listening because they cannot assume that everyone has the same viewpoints [16]. In an inclusive environment, people feel safe to share ideas; there is a stronger sense of belonging and a sense that people can be authentic. Most importantly, the outcomes a group can achieve are likely to be better, more significant and impactful than in the case of a non-inclusive one. This type of environment is difficult to attain within a large, complex organization like a university without deliberate and consistent effort from many people, who together serve a collective role in moving the needle on equity, inclusion, and diversity. I will share with you some history and insights gained based on a series of interrelated projects that allowed me to work with and lead a group of faculty from across the university and administration to transform our university into a more inclusive environment. This dedicated group that I created and led sought to transform a university towards a more inclusive environment.

The WE@RIT, EFFORT@RIT, and AdvanceRIT Journey

The journey at RIT that I will share with you began in 2004 at the campus coffee shop when I assembled a group of women faculty and administrators, and we brainstormed the term WE@RIT [17] to represent a program that we imagined could be created within the college of engineering to address the severe under-representation of women engineering students. At that point, the college enrolled less than 10% women undergraduates, lower than the national average. We also knew that women engineering students were consistently succeeding at rates higher than their male colleagues in regards to GPA and retention. I continued to lead this motivated and energized group, and we created a strong organizational structure that is still vibrant and thriving today within the college [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. WE@RIT motivated the creation or strengthening of similar organizations in other colleges within RIT, including Women in Technology [26], Women in Science [27], and Women in Computing [28]. A great achievement for our college is that the gender profile of our incoming engineering undergraduate class now typically exceeds over 25% women, surpassing national benchmarks.

Around this time, in the late 2000s the NSF ADVANCE program [29] announced a new grant called the Institutional Transformation (IT) Start grant (later renamed IT Catalyst), which would provide up to $200K to support a university in conducting a self-study to explore the status of women STEM faculty on their campus. The IT Start program was created to help universities position themselves to submit a successful NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) grant proposal with much larger funding available (over $3M). At RIT, a group of women faculty and administrators already engaged in addressing gender diversity among students through their involvement in creating WE@RIT, WIC, and WIT collaborated and submitted a funding proposal for an IT Start grant. I led this effort as the principal investigator (PI), and we were successful and received funding in 2008 (NSF Grant No. 0811076); we called this project, EFFORT@RIT [30]. Over the next 3 years, we worked in close collaboration with the human resources to create a database to study faculty employment patterns by gender and gender equity in salary and start-up packages, analyze faculty climate survey responses using a survey that we created and administered (first of its kind at RIT), and conduct a thorough benchmarking of other universities [31,32,33]. Our research revealed barriers for women faculty in regards to climate, work/life integration, and career navigation [34]. Most importantly, the study revealed opportunities for enhancing our academic organization towards a more inclusive environment.

I worked with this same group plus a few more, and we took these opportunities and shaped them into a detailed, comprehensive plan to motivate important organizational change on campus. A shared passion to expand the safe places on our campus where authentic dialogue could occur regarding gender equity and the inclusion of those who are different in some way from the majority, led us to embark on a large, IT project called AdvanceRIT [35], funded by NSF in 2012 (NSF Grant No. 1209115). Interestingly, RIT is the only university that has successfully received both the IT Start/Catalyst and the full IT grants. I was PI on this nearly $4M effort aimed at transforming campus culture to become a place where more women faculty will join and thrive throughout their careers. Reshaping institutional culture in order to bring about a more inclusive and equitable working and learning environment was a strong motivator for the group, who engaged in questioning, analyzing, and re-envisioning our environment. We imagined a workplace where we could thrive, and we set out to create it.

AdvanceRIT focused on the goal of increasing the representation, retention, and career advancement of women faculty on our campus. The grant’s social science researchers examined the unique challenges experienced by women faculty of color and Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing faculty, and we refined interventions to address the needs of these key sub-populations. The program influences long-term changes that transform culture, promote inclusion, and expand the representation of women on campus and among leadership. At the end of the NSF funding, RIT established a permanent ADVANCE office within the Office of the Provost. With the support of hundreds of people on campus, AdvanceRIT is a success in many ways, and the creation of this program is a significant achievement. In leading this project, I took a systems approach in creating new programs and refining existing policies, procedures, and practices [36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52]. While leading this effort, I found that patience was key because changes within higher education are evolutionary at best. The project also raised the consciousness among the faculty, staff, and administration regarding campus culture and approaches that are helpful in raising levels of inclusion, including bystander awareness/action workshops. Finally, the project created change agents among our faculty, staff, and administration, which has led to a more diverse representative voice involved in decision-making and improved assessments of diversity, marginalization, and privilege to help the university continue to move towards equity.

I’m very proud of all of our team’s accomplishments. Key project achievements focus on faculty advancement and research success, faculty recruitment and retention with a focus on culture change, refinement to policy, practices, structures, and strengthened institutional collaboration in support of faculty equity, inclusion, and diversity. For a detailed list of outcomes, refer to Appendix I at the end of this volume. In August 2021, RIT was one of ten universities recognized by the National Institute of Health in receiving their new Prize for Enhancing Faculty Gender Diversity in Biomedical and Behavioral Science [53], which is in large part due to the impact of the AdvanceRIT grant on the RIT campus.

From a student’s perspective, there are now more women faculty in the classrooms and labs to serve as important role models and to offer unique and different perspectives along the way. Therefore, the seeds that were planted in my mind as an undergraduate engineering student, sitting in 5 years of intensive engineering classes at Penn State as I wondered “where are all of the women on the faculty?” grew into shaping me as a person who questions things and dreams up possible solutions.

From a faculty member perspective, prior to AdvanceRIT, the capacity to discuss work environment matters, specific to inclusion, diversity, conflict resolution, behavior issues, and open dialogue, was very limited on our campus. In the AdvanceRIT effort, the research team facilitated both cultural and environmental transformation initiatives and interventions. The group collaborated effectively with the faculty and all levels of the administration, using a multi-faceted approach addressing political, structural, symbolic, and human resource aspects of the organization. We embraced the desire to achieve diversity of thought among the research team members and our collaborators, key partners, and program participants. We addressed this deliberately and gained proficiency over time, while serving as role models for others on campus. We demonstrated that inclusion is a pre-requisite for diversity of thought and that both are pre-requisites for an exceptional or “vibrant” working environment where the collective intelligence of the group far exceeded the sum of individual member intelligence.

Helpful Tips, Tools, and Techniques

In this section, I will share just a few of the many tools that I’ve used to support my work, starting with some engineering tools that I have used to address non-technical challenges. As a ME, I study complicated systems like chillers within refrigeration systems, air conditioning systems, and power plants using thermodynamics to find ways to improve efficiency. I often work on solving inverse problems – given lots of data, what can be learned about the health or status of a system and where improvements can be made. With the help of NSF ADVANCE funding, I’ve described how I applied this technique to another type of system, focusing on my university rather than a power plant. I studied the status of RIT in regards to the environment for women using data to inform the study, starting with a focus on women students and then expanding to include faculty. Extending this approach to a non-technical context made sense.

Similarly, I’ve often used and extended the engineering design process to serve as a framework, as I’ve created new programs and initiatives focused on non-technical areas like attracting, retaining, and developing college students and faculty who will work and learn within an inclusive academic environment. My activities have often included the need to change culture and many aspects of the engineering design process that have been crucial in addressing these types of efforts. These include:

  • Building the design team in order to promote diversity of thought

  • Establishing team dynamic expectations and “ground rules” for behaviors

  • Articulating the need and developing a shared understanding of this need

  • Conceiving possible solutions and evaluating likely outcomes

  • Defining what success will look like and how it will be measured

  • Delving into detailed concept design

  • Studying data based on how the created solution is doing

  • Refining the designed solution based on data where you repeat many of the previous steps

Each one of the bullets requires a great deal of time and effort, and I’ve often relied on internal and external experts with expertise outside of engineering to support these efforts.

The first bullet above regarding building a team that can achieve diversity of thought is not a simple task, and it requires deliberate effort. At the start of the AdvanceRIT project, I asked each member of the core team to complete a Myers-Briggs personality test, [54] to help identify where opportunities might exist for the team. For example, this can help to raise the mindfulness of team members to make space in conversations for the quiet introvert(s) on the team or the quiet extravert(s) who may need it, in order to hear their voices. At RIT where we have many faculty, staff, administrators, and students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing, we also deliberately create our collaborations with accessibility in mind. Luckily we had accessibility experts on our team, who helped us become mindful of taking turns while speaking (often passed a stuffed toy to the person speaking) to reduce the instances where people interrupt each other. Sign language interpreters can better keep up with conversations when there are fewer (or no) interruptions. This led to the creation of a tip sheet to help us effectively communicate with people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing that we disseminate broadly [55]. Work in this area influenced the design of workshops, modeling the importance of making space to hear all voices.

As the team became much more mindful of how to promote diversity of thought among our members, we decided to create and adopt a set of ground rules that we often visited and refined as needed over the years. This led to the creation of a ground rules tip sheet for faculty and student teams that we distribute widely [56]. Several workshops have also been conducted with organizations to help them begin to use and adapt this practice, to help enrich their interactions and communications.

I found that leading an effort that transforms an organization to become more inclusive and equitable is extremely challenging, sometimes even overwhelming. I needed to help create ways to enhance creativity, patience, motivation, excitement, and endurance among members of the project’s team, which included nearly a hundred faculty, staff, and administrators. A shared vision and common values were essential to the group. The 20 page-funding proposal that we created and submitted to NSF took about 6 months to create and vet. We based the proposal on 3 years of past research and we had a strong foundation. However, the months that we spent creating the institutional transformation strategy for change allowed us to begin reimagining our work environment to become more equitable and inclusive. After a month of this reimagining, the evolving solution became so complex that we needed a tool to help us wrap our minds about the overall concept.

I found the ideal tool in the book Reframing Organizations, by Bolman and Deal, where they offer four frames or lenses through which individuals experience and view their organizations [56]. These frames – human resources, political, symbolic, and structural – can also inform the strategic approaches created in the institutional transformation process [57]. We adopted the approach and created a strategy to make progress in all four of the frames in order to influence long-term changes that will transform the culture, promote inclusion, and expand the representation of women. Use of this multi-frame approach improved the team understanding of the organization and enabled the group to create interventions within the overall strategy based on thinking which employed all four of the cognitive lenses.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I’ve illustrated a connection between systems thinking in engineering and the value of similar systems thinking in non-technical areas. I’ve also identified three supporting opportunity areas within engineering. The first two involve improving engineer’s ability to recognize the distinction between the creative process and traditional problem-solving, and with that understanding extend creative solutions beyond technical areas to thoughtfully shape the level of inclusion within the overall environments in which we work and learn in order to promote diversity of thought . The last area supports the first two in its focus on expanding our ability to seek out new tools and methods with a curious and open mind.

There are important and numerous distinctions between efforts that focus on solving problems and the process of creativity, or innovation, which drives significant change and advances. Differences include: the process followed for each, time required, mindset and behaviors needed, amount of mental agility required, ability to share or relinquish control, and level of systems thinking . Ideally engineers will be able to recognize when one approach is advantageous over the other given the context and be able to move from solving problems to creating solutions when needed while becoming comfortable and proficient in applying the process of creating solutions to both technical and non-technical challenges. As an additional bonus, when mastered, it can also help shape many aspects of your personal life.

When working in a team or group, it is essential to embody the desire to achieve diversity of thought among group members. It is key to understand what this means, what it looks and feels like, its advantages and how each member can work towards achieving this state. Recognize that the concept of inclusion is a pre-requisite for diversity of thought and that both are pre-requisites for exceptional or “vibrant” working and learning environments for the group where the collective intelligence of the group far exceeds the sum of individual member intelligence. Ideally, the group is within an overall organization that also offers a vibrant or highly effective working and learning environment.

Engineers will benefit by being open to and curious about new tools needed – knowledge, habits, behaviors, attitudes, and skills – to support your engineering work, like those required to support the two opportunity areas listed. It will be helpful to recognize that acquiring this new non-technical knowledge is not simple and it will take time and can be challenging to learn and master especially if you are in an environment where leaders and those in power do not emphasize the importance of these topics or serve as effective role models. Some of these non-technical topics are complex but engineers are used to dealing with complexity in technical areas and therefore should be able to translate this ability to other areas. Perhaps some engineers do not know what they know about embracing and understanding complexity. Instead, within many engineering environments, the treatment of these topics is superficial or even absent as if these things will organically occur and are simple to master. This brings Einstein’s quote to my mind, “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”

Over my career I gained momentum when I began to see how the value of systems thinking that I learned in engineering began to inform my later thinking about systems change in organizations like universities. These two areas began to synergize and revealed new opportunity areas for my own research and administrational efforts. I gained more motivation through my passion for creating new approaches to improving the inclusivity of learning environment for students and working environment for faculty and staff. My efforts are made possible by funding programs that focus on increasing the representation of women in the STEM workforce. However, the intended environmental improvements that I create benefit everyone, not only women. It is crucial that universities work deliberately towards creating inclusive campus cultures. Transforming the culture within a university alters its fabric. It is complex work and creative engineers who believe in the importance of inclusion and diversity of thought are well suited for leading these efforts, especially those who lead and create highly functioning teams and who are open to learning about new approaches and tools while relying on key experts to fill in knowledge gaps. I have been able to use my passion, strengths plus some luck, and a great deal of privilege to do this type of work. I see similar assets in other engineers and hope that more will become engaged in these types of efforts in the future.

For young engineers and engineering students, you should know that these changes are underway and you should keep an eye out for these areas of opportunity and other areas of growth and innovation that are sure to come in the next 10 years. In preparation for these changes and based on my past experiences, I recommend that you develop a mindset that allows you to stay curious, identify and pursue areas of opportunity, wherever you may find them, and to look beyond problems to create expansive solutions.