Building an organisation to serve Dorothy

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. … just a little bit!

“I suspect it’s Maslow’s second highest need – respect – that people most crave from work: respect not just from their colleagues but from the world. No one wants to have to cringe when they tell people where they work.”

This insight from Michael Skapinker’s excellent column in the FT last week got me thinking about using social pressures to drive business and institutional change.

My experience and observations suggest that Skapinker didn’t go far enough: I was recently at a cinq à sept in Toronto and starting chatting with someone who works for a business consultancy. He talked about a variety of projects he was working on to reposition various resource extraction companies in the global market – interesting stuff if you’re into business strategy.

The conversation turned to what I spent my days (and nights!) working on. I told him briefly about Engineers Without Borders and our work in Africa and Canada.

And then R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

I started hearing about all the Corporate Social Responsibility projects he and his consultancy have been helping out with over the past few years. Here I had a very well paid business consultant, who was previously telling me about positioning the company for an extra $2billion of capitalization on the public markets, talking about community empowerment. Beautiful.

More than “not wanting to cringe”, my experience is that people want to be sincerely proud of the companies that they work for. This is one of the drivers behind CSR policies, corporate values and codes of conduct, and it results in business leaders being responsive to their employees wishes.

This has obvious relevance for the change we desire in EWB. If we want a company’s offices to offer exclusively Fair Trade coffee, then we should start by convincing employees that this is a good way to support global development. Change from the inside out.

I’ll take the chance to point out a great example of this by EWBers Anthony Candelario and Binnu Jeyakumar who have been respectively working to evolve their company’s Codes of Ethics/Conduct (http://my.ewb.ca/home/ShowPost/72223).

Now, the devil is in the details. How can we have a change movement driven by R.E.S.P.E.C.T.?

“To help people through technology.”

“I decided to go into engineering because I believe engineers are here to spread education globally. I also believe engineers are here to improve the standard of living for all of the globe’s citizens. Finally, to create a situation where engineers can work together in a network around the world. I hope that I can do that at the end of my four years.”

These are the answers I got when I posed the question “what is engineering?” to 1,300 first-year engineering students a few weeks back during their first lecture on their first day. Those answers, and many of the remaining 1,298 blew me away. But why was I so surprised?

First, some context: To say it was intimidating to follow a Nobel Prize winner (John Polanyi) and Canada’s most recognized international statesman (Stephen Lewis) to give UofT Engineering’s third annual opening guest lecture is an understatement. But that’s where I found myself, a few weeks ago, on the stage of UofT’s Convocation Hall in front of 1,300 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first year engineering students (though I was heartened by the fact that, considering that it was the first lecture of their University career, my audience was likely as anxious as I was).

In true EWB fashion, the lecture I gave was a group effort. Ideas came from across the organization (http://my.ewb.ca/home/ShowPost/63767), and I ultimately sat down with students at our amazing UofT Chapter for the finishing touches.

The theme and core concept of the lecture was a simple imperative: That each one of them, as a first-year engineering student, are responsible for answering the question “What is engineering?”

So why was I so surprised by the inspiring, visionary answers? Well, because when you look at the course content that awaits them in their degrees, different answers emerge. At UofT, definitely one of the more progressive and leading engineering schools in the country, of 500 or so engineering courses offered, roughly 10 are set aside to deal explicitly with the role of engineers in society or in the environment or in policy. That’s 2%!

And so a massive disconnect awaits these students.

That’s why I challenged them to ask the question − what is engineering? − and why I begged them to spend the next 5 years of their engineering degrees pushing for the answers that they expect.

Now we have 1,300 answers to that question, on cue cards (please get in touch if you have a passion for data entry!). Let’s ask it again every year to each class of first year engineering students at UofT. Let’s ask it every year to every first year engineering student across Canada. And then let’s ask it as they receive their iron rings. My guess is that the answers today would change substantially from day 1 to day 1,800. My hope for the future is that they are quite the same.

Mina Shahid, the Co-President of the UofT Chapter of EWB, recently asked all of the UofT Engineering Faculty: “Is U of T ready to help make these visions a reality?”

From listening to this first-year class during their first lecture on their first day of engineering, I don’t think it matters if UofT is ready because they’re about to be hit with a vision of the next generation of engineers, a vision that includes engineers serving a global society. And this vision is coming whether faculty at any engineering school in Canada like it or not … and that’s a beautiful thing!