Prosperity in the New Year Requires Diversity of Thought

Prosperity is a familiar New Year’s toast worldwide. Yet the mere word understates our measure of success in the global engineering community. We’re no longer talking numbers, strictly speaking. In addition to economic measures such as employment and growth statistics, prosperity is irremovably linked to idea creation and cultural perceptions. 

We all want to work with the best talent available and to improve workplace performance, especially by creating an innovative environment in which to work. But to prosper, our focus must advance beyond the intellectual understanding of technical capabilities, workforce needs or market demographics. We need a gut-level change in the engineering culture that truly values informed, collaborative interaction.

Positive perceptions of peoples, countries, and companies affect investments, attract talent, and facilitate transactions globally. Companies and nonprofit organizations alike benefit from understanding cultural and personal nuances. This is how workforce diversity, in particular, translates into direct economic advantage, as much as individual talent and education. Engineering needs greater workforce diversity to bring in that knowledge to all aspects of its work, from cradle to grave, whether we’re talking about product development or about ASME itself.

One great example of how ASME is leveraging its strengths as a major engineering network, particularly for students, is found in its partnerships with organizations such Engineers Without Borders (EWB), the Engineers Week Diversity Council, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE). Promoting service-learning projects for students and mentors helps ASME encourage underrepresented groups to pursue engineering know-how. Plus EWB in particular helps students and members build skills for cross-cultural design teams that create sustainable and appropriate technology solutions while working within real communities around the world.

ASME, in its Policy 15.11 on diversity and inclusion, defines diversity as the ways in which we differ as individuals or organizations, including age, gender, ethnicity, physical appearance, thought styles, religion, nationality, socio-economic status, belief systems, sexual orientation, and education. All of these differences still allow us to recognize commonalities that motivate us to work collaboratively to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Individuals bring unique life experiences, cultural views, personalities and styles.

In the diversity forums that ASME has conducted at Congress and soon will run at the annual Leadership Training Conference (LTC) in March, diversity often is not what participants initially expect. For example, bringing new people to the table (into a committee or council or group) is not enough. What needs to happen is that individuals in all their glorious diversity need to be brought into the conversation, and then we really need listen to what is being said. Greater diversity means more views and different approaches. It introduces greater complexity, too. But engineers are trained to manage complex systems. And when managed effectively, the result is much more innovative decision making.

As an example, our forum discussions explore an important step of awareness known as “privilege” and what we can do to create a fairer environment where we can truly value differences. In group dynamics, sometimes it takes an objective assessment to help us recognize that some people are privileged (defined by advantages or lack of barriers) and others are not. ASME’s diversity consultant Doug Harris, from Kaleidoscope Group LLC, talks about being in “bliss,” that sense of thinking everything is OK because the situation is OK for you, despite evidence that it is not OK for others. There is an old cowboy saying that states the same thing, relative to thought processes akin to “bliss,” and it goes, “If it ain’t happening to me it ain’t happening.” Awareness can change how we listen and encourage true participation.

ASME policy defines inclusion as the creation of opportunities and the elimination of barriers that allow people to participate in and contribute to all levels of interaction. For us to be inclusive, we need to recognize privilege, regardless of its source, and we need to breakthrough to knowing, accepting, and leveraging each others’ strengths. The outcomes are a high level of competency and a high level of participation, bringing greater clarity to organizational vision and mission. True inclusion enables healthy dialogue within an innovative and high-performing engineering culture.

If your ASME section or division (whatever unit you participate most in) has not already been discussing this, ASME encourages you to raise expectations a little higher in terms of diversity and inclusion. Ask what your unit can do to address new leadership and greater participation that adds insight into meaningful interaction.

I’d also like to recognize the Richmond Area Program for Minorities in Engineering (RAPME), in Petersburg, Va., for encouraging and educating minority students in grades six through 12 through its Summer Engineering Institute (SEI) and its scholarship program. RAPME is the 2009 award recipient of the ASME Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies Inc. Medal, which was established to recognize outstanding contributions toward developing and implementing practices, processes and programs that value and strategically manage diversity and inclusiveness. Since 1978, more than 3,800 students have attended SEI, and approximately 95 percent of the program’s graduates go on to attend college or a university, with more than 70 percent majoring in an engineering discipline. RAPME has awarded more than $125,000 in scholarships to former SEI participants to assist with studies at accredited engineering schools. 

We must keep the doors open within our profession and workplaces. We must listen and manage the complex relationships that successful teamwork requires of us. We must look beyond traditional economic measures of achievement if we are to reach our overarching engineering visions of innovation for our companies and for providing solutions that benefit humankind. These are my wishes for ASME in the New Year.

Amos E. Holt
ASME President