Engineers vs. managers - the trap of perfectionism
April 4, 2008 – 7:53 amNow is the second time, that the fundamental difference and source of all major conflict between an engineers and managers approach is revealed to me as I’m reading Kaizen and The Art of Creative Thinking by Shigeo Shingo: engineers, they want to ‘fix’ problems, while for managers, it’s sufficient to ‘manage’ them - that is, have them under control. The first time I encountered this comparison was reading The Hacker’s Diet by AutoDesk founder John Walker.
The solution, as most of the time, is in between.
Faced with an issue, engineers, having a perfectionist stance, deem any ’solution’ a failure, unless it is a 100% solution. If the tap is leaking, the only solution is such that there are no droplets coming from it if it is closed. Whereas for managers, the goal is to keep the issue at bay, and know how to maintain a status quo. Using this approach, placing a glass under the tap, and making sure it is emptied regularly is solution in itself. After all: there’s no unknown leakage anymore, and everything is kept under control.
Of course, the best usually comes when these worlds are combined: let’s improve on the valve, so that dripping is very limited, but still place and empty the glass underneath, albeit emptying with much less frequency - something that would not be considered a solution by an engineer at all. But from a managerial perspective, the maintenance resources are decreased considerably, and thus this is a major improvement in itself.
Shigeo Shingo suggests that this is actually a very good way to eventually achieve a ‘perfect’ solution, as it is easier to tackle only parts of a problem than the whole. One can ’solve’ say 60-80% of the cases with a naive approach, and put it into effect right away, already harvesting the benefits. And then there’s time to go for the remaining 20-40% later.
To the frustration of perfectionist engineers, this latter improvement sometimes never happens, and then there’s a feeling that ‘everything is broken’, ‘nothing is done properly’. And from his perspective, this view is understandable. But then again, making 60-80% improvements on other parts of the process is most probably a time much better spent than attacking 20-40% yields for the sake of perfectionism.
Nevertheless, the source of the conflict is ever there, and one must be wise to mitigate it regularly.
There is sure a huge mismatch between the thinking of manager and the engineer types, but this stereotype about the engineers being all perfectionist is a bit flawed I think. Engineering actually teaches that you have to aim for the good enough solutions, not the perfect ones. Unless the perfect one is the only one good enough, of course.
The ones who are expected to always go for perfect, the theoretically perfect solutions are the scientists, the theoretical guys. Actually if someone looks for the great engineering examples (like of course the various space missions) they are all about the good compromises.
So I don’t think that it’s that simple that engineers (and I mean real engineers with an engineering degree) are just pure perfectionists. The real problem might be that usually there is a mismatch between a good enough solution from the engineering point of view and a good enough solution from the business point of view.
To illustrate it on your example, the theoretically correct solution would be to install a perfect valve, to improve it until it is not dipping at all. The managerial solution is to put a glass or bucket under it and have someone empty it every know and then. The engineering approach could be to install a plastic pipe that takes the dipping water to the drain. You could call that hacking as well
(Of course both the engineers and the managers would improve on the valve as much as it’s sane.)
By atleta on Aug 30, 2008
Yes, we might be using a different term for ‘engineer’ - as I’m in the software business, I’m referring to software engineers, who, usually, have a scientific degree (Master of Science), instead of an engineering degree. And as you point out well, this might be one of the reasons for their perfectionism.
By Ákos on Aug 31, 2008