Thinking like an Engineer

Engineers are known for their structured thinking. This is useful due to the fact that building complex systems is like putting together assembling building blocks together. In order to organize those blocks in a way that don’t collapse, it is important to calculate the impact of each decision that gets made along the way.

Structured thinking can be done through processes like Agile sprint planning and daily standups or logically breaking down things into their most atomic parts to be composed back up into something bigger. These can be extremely powerful techniques to solve problems systematically at large out in the world.

However, the downfall of being too rigid with structured thinking is to not flow with the vagaries of the external world. While most people don’t like surprises, Engineers especially don’t like surprises when it comes to things that we are working on. The vagaries I refer to could include reacting to high pressure scenarios that come out of the blue, and have a short time within which they need to be resolved.

While breaking things down into their atomic unit and starting to problem solve can be hugely helpful in these scenarios, what is equally as important is having the right emotional quotient or the mental attitude towards how you approach and emerge out of the problem. Having the right resolve and demeanour to be able to react to spur-of-the-moment issues and resolve them, while maintaining composure, is a killer attribute for Engineers to have, in addition to the way we think about problem solving.