A more optimistic version of myself has before suggested that the future workforce is in front of us if we just give them working conditions that reflect their needs. This month, June 23rd, marks Women in Engineering day. So in a bleak post-DEI world, how are we doing?

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However…

There is an engineering feat still miraculously standing. The aqueduct of free waters. Mind you, free does not refer to the cost - this was paid for by brutal taxes on wine, meat, and olive oil. Instead its homage is to fallen water from the sky and brought by gravity into Lisboa.

Its necessity was vital to life. The only reliable water in the 18th c was from the clay formations near the Alfama district, a destination in posterity known for the narrow streets built pre-earthquake. City planning would change remarkably after the quake with Marquês de Pombal at the helm of the design. This design, with the help of military engineers, reflected new values in which the citizens would take precedence over the church and the crown. The Aquas Livres plays an important role in this rebuilding, as a structure still standing when the rest of the city was in chaos, it served “as a training ground for the craftsmen who later assisted in the rebuilding of Lisbon.”

As the city expanded it needed reliable fresh water elsewhere in the city, underlain by limestone formations. The aqueduct starts in the Caneças region, with little architectural details. As it comes into the city it becomes more grand, more baroque, and more modern. Well modern for this time.

And innovative. This design is built on a person-scale. Maintenance can be done inside the aqueduct without cutting off the flow of water. It sports windows from the inside. This makes it a comfortable walk and I’ve heard a rumor that it used to be a cyclist throughfare.

A colleague of mine hooked us up with a private tour from the water utility historian. We walked a few kilometers of the aqueduct down the middle lane with troughs on either side.

Near the start we came upon the Arco Trunfal das Amoreiras, the most spectacular of the arches. This Doric arch is a commemorative monument to the waters entering the city in 1748. The round windows in my photo are the round windows seen from outside (and in the 1908 photo below), just as the aqueduct makes a 90 degree turn. From the inside, the water tray makes the turn without any additional engineering, indicating lower velocities.

From here we head up to the top of the aqueduct with a view of the city. Looking down, you can see one of the 30 street fountains which were fed from these waters. There would have been services for home delivery of water for the wealthy, which I talk about in this Scottish travel case study. Each fountain has a location for horses, drinking fountains, and waterboys. And that is as good as in-house plumbing gets in 1755.

And as we continue into the city we emerge in an underground reservoir. The deposits from the waterfall tells the story of mineral-rich “free water” from the springs. The story goes that the queen would come in here daily to listen to the waterfall and be at peace (unverified).

As the aqueduct lowers in elevation it eventually makes its way underground. Many people will say that it's a gravity fed aqueduct. And that's true for the most part. Designed with Darcy principles it features portions in the underground between differing pressure zones. These reaches are pressurized, encapsulated in concrete on either side of the walkway.

To perform maintenance on any of the portions, stones can be lowered into the flow of water to access a portion of it. These stones have been sealed into place and its evident that some of this right-of-way was used to put in more modern piping. In the 21st c, the acqueduct is no longer in use. The trays of water in the tunnel have signs of sedimentation and ultimately other means of water transport have been adopted.

As we continue underground the ceiling slopes downward. At the lowest portion it’s 1.75m (5.75 ft) tall where its been reinforced for the trolley to be able to safely travel above it. I didn’t have any issues with that clearance but I was in the minority!

In fluid dynamics, non-pressurized reservoirs can help to control the pressure at each node. One of these nodes we stopped at to see how the pressure transients are taken care of. In the event of a water hammer, water can spill over this basin and be collected back again from the floor, without any waste of water. If memory serves, there was a small door to a wine cellar in this area. They really did think of all the operational concerns!

The photo below shows a much smaller basin. The pressure of water at the surface of water is equal to the hydraulic head (height from the datum) in this small reservoir and also at a small basin on the other side of the wall, connected through a small hole. This is the only one that looked like this — it services the palace through the principle of balancing of water. There is net flow between reservoirs.

The palace was the only residence plumbed like this and would likely be somewhere in their basement where the servants would go to access water.

Portions of the aqueduct will continue to be developed into the 19th c. Similar to 21st c techniques, the tunnel was started from either end and met together in the middle. Without the help of digital surveying the tunnels connected about 20 steps away and is joined by a short zig between the segments. I didn’t take any photos of that!

We pop out through a non-descript door right in the Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara and back with the other tourists. If you walk across Lisboa: between the stone arches and Tagus river you are reminded that water is at the heart of Lisboa. And also of vino.

If you want one last cool thing to look into, search the Santa Justa Lift in Lisbon. Actually there’s a lot of cool old engineering there.

Reading: This interesting book about salt’s global history. By Mark Kurlansky.

Working: Chatting with users on their technology needs so I can take it back to the team and see how we can help them.

Listening: The Coachella live-stream.

I took a bit of a hike to a little known disaster-turned-state park. Almost 100 years ago the St. Louis Times newspaper sold land lots in this resort area to the public for $67.50 with the purchase of a six-month subscription to its paper. Though the summer retreat, named Times Beach, never quite took off as wanted, it became home to 2,000 middle class people.

In December 1982 the town of Times Beach lived through the horrors of not just one disaster but two: a flood and a subsequent environmental catastrophe. After the flood they realized that the material used as a dust suppressant on the town's dirt roads in the 1970s is waste oil mixed with dioxin.

Dioxin - bi product of Agent Orange manufacturing used for military purposes

Everyone was evacuated from the flood and told not to return home by the CDC and newly formed EPA. There's a chilling account from the newspaper that really brings home the disruption this caused to a working class American town.

People with mortgages and blue collar jobs were unable to return to Christmas at their homes. The following year, there's a federal buyout of the town totaling 800 homes and 30 businesses at a cost of $30M. That's a long time to go with uncertainty of where to live and how to protect your family from an invisible Silent Spring. This was a double tragedy.

Credited with spurring the creation for the Superfund law it actually occurred 2 years following the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 which holds responsible those who create waste, from "cradle to grave." This cleanup took $50M + $120M incineration combined with other sites and is a prime example of what happens if we don't have laws pushing for corporate responsibility and holding accountable the creators of hazards. This should be triggering for you if you think about what is lacking from our PFAS rhetoric in today's politics.

The weekend prior, I drove an hour north of Times Beach. I cycled along the Katy Trail, another marker of our industrial past. This trail is 240 miles across Missouri following the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad line (hence the name KATY.) A stone's throw from the Missouri River on the south side, you are even closer to the hidden Hamburg Quarry. 

It has suspected radioactive materials but no real investigative journalism or federal attention has been given to the area. Normally I wouldn’t think twice about some bodies of water that are unpermitted to swim that I would love to jump into -- this isn't one of them.

Unanswered questions lead to city-wide rumors…which clearly are not stopping the quarry partying. And it's a missed opportunity for a rehabilitation of a gorgeous natural site that, I believe, should go back to the people.

It’s not unusual for a Superfund site to become a park. The Lipari Landfill is an example. After 4 decades and $100-300 Million in investment, it is no longer a Superfund site including the creeks, aquifers, and surrounding areas. Before you celebrate, taxpayers had to foot this bill to return the nature back to health because we didn't have the legislative foresight or corporate social governance to prevent these situations from happening in the first place.

Look, the quarry is obviously close to groundwater since you can see the MO River from the bluffs where people used to cliff dive into the potentially contaminated quarry water. If there's any site that needs a final chapter, it's this one.

Conservation where there was disaster

There are other industrial quarries immediately along this trail. The best known one contains processed uranium from nuclear pharmaceuticals that were disposed into the Weldon Springs Quarry, an agreement with the feds to own the cleanup in the 1990s by the Dept of Energy. Both the Weldon Springs quarry and uranium-processing plant are located in St. Charles (the historic capital of Missouri, just north of St. Louis across the Missouri River near the start of the Katy trail.) We will always have industry in the country.

Take this additional example: further off the Hamburg trail is the TNT disposal cell, a remnant of the industry during WWII. Complete with visitor's center, natural wetlands trail, and walking path to the top it's… still a bit boring. I got quite a kick out of the informational boards which read to me like a scope of work (SOW) for the containment project. It brought me right back to being an engineer-in-training taking groundwater samples and leachate samples from under a haz landfill.

Environmental concerns can become conservation efforts. It's a great solution to take a previous eyesore and bring community, nature, and climate action together. In California, there's the world's largest landfill (video is worth a watch if you’re an engineering geek! but keep in mind that not all countries participate in the practice of landfilling) which is a multi-functional nature reserve for the community.

Normally reclamation refers to taking back land from the sea or wetlands. However, in this case we are taking it back from our anthro-derived past decisions.

How do we memorialize the past?

Oversight on the hazards, poor regulatory environment, and no social corporate governance have led us here. Which begs the question… how do we feel about this today? Under consent decree in 1990, the feds paid for long term management of the Times Beach site and the defendants paid for the structures and disposal, construction of a ring levee to protect the incinerator subsite, temporary incinerator, excavation of contaminated soils, operation of incinerator, and restoration of Times Beach. This site would eventually treat materials from 27 eastern Missouri dioxin sites which spiraled into a community issue. The incinerated remains are buried in the visible mounds.

In 1996 they created Route 66 State Park and today the only evidence of contamination are these eerie mounds around the site. It's a beautiful green space for biking and fishing with access to the Meramec River, an absolute gem of Missouri. And those Christmas decorations? They're buried in the "town mound" where you can frolic with your dog.

Call to Action for St. Louis

For me, this is still a tragedy. A blemish on our history that these working class families were subjected to the horror caused by a corporation without a conscious. I am glad to see it reclaimed to nature and to the people. I would love to see more investigation done into sites that clearly need a new chapter, like the Hamburg Quarry. And I want it be known to visitors the history they are standing on while they're there partying or walking their dog on top of someone's burned Christmas decorations.

Listening: ACL weekend live stream and finding new artists like Stephen Sanchez, FLETCHER, and Connor Price.

Working: Prepping to interview some badass panelists on the water panel at Year in Infrastructure.

Reading: Finding how walkable cities really are https://close.city/

During SXSW this year I popped over to a hotel where a local radio station was doing quick sets of some pretty top acts as a charity fundraiser. One of their sponsors was one of the five brands of sparkling water that are bottled here in Austin.

The representative who tabled the event told me that their water is cleaner than tap water because it’s just rain. He mimed holding a cup out to catch rainwater.

While true that rainwater doesn’t have surface contaminants picked up from hitting the ground, running off through the car oils and dog poop on its way to the river, it does pick up contaminants from the air. And from wherever it was before it became rain thanks to the water cycle.

I tried to tell him that’s not true, that it has to be touched by humans or it wouldn’t fit our standards in this country. He clearly was not trained enough (or paid enough) to be speaking with a licensed water engineer about how we do water.

It’s easy to hate on bottled water companies after the Nestle documentaries that were popular circa 2012. People’s tap water on fire, fear mongering to inflate a bottled water market, rural family wells drying up with no regulatory support. That’s still happening in some respects.

These days we have luxury water trends from TikTokers in LA. Their reverse osmosis technology isn’t new to our industry, the additives don’t actually hold up to their claims, and the plastic waste is absurd. Underground pipes have their own challenges as we’ve seen lately but they will always be more realistic and more equitable for safe mass consumption.

Fun fact: in the US, bottled water is regulated by the FDA whereas tap water is regulated by the EPA. It may surprise you that the tap water can be held to higher health standards (also here) than the bottled water. But to me they’re kind of just the same… other than some taste factors & plastic issues. PFAs can be found in both and not usually regulated or test in bottled water.

In a study of 1,000 bottles of water, 25% were just tap water and 22% were above state contaminant levels. So I’d recommend to choose what you want to drink armed with information from your local water scientists, rather than information from the “wellness” industry.

WATER ISN’T LOW COST

In my hometown they say that bottled water is a scam since it’s essentially “free from the tap.” While I agree with the sentiment, we should go ahead and debunk the myth of “free” water. In 2023 Black & Veatch had a report surveying 450 utilities where 50% of them said they think people have little understanding of the cost of water.

It really isn’t true that water is free. It’s part of the dangerous narrative surrounding our drinking water. In fact, it’s incredibly expensive and getting more so.

According to the World Health Organization, poor access to drinking water kills 1 million people a year. In 2022, only 73% of people had access to safe drinking water. In some African countries the supply is so intermittent that wealthy families have water storage at home for when the faucets stop running in the afternoons. Yet in the US people become easily outraged at water rate increases. Other utilities are all socially valued higher than our life source resource. Maybe its time to right-size our expectations on the cost of water.

It’s important to note where the demand is coming from - we use drinking water for more than just drinking. I haven’t even began to touch on indirect water use.

Water is 70% consumed by agricultural purposes. Industrial and manufacturing users are also up there with major water use. In the past few years, we are starting to see a trend of data centers also being in the top 10% of major water users. It was uncovered that in The Dalles Google used more than 25% of the town’s water supply. And AI? For every 20-50 ChatGPT questions you ask, it costs us about a bottle of clean drinking water.

The valuation of water is lopsided compared with all other consumer goods. In my state, we have a budget of $37.2 Billion for roads (TXDOT) and could only pay $378 Million from the state water fund. Ouch.

At the consumer level in 2024, the average home water bill in the US is $73 per month. That’s much lower than our average electricity bill ($123) but higher than the internet bill ($64.) And your phone? Expected around $200 per month.

Individual consumers are not paying the full price it costs to process water.

Part of what brings down the cost to consumers is the laws protecting water rate increases. Another part is that like most infrastructure it’s a resource that can share the capital costs among many users (such as an upgrade of the drinking water treatment plant) and where utilities can manage costs over the lifetime of the asset (such as going for debt for capital improvements and then paying back gradually.)

But don’t forget, even in places where people don’t pay water bills (like those who have Irish Water) these costs are being subsidized from somewhere.

All of this is of course subject to change: climate change, digital transformation, new ways of working, a changing regulatory environment. It is all forcing utilities to do more with the same amount of money they’ve always been able to collect from their consumers. In my experience, the utilities are taking on these burdens so that the public does not. We’ve already seen how this has stretched some of them too much when they haven’t been able to adequately protect their people from emerging contaminants, changing out aging lead water pipes, or prevent overflows into waterways. Don’t forget reducing carbon and the circular economy or increasing concerns around cyber security. We’re hearing more of these stories lately because there are more stresses on utilities now.

Big data from your tap

Over the last summer, as we suffered 110F weather, a contractor was sent out to replace all the meters in my neighborhood. It allows the meter to function as an IoT device that uploads my data to the web. Less humanpower is needed to read the devices every month & they can offer services like alerts to customers when there’s abnormal water use (indicating a possible leak.)

Here’s what my portal looks like:

In the sector it’s well known that an average household water use is 60 gpcd (gallons per capita per day.) From these graphs they have estimated how much water is being used for outdoor use vs indoor use… though I’m not exactly sure how they know (other than using big data to guess.) It builds an interesting picture of showing you the data to help you understand better how to curtail your outdoor use.

That’s a problem in a few ways, primarily putting the onus on the individual to conserve water. It also assumes that there is equitable access to addressing leaks on the individual’s side of the water meter.

Likely, you aren’t going to go look at your data. I get it. I had a leak in my utility closet in April and it wasn’t even a blip on my data chart. I got no notification from this new-fangled tech. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a small leak and a car wash day. My neighbors have too much to do to bother with their data portals. And I’m not even sure some of them have internet.

Rest assured, the utility isn’t going to use it to change your water charges even if they could. The whole point of the existing rate schedule is for payers to be charged more for those wanting to pay more for the ability to use more…generally for outdoor use (lawn watering.) So why go through all this trouble to install millions of dollars of new meters? Big data and AI.

Some of the really cool uses are when we can layer AI over the data to understand at the utility-scale if there are leaks out in the system. It’s taking data like my personal data below, all of my neighbor’s similar data, weather data, other event data (like the flushing of a fire hydrant) and hydraulic & geographical data for how the system is set up.

A computer will do a better job at monitoring for deviations across all these parameters than a person. One use case is identifying water loss leaks. Called non-revenue water (NRW) the average amount that leaks is 20% of the produced water but can be anywhere from 5% in higher functioning systems to 70% in inefficient systems. Think of water leaks as the water equivalent to potholes. Consider it for another second — all of the costs and resources involved in treating water and then 20 PERCENT doesn’t make it to consumers? No other industry is randomly missing 20% of their product.

With data we can identify a possible subsurface leak way sooner. Before we had to wait until the leak was large enough that it was visible from aboveground but now we can send out crews sooner.

This reduces the risk of having a massive failure, cascading in more failures in the pressurized hydraulic system. You may have caught the disruption we saw earlier this year in Atlanta.

Obviously, I’m a fan of using the technology to better manage and conserve water. Water utilities are some of the only business models where they both want you buying their product and also not using their product (except maybe gym memberships?)

I think it would be better if utilities could show us the real cost of each gallon and then our actual cost (with the discounts, subsidies, and reduced rates applied to my cart like they do in ecommerce.) That way, we will see the cost of water and still be motivated to fix things like a leaky toilet.

I’m nervous that there are still stakeholders, politicians, and influencers that spend a lot of time talking about public water conservation. This rhetoric unfairly puts the onus on individual citizens to conserve water. In my portal it tells me to “take 5 minute showers” which would curtail water use… but not nearly as much as putting into place measures for manufacturing companies to reduce, reuse (recycle) and find more innovative ways to get water.

The missing part of this equation is the incentives for companies to use less. These same companies that might market their great green policies could very likely be greenwashing their numbers. I’ve seen a major manufacturer not pretreat their effluent, putting the burden on the city to upscale their entire wastewater treatment operations. I’ve seen a major manufacturer fund city gate repairs so they can claim all that saved water leakage as if it were saved in their manufacturing processes. It’s not just bottled water companies that make misleading water claims.

You are part of how we talk about and how we value water. The October campaign, A day without water, draws attention to this. I heard a discussion from a research leg of a European water utility that mentioned that if they let their customers know that there may be a 5 minute water outage, their ratings go up. Before you judge them, think about how eye-opening that is that when people are reminded that they have clean, cheap water, they appreciate it more. You have to have perspective to have gratitude.

So next time you see someone marketing clean, free water from the sky or from your faucet know this - we haven’t had idyllic water for many centuries. People used to drink beer because the water was so unclean. Even water from spring-fed mountains is dangerous to drink. Clean, untouched water is a picture they’ve painted that has never existed in this millennia. Plus, you’re already paying for it to come out of your tap and the environment will love you more for choosing tap water.

Reading: City of Thieves by D Benioff - Uff this one is sort of a dark thriller / quest book. It can be hard to read but it’s also sort of funny?

Listening: The Perfection Trap by D Curran. I like that it both talks about the individual things you can do to the greater cultural problem with how we value meritocracies. Similar, I’d say, to water conservation.

Working: I’ve been curating some water industry views to explain to our non-water executives what the heck utilities are really concerned about.

It might be insane to pull this comparison. One city is the heart of modern civilization and the other a small, artsy town. True, both are melting pots of cultures and history but they have one other thing in common…

Too much water in not the right place

My boss loves to say, “You often think of water in happy pictures of people drinking fresh, clean water. But let me shatter that for you. Often water is too much, too little, not in the right place, not the right form, or not the right quality.” And that’s the essence of stormwater work. It’s too much in the wrong place. And rain? Not nearly as drinkable as the image in your head (or heard in some bottled water marketing.)

If you’ve ever stood next to a creek (but be safe!!) during a rainstorm, you’ll understand just how quickly water can fill a creek. A stormwater tank is a way to catch the water to either let it drain slowly back to the river when there is too much or to hold for treatment when its not the right quality.

I’ve before discussed a watershed. In Austin I live in the Boggy Creek watershed where this picture was taken. It’s elevated out of the flood zone. In this case all this water that runs off the deck and down the slope either permeates into the ground or comes to the Boggy Creek which discharges at one point into the Colorado River and then the Gulf of Mexico. Because of this direct connection to the ecosystem, it is important that runoff is of good quality to protect waters of the US, per the Clean Water Act of 1972.

There’s a few instances where water quality in a river is poorer than other times. Immediately after a rainstorm it will pick up E. coli from dog poop and oil contaminants from cars. There’s also cases where there’s chemical imbalances, sediment and oxygenation, leading to algae growth and a couple of other water issues that I won’t cover today. All that to say, stormwater poorly affects water quality. It’s the reason that construction sites are required to post SWPPP signs at their entrances. Look for it the next time you pass a site.

Surely, there’s a design solution for stormwater?

At the global level, there isn’t a clear standard for how people do stormwater. I was talking with a Portugal client of ours and they said they just let it run off naturally. That works if it’s a region without much rain. Remember that it is sometimes better to under-design and fix in maintenance than to over-engineer a city into an unnatural (and expensive) landscape.

Some cities might have a separate department for stormwater or lump it in with sewer. In Austin, we have a “watershed department.” They cover anything from flood control to the slope stability around a creek. They might also design the hydraulic way water is routed through culverts or under trails.

Look for a Drains to River storm sewer

When we have too much water, all at once it is called a wet weather event. This is an important term as it is how we design and discuss stormwater, but it just means rain. There are typically 2 designs: combined sewers or separated. You can tell by looking for a storm sewer that says “drains to river.” That doesn’t mean if you don’t see that plaque that it doesn’t drain to river. But they often mark them so that people don’t dump contaminants straight into the river.

Combined Sewers

This is typically an older design you might see in an older city. The benefit here was that you only need one set of sewer pipes and you then treat most of the water that comes into them. However in large storms (sort of like the ones we get in the 21st c) they may not be big enough or the treatment capacity at the treatment plant might not be big enough for that small amount of time when a lot of water is coming into it.

When this happens they will overflow gross, surface-contaminated water mixed with sewage to the river, bypassing the treatment process. The US and Europe is really starting to crack down on this as they are point-source contaminations at an outfall. In the US, we have the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.

Separated Sewers

On the other hand, a separated sewer has its own benefits and drawbacks. It’s more capital and maintenance costs. In a big storm, it’s likely that the river’s water quality is severely reduced. All the rain picks up the surface crud and transports it straight to the river. It’s why you should reconsider jumping into Barton Creek downstream of the springs after a major rain event.

Green Designs

There’s another way to do it - learning to live with water. Within the urban environment we can design small but mighty features that collect water. Stormwater curb extensions, bioswales, and permeable pavement are just a few ways to try to get water into the soil rather than the river. Obviously it only works up to a certain quantity of water.

Climate adaptation is the idea that we know climate is changing and we need to have designs that are meant for it. I have a post on this too.

Extebarri’s Best Tourist Spot

In my conference bag I had a little water drop shaped USB drive. On it was a beautiful video which you can see here about all the different types of water in Bilbao. It’s also on Youtube and a fun watch.

At the conference I then took the best tourist visit to…. the stormwater tank. This tank took about 33M Euros to build. It’s approximately 28 Olympic swimming pools. But who knows the volume of a swimming pool? It’s ~roughly~ 2 Guggenheim museums of capacity.

What makes me really excited is the ability to take stored water and then treat it for other uses - an ideology called One Water. In One Water you can use the different types to fix the problem of too much, too little, wrong type, wrong place. Excess stormwater is now…irrigation water. Or drinking water. Or whatever you want it to be.

A fun fact I learned is that in Spanish a river is rio but a saline river is ria. We call it an estuary in English. At the watershed level, they operate the pipeline with a couple of valves using the information they see from the instrumented piezometers (wells) nearby.

Water comes into the manifold and fills 3 chambers by gravity. You can see this feature in the video above. There are no gates on the individual chambers but instead there are slots in the wall that allow water to pour through. The slots are at different heights so that the chambers fill individually, and some not at all in smaller storms. On the third chamber, it can spill over into a fourth chamber.

There is a system here to flush out the chambers after it has been emptied. A vacuum holds the water in at the far side. After the event they release the water and let it flush everything out. In the case of the photo above, the chamber’s system broke and they had no yet used the secondary method of flushing with clean water.

In smaller tanks, they use a cradle system, where water fills the cradle which then rocks over to clean the tank. However this is too big of a system and they have to use the vacuum method here to hold the amount of water needed.

Another feature of the design is the ventilation. It is only necessary if you want to enter (for people) but also keeps the smell down in the neighborhood. It’s considered an auxiliary system. That means if the power goes out, it isn’t mandatory to keep online. In the photos above you can see the ventilation equipment and the control room.

There’s also a hydropower plant, using reservoir water, and a test facility for water treatment on the site. Neither are directly associated with the stormwater tank. One question I asked… if you have all this stormwater, then why the fake grass above the tank? The answer: for low maintenance.

So how is it the same as Istanbul?

After they finished the conceptual design, this team of women engineers realized that it has the same volume and dimensions as the Basilica Cistern built in 532 AD. They wanted to have an element that calls to the coincidental similarities with the tank in Istanbul.

They also told us that there are 627 of these in the world. So then I wanted to know about others – as you can imagine googling “water cistern” and “stormwater tank” is a bit difficult. I did find one in Hong Kong that is just shy of the size of the Spain tank at 60,000 cubic meters. The design intent is to mitigate floods and then use to water the sports complex. Yay One Water! This one has moveable weirs for water management.

So if there’s one takeaway here, it’s that stormwater is a LOT of water in a short amount of time. It requires huge capital investment and even digital tools to help operate. And it’s only getting more complicated as storms are more intense.

But also that water infrastructure can make a great tourist destination. But you already knew that, right?

Reading: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. I wouldn’t honestly recommend it unless you’re a big sci-fi fan. The writing is hard to get into because they use “Luna” speak. But it’s quite fascinating how the world is built.

Here’s a recommended read on Bilbao re-inventing itself.

Listening: TEXAS HOLD ‘EM. Go Beyonce.

Working: Digital twins for water treatment plants! Which actually includes stormwater facilities that have pumps, pipes, valves and sometimes even advanced chemical and biological treatment.

But why is not important. What is, is that when it falls over, passerby’s tend to pick it back up. There’s something about seeing a motorcycle tipped over that makes people want to flip the turtle back on its feet. Sometimes they place the helmet back on top neatly. Unhoused neighbors hang out and tell me the gory details of what happened. Once when a presumably drunk person ran into it a motorcyclist picked it back up and wrote me a little note. We exchanged emails and now follow each other on instagram (Hi!).

THE TIPPOINT POINT

Let’s switch gears for a moment. The region-beta paradox is the phenomenon that when something is bad, but not awful, you’re more than likely to cope with it than to change, preventing you from moving towards something better. In other words, humans continue an activity until a threshold has been reached that precipitates the need for change. A tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would say. Psychologically, this comes from a fear of ambiguity. (In the case of my Vespa, it hasn’t gotten bad enough for me to fix the kickstand issue.)

When a good Samaritan comes by and picks up my scoot, that intervention is called citizen engagement. Among a lot of other terms used in the industry. You may be doing more than you realize if you’ve ever reported a power outage or a flooded low water crossing (such as on ATXfloods). This is great because it feeds into changes they’re able to make with operational budgets, OPEX. However, I too wonder if my pothole requests aren’t being fixed because of the low income neighborhood where I live or if there’s some bigger plan in the works that makes my small request obsolete.

Obviously there are still roadblocks with this sort of engagement. The lack of clarity between how my time reporting something, and how it was taken into account, is a major barrier to people continuing to use these apps. Further, the apps aren’t easy. There’s evidently no UX designer and in the case of Austin it is organized by department, not by infrastructure asset type, which makes no sense to someone looking to report. A search bar function would be an easy add.

Further, while important to get things tagged and fixed, I personally think it’s more effective to engage on the capital expenditure side, CAPEX. It’s less of a bandaid fix, addresses the root cause, and orients the infrastructure budgets around your long-term goals, not your current-day pains. Let me explain.

FROM PAST TO PRESENT

We’ve known that we need to solicit public feedback for decades. Community input helps to ensure we don’t carelessly or misguidedly design in a way that is racist or classist. We actually have hardcoded this into the design process, meant to bring in community information before we make changes that affect the community. If you’re in for a good podcast, here’s one on Boston’s Big Dig that illustrates how people can make an impactful difference, and why when they’re not involved, we end up with solutions that can be inequitable. It, like the article I’ll mention below, chronicles the changes in how we view big government and infrastructure planning.

“These people are members of the community. They care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.” Parks & Rec

The process for community feedback that you see made fun of on television is mid-design, pre-build. The technical analysis has been completed by experts, the financial analysis has been iteratively redone, and then they begin the social analysis once they have design options to present. But research shows that the people going to these meetings are all one privileged demographic: the white people with time, money, and opinions. Oftentimes loudly and disrespectfully….hence the satire.

One of my friends sent me this Vice article which points out the failures of the current system for public input - how it makes people feel less heard and how it slows down the infrastructure development process that in turn just makes people less trusting turning it into a vicious cycle. It’s worth a read if you’ve ever been curious about some of the truly bizarre things that happen at public comment meetings. I used to work with a woman who’d told me that in the 90s she had gotten death threats for trying to give out rebates for low flow toilets. Ah, the 90s. Crop tops and casual racism.

Now, from a combination of moving further to the right (bizarre public comment meetings, with action items that add tens of thousands of dollars onto the project, AND increased costs for meetings just to combat lawsuits) and the threshold pushing to the left (more technology to submit comments, ideas, and complaints), we now find ourselves in a beta-region environment. Things have gotten bad enough that it has stimulated change.

PARTICIPATORY PLANNING IS KEY

It’s possible to get community feedback pre-design, pre-build. Rain to river is our local ATX portal to put ideas, in addition to problem areas, for things that you want improved about the watershed. The idea is that when the Watershed Protection department (which is a function of the local water utility) goes to plan for capital investments they can use the information provided to shape their goals. I emphasize this part of the intent because shaping goals works better than taking in any individual, biased opinion which is what we get from community feedback meetings.

This input is known as participatory planning. In addition to systems like Rain to River, we can pull planning insights out of the OPEX systems if we can reduce the barriers I mentioned above. With a meta analysis (AI use case / large language model anyone?) to understand which of those comments would be ameliorated through better design.

It doesn’t have to be hi-fidelity. I’ve seen quite a few utilities use Facebook/Meta to post plans and get community input. It also gives market data to say what’s most important to most people (by seeing what others upvote). Instead of just opinions, a meta analysis provides data about opinions that can help to alleviate biases in design.

COMMUNITY FEEDBACK PROCESS IS CHANGING

Technology is changing the way we-the-people interact with utilities. Take this story of a wastewater treatment plant that found a wedding ring when they cleaned out the basin 13 years later and was able to miraculously find its owner. Thanks to my colleague for forwarding on that story, with his comment about how often they should be cleaning those basins.

I know that after seeing all the memes on the horrors of public feedback meetings, people may feel like the process is broken. However, technology can be used on the mid-design side more effectively, too. People who wouldn’t have the confidence or time to stand in front of a room on a microphone can use their web browser at home to view the alignment (e.g. rail, bike lanes, etc) and see the impact of a proposed design such as they did for a 5 mile tunnel in the City of Gothenberg, Sweden. I love that a lot of the public comment meetings have moved over to Zoom; you don’t have to find transportation to get to the meeting whose objective is to discuss the poor transportation.

By using technology, we can build the foundation of equitable design but we need your help. Take the time and put in feedback for new ideas. Tag problem areas even if you know they’ve been reported by others. And thank your city engineers at the public comment meetings - its certainly not a job I have the patience for.

What if your city doesn’t have these sorts of feedback systems yet? Tell them they should. After all, we’re in the region-beta environment. Better yet, ask for a digital twin that can help to preserve continuity of design goals from planning through to design, construction, and O&M. For technology-curious readers, here’s an interview with ChatGPT pretending to be a credentialled water expert that does a pretty great job explaining it all!

One of the things that makes me really excited is using technology to build the foundation of equitable design, which I’ve discussed in A Failure of Power and Essential Infrastructure People. Technology-enabled planning allows us to hear more ideas more empathetically and boil down the ideas to have designs that best work for a diverse city with diverse opinions. In a respectful way.

It’s still not without faults: the form builders need to be user friendly, AI needs to remove bias, and the designers need to implement the information gathered. And of course, we need to undo some of our laws that codified the bulky process that requires public input periods on all projects. But it takes us forward.

Next time you see me at a coffee shop, you’ll know what my Rain to River laptop sticker is all about. Thanks for picking up my scoot on the way in.

Listening: Aimee Carty’s Not Good at Parking
Reading: That vice article. My favorite cynical quote, and what you’d expect from Vice, “Random people from the community who haven’t even looked at your proposal will demand you study some new routing that you, a person with a master’s degree on the subject, know is nonsensical by any conceivable measure. You will have to study it so you can tell the judge you studied it. You will then have to respond to that person in writing, without using any mean words. Each of these additional studies will cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars and add months to the project. Those same cost overruns will be decried by the very people who showed up to the meetings demanding you do those studies as evidence you’re incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed to build anything in the future with their hard-earned taxpayer dollars.“
Working: Dam Monitoring solution business plan / yearly strategy session

Project management can at times seems like administrative overhead. It’s contract redlining, negotiating change orders, and building consensus on even the littlest of disagreements. After I left the world of PM I started a house expansion project and heard a couple of friends say to me, “I wouldn’t know how to do what you’re doing.” It honestly just comes down to an attention to detail and a little bit of knowledge. So, here is the knowledge that I was thankful I learned from my experience as a civil engineering PM.

Anyone can do it - It honestly just comes down to an attention to detail.

Here are some of the things to consider when you’re looking at your own project but, of course, you need to rely on the professionals around you as well because every project is unique. I want this to empower you to get involved in the details.

YOUR PROJECT, YOUR CALL

Be friendly

It’s in your best interest to grease the wheels. What I mean is that you want to be the friendly person that brings the very diverse set of contractors, engineers, and planners together. Make their job easy and they’ll go out of their way to accommodate your build. You’ll see less change orders. You’ll get prioritized faster. It’ll be a better experience.

But don’t put up with bullshit

One of the things I realized is that I don’t have to work with people who are troublesome, unmotivated, or I take issue with their technical backing. That’s not to say it’s okay to be a diva. In fact, see the above, “be friendly” bit of advice. But don’t get walked over by people who have an interest to finish the project faster to cut corners. And if it comes down to it, you can always fire them (but generally that will cost you so make sure you weigh the risks).

The first structural that was identified for my project refused to make edits when asked and I realized really quickly that he would need lots of babysitting and wasn’t motivated to finish the project. Engineers tend to work in “feast or famine” where they have too many projects or too little projects. A diva engineer might mean they have too many projects and that’s something I would sincerely ask about if I felt it was causing problems with my project. Since the contract wasn’t even signed yet, I asked the design-build firm to suggest a different structural.

In this case I just said, “I would like you to suggest a different structural engineer.” I risked having to pay more for a more expensive engineer but… this worked out in my favor and the engineer was slightly less expensive and more engaged. And because we developed a great relationship, he helped me to talk through my contractor options and was relaxed about me not wanting to submit payment on 100% plans until some revisions had been made.

Get bids

It may seem funky to build a relationship with one contractor and then choose a different one. That’s normal in this line of business. Get multiple bids. You don’t have to cover that you’re shopping around. This is a big expense and everyone wants you to feel comfortable that you want to work with them. In my case, I was not entirely happy with the slow schedule with the original general contractor (GC). I ended up having to check in on them and the nickel-and-dime attitude made me nervous about ballooning costs. They seemed highly knowledgeable but I had solicited opinions from the others on my team and ended up selecting a different GC to move into permitting. Their costs were about the same so I knew I was getting market value (pending no change orders).

CONTRACTS

The contract is the one legal document that will protect you so it needs to be as clear and inclusive as possible, even if you hope to not use it. For example, even if you agree to do small changes by “text approval” (aka, like from text messaging) you should still have language in the contract about what both parties agree to being in a change order and when a change order should be needed. You’ll be happy you have it when they uncover a “changed condition” (aka, something different than what they thought at design) and they want to charge more for it. You’ll want to make sure that you get notified timely, that they adequately tell you the costs and timeline change, and that you get to approve work on it before they begin to incur additional costs.

As I was reviewing contracts I realized that they were missing major items that protect the clients. As the owner, you can always choose to negotiate before signing or agreeing to anything. When I started looking for structural and architectural help, I reviewed 6 total contracts (4 of which I signed, called executing). Here are the things that I looked for as a client to make sure I was covered and that the work was fair for all parties.

ADDED PROVISIONS TO PROTECT MYSELF

Additional services

I was very particular about including a redline that said, “with prior written approval from Owner” for any additional services. If they are able to add on costs above the lump sum then you want to be able to say, yes or no. In this case several contracts said, “additional site visits at $250/hr” or $400 total. I don’t want them to just be able to show up. This is a small barrier for them to get approval. It is reasonable for them to tell me exactly why they want to come to site and what the outcome is of that visit that is over&beyond the previously agreed amount.

Timeline

I wanted all contracts to have a schedule. It’s really the only thing you can hold them to contractually to meeting their schedule. All the contracts were missing this key piece. Having it in an email or a “scope of services” as a separately non-attached document to the contract does not legally protect you.

At the time of signing, everyone seemed like this was the most important project and was confident they would prioritize my schedule. This is common at the beginning but becomes relaxed once the contract is signed. Even with this thorn in the contract and my weekly emails asking for status, I STILL had a hard time keeping it on schedule.

TYPICAL LANGUAGE THAT I WAS OKAY WITH LEAVING IN THE CONTRACT

Only for this project use

They want to protect themselves from any changes that might be done after the project is over. If the background maps or something are used for a different project, they don’t want to be liable if someone changes something years down the line. That seems fair to me. They will, of course, be liable for the current project that has their stamp on it. I allowed this language but did redline in a request for all original format files (like CAD files, original 3D surveys, etc) to be submitted as a deliverable at the end. I want my data (sometimes called “assets”) in case I ever have to reference it in the future.

Copyright

Similar to the above, they wanted to retain the copyright of their work. I was less inclined to accept this one as it meant that if I ended up firing them (for whatever reason) I want the next person I hire to be able to legally pick up where they left off. If I am paying for the work, I want full ownership of the work. This is less important in the grand scheme of things…even small utilities don’t fight for this one and end up signing over IP that consulting companies then profit off of by reusing/copy-pasting. Sometimes the “only for this project use” provision will satisfy the engineer’s concerns about future liability instead of using a copyright.

WHAT MIGHT NOT SEEM LIKE A BIG DEAL BUT IS

Correct dates

Make sure all the dates are updated to the day of contract execution. If there’s an argument at the end about a project going over schedule (which chances are it will) then you’ll want to be able to point to typo-less, consistent dates of when the project schedule began.

Contingent dates

It’s common in the industry to say the clock starts “after receiving XX data requests” to make sure that anything that is out of the engineer’s control has been managed before their clock starts. For my house renovation, I was okay with the structural engineer saying his calendar was “2 weeks after receiving architectural plans” since he can’t do the calculations if he doesn’t have the plans of what he’s calculating.

I DIDN’T END UP INCLUDING THESE ITEMS

Liquidated damages

I didn’t see this language in any of the contracts. The risk is that if you add in liquidated damages or retainage then you’ll get high quotes for the cost of the project. However if you include these and they agree to it, then there is some incentive for them to finish on time.

Retainage

Same as above. Retainage is the amount of money that a contractor puts up front that they get back at the end of the project. It incentivizes them to complete the project instead of jumping to a project with more work/money in it for them.

However, language was in my GC contract for me to have retainage of 10% of each pay line (they have a schedule of payments so that when they complete that major task, you pay the amount associated with the task). This is definitely in my benefit so I suspect that it was legally required for them to include this bit.

Insurance & General Indemnity

I was used to being able to specify how much insurance a contractor needs to work on your site. This means that if something happens I feel sufficiently covered. The GC contract has some information about me getting insurance specifically for the project that I still haven’t quite made heads or tails of.

Similarly, I have never seen a contract without a general indemnity clause until my home project. My guess is that this is more common for larger projects but it’s hard for me to know (maybe ask your project engineer?).

Additional expenses

I was not happy that there wasn’t a clause to limit additional expenses. None of the consultants or contractors reacted well to this suggestion so we didn’t include it. Ultimately, if they want to charge me something outside the base price then I felt I had enough language requiring they notify me ahead of time, submit appropriate documentation, and get my approval. There may also be some laws that protect homeowners for these sorts of things but I didn’t look into it.

THESE I KNEW WERE EASY TO THROW IN

Safety & Regulations

It is really important to me that contractors are maintaining a safe work site (notice the footwear in some of these photos…on a bigger or more dangerous project I would have had a frank but friendly discussion with the superintendent over that). Because of this I required this language to be included:

“Contractor shall comply with all federal, state and local laws, ordinances, codes and regulations applicable to this contract. Contractor shall perform this contract in a safe manner consistent with worker and public health. All workers shall be properly trained and qualified to perform work and shall have received the necessary certifications and other credentials necessary to perform work.”

You may also require language prohibiting drinking or drugs at the project site. Or you might be the type of homeowner that gives them all beer and popsicles at the end of a hard day.

Staffing

I requested that the contractor provide all personnel necessary to complete timely services in accordance with the schedule. More importantly, I wanted to be able to remove any employee or independent contractor for any reason whatsoever, with or without cause. My thinking was that they’re working in my house and if I don’t feel comfortable with their attitude or their work then I would let the contractor know and if it doesn’t get remedied then I would request them to not show up on my site again. The GC didn’t love the language but after talking through it with me over the phone and understanding that my intent wasn’t to fire tons of people, he was okay with including it.

Delays

I wanted the contractor to notify me within 24 hours of first knowledge that any scheduled dates would not be met. Ultimately, probably not even worth including but I redlined it in anyway. I noticed that the GC changed it to “notify in a timely fashion” which sort of defeats the purpose of the clause since “timely” is so subjective.

Site Access

I requested that any time the house was accessed that they got strict permission from me (such as knocking on the door) and could not just come inside whenever.

Assets

All assets, whether 3D survey scans or digital photos of construction progress, I wanted access to at the end of the project.

Anything else

Consider whatever you might want the contractor to do, and be held to by law, when signing your contract. I included an item about “salvage” requiring that the Contractor make every attempt to salvage windows and gutters instead of throwing them away. I also had an alternative bid so I included language about when the decision on which project (full project or alternative reduced scope) would be decided and how that would impact the payment schedule.

WATCH SOME OF THE REQUIREMENTS THEY INCLUDE FOR THE OWNER

Material requirements

I noticed that this seemed to be all over the place for what was required of the Owner. For me it was certain insurance to carry (which then was said by phone that no one actually gets it… hmmm).

There was also a requirement that things would be paid in “cash” (aka, no loans).

Response requirements

Be careful of the GC wanting you to respond within a certain amount of time or any language that they may override your right to approve things. A friend of mine had it in her contract to respond “within 48 hours” which may seem like a long time until you’re trying to make a decision and get input from your architect.

My GC had language in there saying they could sign the final completion form on my behalf once they met the final inspections. I tried to change it to “after 120 days” so that I had plenty of time to say if something wasn’t completed like it was supposed to be. Plus, while many homeowners may be happy to have their project complete and useable, I want the privilege of the last final signature on that completion form! Ultimately, he didn’t accept my revisions but I will for sure be holding my final 10% retainage payment until I am satisfied the job is completed.

Anything that you have as an unspoken agreement can, and should, be put into your contract. If they’re willing to say they are doing it then it should not be a problem for them to write it down. The contract doesn’t have to be fancy; it can be updated in PDF with large textboxes.

For the contract with my GC, he approved everything through his lawyer so it took a few extra weeks to sign. He also wanted to talk through each redline, no matter how small or easy, before accepting it. When I went to sign, we crossed out and initialed the original T&Cs and attached the custom T&Cs as an amendment. He had a whole drawer full of blank contracts so I’m sure I’m one of the few clients who actually made adjustments. My advice is to make adjustments on any and everything and let them tell you “no.”

Good luck!

Listening: The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by V.E. Schwab. Slow beginning but really picks up.

Reading: I really like this substack called Maybe Baby. She posts regularly and I love her writing style on some of the more thought-provoking posts.

Working: Organizing market research (quantitative surveying - voice of customer) that will feed into our data analysis and decision on water product offerings.

June 17, 2023

The time is 9:12PM. It's a Saturday night in June and there is a week-long 100+ deg heat advisory in effect. The air quality index is in the red zone as Canada wildfire smoke makes its way south, deepening our gorgeous southern sunsets.

The cicadas are in full force this summer.

And I have COVID for the first time.

For 5 days I've been reflecting on the past year - the new job, the new house, the new people. I posted approx 1 infrastructure youtube video, 1 infrastructure post, and the only thing I’ve got to show for my time are the 1,500 miles I’ve cycled (running away from what?). I say this with a chuckle because from current me’s perspective, I’ve had a great year. A year I would not have appreciated back in 2019.

Like each passing year, I hardly recognize the me from the previous one. I see her in pictures and sometimes am glad I'm not her; but unlike tenille arts usually just curious, not jealous or sad. The photos we see are an illusion. A modern-day art piece we've curated and crafted to show the world our untrue nature. We would have called that our "brand" before we stopped spinning on their merry-go-round. Before lockdown. and quiet quitting. and manifesting. and all the other things we’ve (not) done in the past few years.

A search through my unposted blogs and I see exactly 2 fully formed articles on burnout. In one I suggest "some signs it might be time to leave" and then go on to be a fixer personality and find ways to make it work anyway.

The second I’ve posted almost in full below and…it’s a time capsule that illustrates the pattern of knowing burnout and yet sticking with it. I am sure it won't surprise you that I have been named as an anxious attachment before. It’s oddly emotional, and /no doubt/why it was never posted, brings me back to the time I wrote it - dealing with some bullshit or another from a difficult-to-work-with coworker.

It’s a thread that links 2019 me to a series of steps I made to get to 2023 me. A puzzle piece to be spoken in the missing chronology of my blog. Here you go.

February 6, 2019 (links from 2023)

We're the burnout generation. We want to be valuable and changing the world and that takes hustle. In neuroscience, we know that our brains are split into two systems: the deliberate system and the automatic system. Too much over-use of the deliberate system leads to poor calculations. Lack of sleep is physiologically similar to drinking alcohol. It impairs your deliberate and automatic system, causing you to make bad decisions. We've also proven that overuse (aka burnout) of the deliberate system has the same effect.

There's no doubt that it takes a dedicated worker to be in STE(A)M. We are pros at taxing our deliberate systems: multi-tasking, working long hours, stretching up to brush our fingertips on that glass ceiling. It's too common to romanticize the lifestyle: pulling yourself up by your bootstraps! "I'll sleep when I'm dead!" We wear overworking and sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, disregarding the sentiments of selfcare. Me more than anyone. But if our generation agrees on anything it's that this is prone to failure. Our generational strength needs to be figuring out ways to optimize how we perform.

In February I took a couple of days off. I laid in bed and couldn't get one phrase out of my head: "dead end tasks". Or, a task that doesn’t actually get you close to achieving any goals. Not even necessary waste, just waste waste.

I couldn't sleep, couldn't run it off. I tried to work my way out of it, but found myself talking out loud, describing in explicit detail the definition of dead-end and how it applied to my situation. Self-talk confirmation bias. Frustratingly, I couldn't complete anything because my brain had devolved into thinking "This is burnout. This is burnout" over and over again.

Then something minor happens. The stuff that gets in the way of the stuff, as my mentor likes to say. Or a failed crucial conversation. The short email my brain can't comprehend in good judgement. I've got amazingly supportive gal pals who…can egg on my confirmation bias.

"I'm so sorry that happened."

"You shouldn't have to deal with that."

I find I am adapt at analyzing people's motives and thought processes to manage risk. It's a skill that fits my project manager personality well, being able to mentalize social dynamics, and course correct when necessary. Truthfully, my amygdala doesn't excel around extroverts, but engineers are my people. I know their rhythm. I know their responses. However… on burnout fumes I might as well be a cicada in a colony full of bumblebees.

I receive both sincere and ambivalent emails. People who understand yet they're too wrapped in their own taxation. People who don't understand, yet try to help and are unknowingly destructive. I have that one work friend that tries to temper my reach for the stars with grounded realism, trying to delicately talk me out of my ambitions. I try to go go go but I am thinking, I am falling apart and you are holding onto my heels. I was ruminating on a thought of a new job unable to nudge it along. For me, that is a tell-tale sign of burnout. Which is the one time that you should not be looking to leap.

I have other burgundy flags too. Making silly mistakes; not being able to multi-task as easily; anxiety. It's micro-depression. I get so wrapped up in something that I can't think rationally, only emotionally. I'll get a one-sentence email and be so frustrated that I can't brush it off, even with little context clues as to their emotions. It sits uncomfortably in my prefrontal cortex until I dissect it.

My friends, "Do you see a path for yourself at your company?" And I don't answer. Not because I don't see one. But because it's become foggy in between thoughts of "is this a dead-end task if I don't want to do this forever?" I can't see the trails through the fog. I'm re-doing invoices as they get rejected multiple times. I'm delegating all the tasks I want to be doing myself, because I don't have time to do them.

I made it through 3 days and then needed two days off. Though honestly I still worked about 6 hours each of those days. "I'm sick" didn't seem to resonate with coworkers or clients when there are deadlines. I took the weekend off. And the next week I felt fine again. I went at it hard. After all, I had almost four days to make up. I have a hard-working reputation to maintain. I have expectations and projects that I've committed to that I need to meet. I told everyone I was on burnout. I put them on alert. But I was over it.

I slushed through it with the thought of an exit plan. I’d applied to a new position in my company. I regained a sense of control and predictability. I mind-maneuvered my way out of dead-end tasks.

And then it happened again. Because, of course it did. I worked more hours to make up for how unproductive my hours became. Every email I took the wrong way: Mood congruent attentional bias means that my brain sees negative things that might actually be neutral or non-emotional and that I perceive them as more negative than they are. I countered this by not reacting… only to then ward off bitterness at not standing up for myself.

I am googling tech jobs. Well what am I doing staying in the same company, not exploring new experiences? People change jobs on median every 18 months in Silicon Valley. Every 4.2 years in the U.S. on average. Career experience comes from new experiences. Yet, I don't trust myself to make any rash decisions. I'm standing on the edge wondering if I should jump before I start to fall uncontrollably, just to maintain the semblance of control when it's obviously nonexistent.

My ex-coworker friend reminds me that starting at a new place is like hitting the restart button on people's expectations. When you get categorized as an overachiever, people think that you don't need help when you're struggling. They trust that you'll do what it takes and you'll get it done. It's also not easy to ask for help especially when you know that the 'help' may be more time consuming and ineffective that just doing it yourself.

So here we are a few months later. The trees are full of vibrancy and life outside my window. I can hear construction trucks backing up on the city streets below. It's a Sunday but I'm happily drinking coffee and organizing a few regional-based workload staffing activities for my office. My projects are still tough but I have shaved off working on multiple projects for multiple clients (even though they were great projects I wanted to be a part of). My coworkers still have the unhelpful dichotomy of expecting more work than feasible in 40 hours meanwhile telling me not to work weekends. The contradiction in expectations. The cognitive dissonance. It's easier to brush off as a them-problem. It's my mindset that has changed. I have not gotten the opportunity that really pulled me through that depression. I'm okay with it. I have other initiatives that I am working on that feels like career progress. And I am looking forward to 7AM tomorrow when the emails start slinging back and forth across my inbox.

Reading: No Time To Spare by Ursula Le Guin has me thinking about time and how long life really is. This one is really great.

Listening: Alex Lahey - the concert I missed while having COVID.

Working: Dam solution all day every day. We’re connecting digital twin products to use for monitoring and inspection of dams.

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Thanks! Andi

• $ is still the #1 factor in retention, next to having good people managers

• Current benefit packages contribute to institutionalized racism & sexism

• Formal reviews & written feedback are inequitable, proven unsuccessful, unwanted, and costly to an organization

• People trained to think as engineers are intrinsically unprepared to give equitable feedback

• AEC companies can change their processes to retain talent, especially women and carers, by updating their policies and collaborating together

We’ve all heard about the high unemployment rate and the conundrum of simultaneous labor shortage. Experts are calling this the Great Resignation with a Microsoft study showing 41% are thinking of quitting and tech turnover rates are 1/3 of their workforce. Post-lockdown, job uncertainty has waned. We’re finding that previous employer processes are outdated, employees want more flexibility in their work, and inflation is on the rise. People don’t want to go back to pre-pandemic salary figures. The labor market has officially shifted.

The AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) industry is especially poorly positioned. The infrastructure bill will increase labor demand. In a tangential labor market, it’s not uncommon for our colleagues in tech to stay at a job for 1-2 years. This will trickle into other STEM companies as we partner with and compete against tech in the upcoming decade, leveraging digital environments to deliver the upgraded infrastructure.

Not all turnover is bad. It can improve talent and reduce complacency making the company more competitive. However, there’s a high cost associated, about 6-9 months of their annual salary, and can be detrimental if top talent is lost. New hires will be asking on average 5-20% more than current employees in the same job category, with reports of some companies pre-emptively giving these significant raises and companies like Amazon and Uber already dolling out millions in hiring incentives.

To deliver all this infrastructure work, AEC companies will need to collaborate to keep people interested & excited about the industry.

Filling the labor market with women/womxn

Women are a portion of the workforce that have had historically higher rates of turnover in engineering when compared with other skilled professions such as accounting, medicine and law. Top that with the Shecession where 47% of women have used their PTO for childcare duties and have sacrificed $800 billion globally in lost income. That means there’s a possibility for change that can be stood up from within the industry by appealing to womxn and carers, both those thinking about leaving the industry and those who left previously.

Another reason they may leave is that employees don't always chose their projects - it's a function of the market and what work the company is pursuing. For disadvantaged employees, their supervisors may put them on activities that are necessary for the company but less valued by the direct supervisor. In lean methodology this is known as “necessary waste”. Then they get mediocre reviews because their contributions aren’t considered as important as their counterparts'. 

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, widening the promotion gap. For women, this is one of the main reasons they drop out of the industry at mid-career. They’ve gotten perpetually further from what they wanted to do and are getting paid less. COVID-19 has accelerated this with 57% of women in engineering burned out (compared to 36% of men), which we can assume is partly from women being the primary carers during a pandemic. If the industry doesn’t get ahead of it, they can expect to go in the wrong direction for diversity, costing companies even more money.

The OG in retention

There’s lots of talk about culture and work satisfaction, but data has shown that money is the primary motivator for employee retention across generational boundaries. However, even that goes out the window if employees don’t have good people managers, making employees 4x more likely to quit and 2x more likely if they aren’t being recognized appropriately.

Employers will have to be agile to the new labor standards, progressed by tangential industries, to succeed in tomorrow’s market; Appealing to womxn and other carers is a place to start.

Benefits are aN equity issue

Benefits are 34.8% of salary, according to the BLS. That may be the case for some employees — but for others it is not accessible without red tape, with benefits needing to be renewed yearly and manually by the individual. Others are buried deep with nuances that if employees are changing jobs as often as is the new normal will be difficult to navigate, no matter how user-friendly any individual front-end. Overall, benefits can be fantastic to woo new hires but I’m about to show you how they can also be inequitable allowing those with more time, training, or institutional knowledge to fully capture the coverage.

Every hiring manager in AEC says “we have great benefits”. That makes great benefits pretty average in my book. So I wanted to know: what really is a great benefit? Turns out, it’s not super easy to tell. To fix this, I’ve started to crowd source benefit package details to understand the stats. If you work in the AEC industry please fill out this google spreadsheet. There’s already a lot of data there for you to browse.

Individual companies aside, We need to make benefits less time consuming and more transparent Across the industry if we want to be more equitable to disadvantaged employees and those without money mentors.

great benefits

Here are the benefits that I’ve gotten throughout my career as an engineering consultant.

As a womxn and a millennial, culture and flexible working are non-negotiable for me so that’s not part of the conversation. After COVID-19 I won’t care for a hiring manager to tell me that flexibility is a great benefit. It’s average.

My out of pocket for dental may be $20/month but what is covered by the insurance? Lots of variability, nuance, and ever-changing small fonts.

A lot of potential for a lot of Inequities in 401(k)

We already know the inequities of pay gaps between different gender and ethnic groups. Benefits are no different. Let’s say Hypothetical Company, LLC does a 50% match rate up to 6% salary. It’s a pretty common benefit. A $50,000 salary employee is eligible for $3,000 however the employee is spending a greater portion of their paycheck which means that HC LLC is likely matching much less than the eligible $3,000.

Compare that to a $150,000 salary employee that is eligible for $9,000. So whereas someone at the higher end of the payscale can get almost $30,000 a year funneled away (which then compounds) the equity gap widens between the two employees. I did find it helpful to know that just north of $150,000 the benefit plateaus at this hypothetical company. Now if the company matches at 300% up to 6% of the salary, imagine the gap that forms between low and high income earners.

We already know there’s an institutional pay gap between demographics. If an employee is being underpaid in base salary compared to their peers, they’re also being underpaid in benefits with major financial repercussions that extend across their lifetime.

You’ll notice that my 401(k) benefit was halted in 2020. My company didn’t do any layoffs after the first COVID-19 surge but revoked this discretionary benefit. Let’s say it was halted for a full year at HC LLC, then a $100,000 employee would have lost $6,000 from their retirement pay, compounded by a conservative 7% over a 30-yr lifetime is the equivalent of a $45,674 loss. That’s a lot of money to a financially disadvantaged employee. Even more, if they had started this in company stock which performed well in 2020, this is worth almost $500,000 in a lifetime.

Companies need to be held accountable for their track records of revoking discretionary benefits so employees can make informed decisions about their financial future when looking at job offers.

The benefit is also only vested one time per year now but which they still call “fully vested”; some companies don’t have it fully vested until 3 years into that person’s service according to my crowd sourced data. All of this language is confusing but ultimately means… a) if someone quits before the payout, they lose the benefit for that year; b) an employee loses any financial gains they could have made on that match until it is actually (really) vested; and c) companies might not actually be telling the full truth in their documentation because there are no checks and balances.

Folks, not all benefits that are spelled out the same way actually function equally. We need to work together to do an industry-wide meta-analysis to understand the discrepancies so that people aren’t dropping out of engineering faster than other job types…making every company lose.

How to fix it

Benefits are confusing. Employers are well aware that turnover is about to happen. They can’t just sit on the sidelines if they want to be competitive and live up to their social equity values they talk about on their social media feeds. Supply and demand economics indicate that it benefits everyone to keep employees in the industry.

The small print and nuances are not an AEC employee’s specialty, nor should it be. But by the lack of transparency across the industry we are deepening the inequities experienced by different demographics and contributing to institutional racism. Companies that want to compete in the new job market should look to clarifying their benefits and making them more equitable within their company. Money mentoring is important and cannot be left to the employees that know about money resources and choose to do it in their off-hours. Make benefits an on-the-job training. Require this as a course to get ABET accreditation. Put it in the FE exam. Collaborate together to give an apples to apples view of different companies. We all have a responsibility to fix this.

Formal Reviews are an equity issue

Now that we’ve looked at money, let’s look at the next best way to retain employees - by having good managers. It's no surprise that managers and employees alike hate the yearly review process. For starters, I rarely hear of something that is said in an annual review that actually changes a person's behavior but have heard plenty about off-base, ageist, sexist, racist biases that were perpetuated during the process. EVEN WITH ANTI-BIAS TRAINING. The corporation that popularized the idea of yearly reviews (from the same CEO known for "rank and yank" 10% of your staff and "brutal candor") doesn't even use it today. However, 95% of companies have adopted the practice.

Any time a supervisor has visibility on radical candor from their peers, it links compensation to feedback. Unless those two are divorced, an organization can’t objectively evaluate and promote staff, nor are they getting the most out of the time spent doing this process.

I'm not saying positive things don't happen, but it's not conducive to how humans are programmed. Even more, people grow based on conversations with their mentors, who they trust. This stressful quarterly or yearly event encourages procrastination of hard conversations, distracts expensive staff for no observable gain, and has not proven to be effective. Netflix (from the book “No Rules Rules”) suggests that ranking employees leads to internal competition instead of competing against the real competitors. They don't even protect companies from litigation and could be used against them in court. If the goal is mentorship & employee growth, then written reviews are not the way to accomplish that.

With 69% of people who think the annual review process is flawed, it may not be just millennials that are changing this process. In fact it's already been ditched by corporations Deloitte, Adobe, Accenture, and General Electric. Expect to see a rework of the system at your engineering firm, with a focus on streaming feedback so that employees have a constant pulse on their performance, rather than a twice-a-year batch delivery. (andromedadumont.com)

Feedback-based reviews get us further from a meritocracy by their inevitable biases and distract us from spending time on what matters to the organization.

Reviews that are connected to compensation

Here are mine.

In my last salary reveal, I discussed the struggle of women individually and how that translates to a global gender pay gap. If you missed it, read From $0 to 6 Figures - A Woman's Worth. In that post I shared my work life from entry-level to industry salary. In summary, I received few raises generally because I was the annoying junior employee and people supported me even if it didn’t always look good in my favor known as gender blow back.

Notice that just because I got bonuses and exceeds ratings on almost* every review (hey, y'all knew I was an overachiever already), that still translated to below-inflation yearly raises in which I then had to correct by fighting for larger salary boosts. The current system is exhausting. It’s not hard to link that and the pay gap to the reason women drop out of engineering professions at higher rates than less male-dominated industries. It feels more unfair to them.

Likewise, a system based in outdated years-experience metrics prohibits high performers from reaching higher levels and disrupting the industry like they’ve done in tech. To woo people back into AEC, employers should consider a results only work environment (ROWE), not years experience.

From consultant rate schedules to compensation job codes, years experience a person has in the industry does not begin to describe maturity, emotional labor, and soft skills needed for the most complex projects of tomorrow.

Engineers have a tough time doing the emotional labor needed for reviews

You’ll notice I said “almost*” every one of my reviews was exceeds ratings. One year I had a new supervisor who was not familiar with me before my review time. They were overeager to be helpful and took someone venting about me as a reason for me not to get an “exceeds” rating that year. My supervisor didn’t have that context to know this was a difference of opinion in management style and so despite their best intentions was not able to have a productive conversation with me about it. I very nearly quit that day.

I did a poll on my instagram and was surprised to find that of the names I recognized in the AEC industry, they had mostly selected “Not at all” for how useful they found formal reviews. Turns out, people who make good engineers, don’t generally make good people managers. Interestingly, the supervisors that feel that they are being the most objective in the review and raise process, tend to exhibit the most bias, in what is known as the overconfidence effect. They’re rooted in their right-ness. The more diverse the industry gets, the more critical this piece will become.

Engineers make great coaches and mentors. The engineer brain is trained to find patterns and Black/white boundaries. A company is setting these people up for failure if they think they will make good formal review conductors, the antithesis of a good engineer.

Longer-term employees are blind to incremental change

Managers that do know their employees well also have a difficult time because humans aren’t good at recognizing incremental change. Just as you won’t notice a friend slowly losing weight, it’s difficult for managers see incremental career growth in a system that links their perception to the employee’s pay. This is compounded by the fact that supervisors aren’t often following the job market shifts. Supervisors are promoted because of legacy in the company and their valued technical work… who are arguably the people least connected to fluctuations in the job market.

According to Netflix, HR has to do the work of finding market value and have regular conversations about personal-top-of-market salary in order to retain top talent. At Netflix they tell their employees, before you say “No”, say “How Much?” to recruiters. That way their HR crowd sources the ever-changing market data and can be sure they actually are paying top of market like they say they are.

Engineers are highly paid professionals, so they don’t need to be doing a job they are poorly suited for and have little market knowledge about.

How to fix it

At this pace we’re already behind in fixing all this aging infrastructure even before we’ve lost staff to the more lucrative tech industry. Here are some other ways to fix it:

1. Stop doing reviews and written feedback.

2. Owners and consultants can think about moving towards cost-plus contracts and other models that aren’t focused on hours but rather results.

3. Corporate HR can take on the supervisory roles when it comes to compensation. HR professionals can matrix with the employees’ direct mentors and coaches which sets the example to employees that they should also be matrixing their support structure in a company. This saves the high-dollar technologists for winning high-dollar work, not doing yearly reviews.

4. Develop algorithms for compensation that are free from bias, looking into equity across the company and across the market. Competing companies create a win-win by working together to be inclusive to the most marginalized or disadvantaged staff. Inclusion makes a really good growth strategy in a retention-focused industry.

5. Walmart is trying to tackle the problem of managers not understanding the best track for their employees, because they only see the current track that person is on, instead of a tailored development path. Another way is to map skills, not career paths, at an HR-level to visually see the best fit for a person.

6. A company equity study is different from a pay gap study. In a pay gap study, a company can look at the value people are contributing in a single job category. An equity study is more thorough and analyzes the mobility of employees as well.

7. DPR has no job titles to promote a flat organization.

8. Data shows that only 2% of principals in AEC are under the age of 40…the age you can be the United States President. Addressing the representation gap can lead to a culture shift.

9. Salesforce President and Chief People Officer Cindy Robbins shared how they facilitate an organized airing of grievances: “One of the best examples of how we do this is through Chatter, our companywide internal communications tool. Everyone can have a voice on Chatter. In fact, we have an Airing of Grievances group where employees are encouraged to raise their concerns.”

10. Pilot a program like LinkedIn's Perk Up with $500 a quarter for employees to use as they want--personal trainers to dog walkers, and other ways to make their work/life balance and worklife easier. My company has previously done rideshare and safe holiday travel in December for $50 reimbursement per employee.

I would love to hear other ideas you have in the comments.

Listening: Khruangbin. Look em up - I bet you’ve heard Texas Sun before.

Watching: Madam Secretary. Can we just pause to admire a show where the drama is in the international negotiations and they’ve done a great job showing what secure, healthy family dynamics can look like?

Reading: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. It’s fun to read about FBI negotiations.

Monday morning I woke up at 2AM to the eerie sound of snow blowing off the buildings on my street. Normally, E 6th St glows with streetlamps, headlights, and window signs. The train honks its horn at all hours. Cars bump down the road playing loud reggaetón.

Instead of the live music capitol of the world, it was the utter silence of a snowy Christmas card scene. The buildings creaked with the weight of the wind and the snow.

I'd been warned the week before by my work's emergency alert system to expect 1-3" of snow through noon on Monday. When I told people at the dog park we were supposedly expecting snow they were rightly confused. I picked up a couple of extra soup cans at HEB just in case and thought, a year ago you couldn't find a single can in sight. The COVID-19 pandemic was coming around the corner and now a year later…still in a state of emergency. But we have toilet paper this time.

With the shelves full and people going about their masked, socially distanced lives it didn’t feel like we’d be waking up to frigid houses, cold toes and faces. Or that it would continue with icicle encrusted ceiling fans. As the freeze was seeping in through the window I picked up my phone. It was calm but ghostly. I had another alert from work saying to expect rolling blackouts lasting 40 minutes or less. Two hours later I was still awake, waiting for the blackout to end.

This was just the start.

The Outage

Between then and Wednesday late afternoon, we had power on twice a day anywhere from 5 min to 2 hours. When it first came back, all my devices powered on and then in 5 min it was out again. I thought about inrush current and everyone’s devices doing the same thing. I put all my sweaters on the window seals, closed the blinds to retain heat, and set up camp on my couch… which my pizza thermometer said was 5-10 degrees warmer than my bed. A friend texted me that they could see their breath inside their apartment.

As a person without power, and a quickly dwindling cell phone charge, I craved answers. By 9AM Monday I was spinning in circles in my condo trying to decide what to pack, if I need to vacate my pets, is a main breaker out and how long would that take crews to fix?

There are three grids in the US: the eastern interconnection, the western interconnection, and the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which was established for the main reason of evading federal regulations, in particular the Federal Power Act in 1935. The ERCOT grid is still not subject to the Federal Power Commission which is now called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). ERCOT, a non-profit, is responsible for 90% of the state’s power to 26 million citizens and subject to Texas regulators known as the Public Utility Commission (PUC).

In 2011 (we’ll get to this later) Texas was able to pull in power supply from Mexico. The same Mexico we’ve just politically, literally, and figuratively build a wall between them and Texas. Today ERCOT has three ties to Mexico and two ties to the eastern grid. That gets them out of regulations from feds. My coworker reminds me that Texas is the only state that’s a state by Constitution, only state allowed to fly at flag at the same height as the US flag, and retains the ability to secede. In short, Texas is a separatist and it’s definitely about political power.

“In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.” Washington Post

The biggest concern is if there is too much power draw it can overload the system and pull the whole grid down. Texas was apparently “seconds or minutes” from this catastrophe happening. The issue then is that they would only be able to power up the black start equipment and it would have been days of no power across Texas. Even after the grid was restored, there were still pockets without power due to broken equipment. It’s not hard to imagine that the older equipment was most impacted, which is potentially not equitably resourced.

Polar Vortex

It was colder in Texas than it was in Alaska this week. Dallas had the coldest temperature on Tuesday since 1903 with a low of -2F. Austin and San Antonio also beat out old records from 1900-1910.

I cooked breakfast by headlamp (sort of surprised I had batteries) and the gas range (same to the lighter). My neighbors a building over offered some pre-ground coffee beans. I poured hot water over the grounds, tea-style. I put on a few pairs of socks and rainboots. Remember this is 100-days-over-100F-degrees country. Buying winter boots was never on my to-do list.

My neighbors, the ones that hadn’t left for friends’ houses (amid a global pandemic that took second priority to many of us), were bunkered in. They used their camping & skiing gear. They charged their phones in their cars. I do not have a car so Harley and I started to trek to my brother’s house, her jumping out of the 6” snow. Me struggling to keep hold of her leash. Everyone I passed I said, “You got power?” Nothing. From anyone. Some student-aged kids told me they didn’t have any way to make food. A guy in a winter jacket with a lift ticket told me he was just going for a walk. This part of town is gentrifying fast (and that’s a whole other equity discussion).

We trudged through the fresh snow, it seeping into my rainboot tops. My phone was almost dead so I regrettably don’t have pictures of people skiing down 12th St or the fresh powder we trudged through on Pleasant Valley. We walked in the middle of the quiet streets where a few tracks had been made by 4WD Texan trucks. It was beautiful in a serene, otherworldly way and I wish I had been in the state of mind to capture it. The puppy loved it until we walked over an ice&snow covered bridge with wind billowing at us. 10F and it felt like we were in the arctic.

Around 430PM Harley and I hiked back. My neighbors texted that we got power! Before I made it home, power was off again and my right foot was bruised from the boots I’d chosen. We hung out in the dog park a while: nobody had anything else to do. And then I read by electric candlelight on our makeshift couch campsite. Tuesday morning, still no power, I found some different steel-toed work boots to make the trek again to charge my phone. I did some work and checked in with my people.

Deja Vu

In 2011, over 300,000 Texans woke up without power. It knocked hospitals offline but kept the Cowboys stadium lit up. The most vulnerable suffer while those with money are unaffected (and sometimes oblivious to what it means to be a tale of two cities). This is systematic racism and once we identify it we should put in proper processes to make sure our designs & our emergency plans are equitable. The root cause analysis from 2011 is available here. The recommendations include winterization of equipment and better communications.

In 2021, a total of 4.5 million people were without electricity on Tuesday alone. Downtown Austin, including the stadium, vacant government buildings due to the pandemic, and high-rise under-construction skyscrapers were lit up. Next door in the historically underprivileged, black and brown part of town known as East Austin was pitch black for multiple days in subfreezing weather. The blackouts were not rolling.

Dishearteningly, we obviously did not prioritize the inequities made obvious in 2011.

Even with a major telephone carrier down we all saw this photo. Austin Energy released a statement after this photo circulated. They said that Austin downtown was excluded from the ERCOT mandated load shedding due to “a part of a critical network of infrastructure which includes buildings such as the Dell Seton Medical Center, warming centers, the COVID-19 Alternate Care Site, the Capitol Complex and Austin City Hall and other government buildings”. The part of town that was pitch black and frozen was not the part of town that would have financial resources for winter gear and supplies.

The plan was to do 40 min rolling blackouts. Just like my work text said. In actuality that’s not what happened. Which means that this was planned out for a different scenario than what actually happened. Decisions were made quickly but that still hurt BIPOC families. Some complained that the power decisions being made were to save ERCOT money and there was lots of finger pointing even from officials.

Apparent negotiations started between the big power users downtown, the big industrial users up north and east and Austin Energy who reached out to 800 properties on Tuesday. While this may not have been the intention of the emergency plan, the actuality was a giant manufacturer had power the two days that the historically underprivileged east side had nothing. Even with changes to the grid on Wednesday, many on the east side were still in the dark.

In the dark without power OR communications.

Cities need to revisit all the emergency management plans and do simulations of power and water loss to identify risks to the system and social biases. And furthermore, come up with a robust and equitable load shedding plan that’s ready for the most dire situations.

State of Power

Political Power

State and federal declarations of emergency were issued for all 254 Texas counties and FEMA mobilized. Tuesday night, my power came back on. Since it’d come on for a couple of times for not very long, I was not confident it would stay. The next day, the governor signed an executive order directing natural gas providers to redirect all out-of-state gas shipment to stay in Texas. “Every source of power Texas has has been compromised,” Mr. Abbott said, from coal and renewable energy to nuclear power.

31 people died from the cold, from trying to stay warm and driving on unprepped roads in Texas. This was a week after the deadly 133 car pile-up in Ft Worth. A 70-yr old man died in his bed from the cold. As I write this, people still do not have power in some places (Saturday update: power is back!). Vaccine distribution lines were disrupted. St. David’s hospital relocated 300 patients when they didn’t have water pressure to run the boilers to power the building. The Mayor of Austin in a chilling briefing: “If you have power, please try to live almost like you don’t. If you have heat, run it low. Run it lower.” Individual people were being asked to take on the burden of conservation while large power users continued operations for two days.

Senator Beto set up a call center and made 151,000 calls to senior citizens to deliver resources to the most vulnerable.

I have to believe we have the innovative engineering tools to set up something like this ahead of time. It needs funding and planning.

The governor called for the resignation of ERCOT’s leaders after lack of communications and reliability. Last week he had been assured that they were prepared. He also spread some misinformation on the state of renewables during that interview. Many other leaders jumped in to push their agendas against renewables leading to lots of false information.

Energy Power

In 2011, 8,000MW went down, about 12% of the state’s power supply. In this week’s outage, almost six times that amount (46,000MW) went down from 185 generating plants. Generators which tie into ERCOT come from many different generation types. We even have two nuclear reactors which are owned by Austin Energy, CPS, and NRG.

By Tuesday, natural gas was 40% of our generation and the second largest generator was wind at 23%. As of Wednesday, we were getting about 40% from solar&wind and 60% from coal&gas (18,000MW and 28,000MW respectively). All these numbers to say that we primarily lost generation from the non-renewable sources. Less than 13% of the outages were from wind, even though Fox News ran a narrative that renewables were to blame.

So let’s look at the power sources at play here.

• Wind - Some blades did freeze up and those were splashed on headlines; this renewable is generating power when the wind blows so even though it generally operates at 25% of the mix there would never be a scenario where we would rely only on this source

• Solar - Similarly, this renewable generates only during the daytime but is less efficient on cloudy, arctic days so it too has to be part of the mix but not the full solution

• Coal/gas - These undergo routine maintenance in the winter and are sometimes offline; it also costs money to winterize them so that is a cost sometimes skipped by private generation companies in Texas

• Nuclear - Clean energy but doesn’t always have public appeal

• Biomass - Looks like it was mothballed for the winter months and is more expensive to operate than other sources

• Pumped hydro - This is when you pump water uphill at night when energy is cheaper (supply and demand laws) and let it flow downhill through the turbines during the day when energy is worth more; it’s not creating energy but is optimizing it

• Hydroelectric - Releasing water through dams to run turbines; these need elevation differences which we have in TX but dams in waterways are an environmental concern

• Hydrogen - Assumed not in our mix but this is a power opportunity getting a lot of buzz right now in the industry

Resilient and sustainable

We saw this happen before so this predictable event should have been in our scenario planning.

If we’re going to be resilient, we need a governance to generators in the state of Texas for winterizing and coordinating better. And we need to look into what is causing the polar vortex in the first place - these same fossil fuel driven energy systems.

“Our planning is based on outdated weather patterns, and if you use outdated weather, you never expect to freeze,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

By the way, his book Power Trip is one of my favorites on energy and will explain this all much better that I could.

Water Woes

Each night we had a hard freeze. During the day the roads were passible but at night it became dangerous again. Five frozen nights later, the ice is finally melting from its thick icicles coating the surfaces. But with rising temperatures means that the frozen pipes had expanded and busted. The older houses without renovations (think marginalized communities) have copper pipes which are more susceptible to cracking than PEX pipes. We even have cast iron pipes from the 1930s. By Thursday, 13 million Texas had impacted water quality. I walked outside to water coming out of the seep holes of the building. Water was squirting out of the encasement around a building drainage pipe. It was coming out from under the door to the sprinkler room.

I made a couple of calls and as a neighbor came over to shut off the valve (cursing that the valve was frozen open) I ran upstairs calling my neighbors and banging on doors, “Fill your tub! We’re shutting off the water!” Austin Water has posted that water use was up 250% and to conserve water. We were losing 325 million gallons of water at the peak. I had mine off for 24 hours (a fast turnaround to get a plumber out on site). Again, individuals are being asked to take on the burden of conservation even though there are large water users on the system.

Smart metering can help with this by identifying leaks much sooner than relying on someone to call 311. Smart meters should be prioritized in equitable ways.

Many are still without water on Saturday as two of our three pressures zones are down. A boil water notice was issued for low water pressures, something that occurs when storage is depleted and system pressure is less than 35 psi. This is due to the ability of groundwater to seep into less pressurized pipes known as inflow. Seven million Texans went under boil water notice on Wednesday, not counting those of us with no water.

I’ve been responding to friends about what to do in a boil water notice, how to flush a toilet with a bucket of water, when to stream or drip a faucet. Sprinkler lines were not winterized ahead of time and judging by the HEB shelves people weren’t prepared.

An awning fell off one of the buildings, loaded up with ice and our board went around in black ice conditions trying to relieve the weight from the awnings. I somehow became a point person to check the property for burst pipes every few hours. We have to record the checks because the fire suppression system froze and burst. This has been a constant thing trying to keep people and animals safe in Austin. It took a disaster before people understood how our grid works and the implications for a state-wide blackout.

We don’t have good public education around emergency failures so that people can make informed decisions to keep their families safe.

What we need to do differently

My experience wasn’t nearly the worst of it. I feel privileged to have gotten a hot shower. The storm affected everyone but the infrastructure failures disproportionately impacted different demographics. As engineers and stewards of public trust it is our responsibility to better design our systems now that we know the weak spots. I listened to a news briefing and heard officials call it a “success” that we did not lose the grid with the blackouts. While that may be true, it is tone deaf to a lot of Texans’ experiences and the 30 deaths in Texas to hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and icy road conditions.

More standardized communications network needed

Friday morning I got my first email with a link to the outage map. If companies can buy my personal data to send me junk mail surely we can set up some official communications. We were distinctly unprepared as a community and as individuals. We relied on people calling into 311 and then reporting out on social media for information. One of the major phone carriers went down and had many people without phone or internet. Let’s update those communication systems and make them redundant to issues like this. Companies need to partner together to ensure reliability for our most vulnerable.

More funding for infrastructure needed

We knew that our infrastructure was underfunded and would affect the economy. If a utility is barely operating during daily operations, why did we expect it to be any different in an emergency?

We need to be strategic about the funding. Some components which can be automated, should be. Having the outage map was helpful in knowing which friends to call to check on but even the outage map we had was confusing. Smart meters can help to identify outages with greater accuracy and transparency, freeing up our people to act fast during an emergency with real-time data.

An instagram account created a crowd-sourced list of everything open around Austin. This was our bible to free food and resources, though wasn’t always accurate. Others also made geospatial resource maps to help. Things like this can be innovatively automated, shaped by our geodigital tools, to come online during an emergency. We need education and training on this so volunteers can respond without reinventing the same things.

A standard rule of thumb for resiliency is that for every $1 spent in disaster mitigation, saves $6 down the line. It is easier and cheaper to build equipment to sustain winter conditions than to retrofit it. We need a plan to build-back-better as we routinely decommission old equipment. I have this guide on resilient design written in plain terms.

prioritize social-based scenario planning

I’ve talked before about how design is not inherently unbiased. We have the capabilities to do social impact based analysis of design before a single dollar is spent. We also have capabilities to do power and water loss simulations with an eye to social impact. This is not something always prioritized by utilities that struggle with funding to replace aging infrastructure but 2021 has made it obvious that this is our responsibility to people on the margins. We need diverse players in this space, including charities, that can raise funds.

More connections and oversight by federal level

The Public Utilities Commission of Texas has ordered that ERCOT “update energy prices to reflect the demand”. To put this in perspective, prices soared from $22/MW to $9,000/MW while 4 million Texans were without power. The PUC is the agency that regulates ERCOT as it is not federally regulated. FERC made recommendations in 2011 but with no federal oversight were not followed.

More connections between the power grid may mean that we would have had rolling brownouts instead of sustained blackouts. Analysis is being done to look into a southwest connection, reports Scientific American. Texas may even make money from that connection which leads me to my next point.

Reparations

There will be an investigation next week into ERCOT and PUC along with talk of financial aid to private companies to winterize their equipment. There’s going to be lots of talks by economists and numbers-people. While there is money on the negotiating table, reparations should be a part of the conversation.

Reading: by electric candlelight

Working: to share what’s happening here in Texas

Listening: the birds digging through the snow on my balcony for seeds

Last month I was editing a large report which had about 700 commas. And me, THE COMMA QUEEN, deleted 2/3rds of them. There were commas between the introductory phrase, the noun, and the rest of the sentence. I love a good oxford comma (greeeeat music video by the way) but we had hanging fragments!

People are often surprised when I tell them I do more writing than math. But it’s true. All calcs have inherent assumptions which have to be recorded in the basis of design report, technical memorandums, or emails. There are moments when I’m re-arranging sentence construction for readability and I wonder how I got through 4 years at university without a single writing class.

As project manager for this project, I try not to do editing. I am generally reading with an eye to how the client will understand it, how to articulate to non-engineer audiences, and how to make language or topics clearer. Sometimes the technical part of the sentence is not the most important part. Even in a technical document.

Don’t Make These 20 Writing Mistakes

1. The biggest mistake is what I call word salad. There are lots of big words but they do not mean much to the reader. Recently I read a geology report that had a sentence about the different types of glaciated deposits. Nothing else in the report mentioned this and there was no context for what that is supposed to mean to the reader, what glaciation means, or how it interacts with anything else in the report. My comment to the author was “If we need this sentence, let’s explain glaciation and connect it back to the context.” We ended up deleting it.

2. Which brings me to my next point: sentences you don't need to keep. Sometimes we feel that adding technical bits and bobs makes it sound more professional. Or we just get really into it and enthusiastically describe everything we know about the topic. However it is distracting if it isn’t referenced elsewhere in the report or does not give the reader a better understanding so they can follow the conclusions better. Just delete it. The tip here is to keep the audience’s frame of reference in mind. Pretend to know only what they know about the topic as you are reviewing it. I often say “what did they show up to find out?”

3. Grammar mistakes:

   1. Uses commas everywhere. In general, people use lots of commas,, and such. My advice is that commas for inflection of voice don't need to be there unless the sentence is confusing without it.

   2. Commas at the end of a phase followed by and. If the rest of the phrase can be read as a complete sentence (ex. Yadda yadda yadda, and the results showed that a positive means….) then the comma is needed. If that phrase can't stand alone then nix the comma.

   3. Apostrophes everywhere but especially after plural acronyms (ex. The vibrating wire piezometers or VWPs are placed…). Possessive acronyms would still get one (ex. The VWP’s cord shall be 150 ft….).

   4. Semi-colons, when not used for lists, should be followed by an entire standalone sentence; make sure it is not a fragment (ex. this sentence).

4. Two spaces after sentences. This is one that really polarizes people. They love the two spaces. This was officially changed from our old typewriter en quad to a single space in the 90s. It is better for our digital future (aka things found on webpages and code) so we might as well get into the habit.

5. Describing something that would be better disseminated as a table.

6. Or a visual.

7. Not adhering to brand policy. This could be your personal brand or your company brand. Some of it is simple like the rule on one space after sentences. Some is more complex. For example a Jacobs brand policy is to write in a way that is understandable and technical but does not talk down to the audience. We have a whole guide on this.

8. Ending a sentence on a preposition. (Bad ex. see last sentence above). Some prepositions are on a mission (apparently) but basically it’s a word that describes place, time or position.

9. Being too chatty. Sometimes when I get reports from technologists it will have, if the technologist has had their extra coffee today, commas and injunctions in the middle of a sentence (bad ex. see this sentence). It's a side thought in the middle of a thought which is distracting to your audience.

10. Too much data. My boss calls this "data and not intelligence". Sum up the conclusions not just the data or analyses. Know if your audience is very analytical-brained or not. Some of them may need this to feel like they’ve gotten the point. Your job as the writer is to help even the analytical types be able to describe your work to a non-analytical type.

11. Reads like a chapter book. For anything other than a PhD thesis, you’ll want to put all the information up front and then reiterate as you go. I did a whole post on audience-based presentations. The same is true for writing. Do not talk about your material in a linear progression in which you worked on it. You'll have to do the extra step to think of it by topics and not chronological time.

12. Not checking the references. Too many times a writer will use a reference they know very well so they don’t actually put it in the Works Cited section. If it is referenced it needs to appear as a whole reference someone can find. I also require that my teams copy/link that published article into a References folder so that any of us can refer back to the actual article.

13. Appendices, tables or figures that are out of order. The first table that you refer to in the text should be Table 1. The first appendix referred to should be Appendix A. To eliminate a mistake, I tend to name all Appendices ‘X’ until the text has been written. Also, tables always go before figures.

14. Inconsistency. If you have dates or numbers (Jan 10, 2020 or January 2020) then they should be consistent in their formatting throughout the entire report. (Bad ex. This 1 is an important one or at least the top ten (10).) Same with use of units that can be spelled or symbolized in different ways.

15. The use of conditional tense. Engineers can be squirmy sometimes. Did you likely find or did you find based on the information you had? Our jobs as engineers means we have to stand by what we do because we have an ethical obligation to the profession. It's okay in some places to be delicate about the information but we should recognize that taking risks is part of the business. Manage the risk and if you’re not sure the bigger risk profile, that’s when you should connect with the PM or others on the messaging.

16. Section references that are unlinked. Inevitably your headings and section numbers will change so if you link it (similar to how you would add an URL) then it will change as well.

17. Extra words that don’t add context. Like saying something is fairly similar. What is the difference between fairly similar and similar?

18. Passive sentences. An active sentence structure is generally easier to read for the audience. Active sentences come in the form "A did B." Passive sentences, however, come in the form "B was done to A." Flip them around so they are active.

19. Complicated lists. Lists that get complicated should use a ; to separate the items. You may even start with a : to let your audience know that the items are a list. If you opt for using bullets for your list, end the last one with a period.

20. The words fewer/less used interchangeably. I have a friend that corrects my misuse of this irl (and yes, it’s super annoying). If it is a countable integer then use the word ‘fewer’. (Ex. This checkout line is for 15 items or fewer). If you can’t count it, then you can use the word ‘less’. (Ex. Less talk and more work!)

Hopefully these helped. These are the ones that jump out at me when I’m reviewing others’ work. Mistakes in grammar and writing can take away from the credibility of the author. It’s a good idea to go back and see what the editor changed so that you are always learning and improving your writing skills.

Got any I missed? Let me know in the comments!

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Listening: Robert Earl Keen live at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio. Here’s a good one.

Working: We started up some construction on site. I’ve been going back and forth between my home office and the site office to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

Watching: I watched Wildlife with Carey Mulligan and Jake Jyllenhaal. It’s a drama and real heavy but def worth it. I also rewatched Gone in 60 Seconds and it was hilariously bad.

Six years ago I was simply using better technology to do my job. It was business as usual and engineers are in the business of using the latest technology for the better of our projects. In my case, I put all my iterative calcs into MathCAD (here’s the post I did about it). I wasn’t even using the best technology - which would have been to create some code that did the iterations and pulled the points off the graph for me (that I did have to do manually in my file). I save a bit of money for my client and a little frustration for myself. It was good enough but not perfect (which is sort of my strength in a team).

Some might say that innovation has gotten a little out of hand but, y’all, that is innovation. Continual, gradual growth. We call this small i innovation. It’s the one that’s lost when we start to talk about the big sexy I innovation. Big I Innovation are the disruptors. The sweeping changes. The oohs and ahhs. It’s all innovation and it’s all part of what we do as good stewards to our communities.

My big news, that has fully taken up all my brain real estate, is that I was recently promoted to lead one of our innovation programs!! :D :D :D I immediately dove in to change the structure (big I innovation?), assess what was working and what could be improved (little i innovation in action) and what should be scrapped and redone (a pivot in the work product a la lean methodology). And with that my team and I are now heading into Q1 with a whole new gig. And yes, I am me, so my program this year is themed.

Which, to be fair, I was using white dude football terms and my boss was like, “Did YOU pick those words? This does NOT sound like you.” So you know what? Challenge accepted; I pivoted to an electronica theme. Y’all are just going to have to deal with my corniness and puns now. Let’s TURN UP THE BEAT.

So I wanted to share some of the innovation resources that amp me up. Even the greatest musicians cite their inspiration. Here’s mine.

ways to Innovate

• Design thinking is the method of solving by thinking about the user, challenging assumptions, and redefining the problem. It starts with empathy first. Reframing the problem can help contextualize what you’re actually solving, helping to solve the problem itself and not the symptoms. Talking about problems, I will expect to see a lot of innovation come out the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals which I see referenced a lot in the industry.

• Biomimicry is using examples found in nature to design manmade solutions. The classic example is designing the bullet train to look like the beak of a kingfisher so that it can speed down the track without a sonic boom. Some biomimicry examples are at the intersection of science & engineering such as manufacturing a material for hospitals that repels bacteria similar to a cicada’s wing. There’s thousands of examples of this which you can browse on Biomimicry and https://asknature.org/.

• The Board of Innovation has a ton of guides and some tools. This company does consulting to help others innovate as a business strategy. I’m in an accelerator program with them (super excited for that to start!) and just completed an Innovation facilitation training. They introduced themselves with emojis. Y’all know I love that. No need to be stuffy just because we’re corporate.

• LinkedIn Learning has a bunch of innovation courses (and so does many other sites at this point) but I have not done any of them yet. Yet!

• The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design is a perfect use of my fav innovating — with people first! It helps to inspire, ideate, and implement is an activity format. It’s the most important part of design thinking and this is a resource I see referenced A LOT.

• Lean Startup by Eric Reis is probably the most referenced book. In a nutshell, the lean startup is starting with your assumptions and then building a “minimal viable product” to get early customer feedback. For our industry, it doesn’t have to be a tool or app — you can start with a mock webpage and then get some feedback on it. You build a little, measure it in the marketplace, and then learn. From there you pivot or keep going. This avoids large failures by failing early and often in an agile way.

Industry Predictions

• This periodic table (also comes in a bubble chart) is a work of art. I have never seen a more beautiful graphic (challenge me on that one!). On the webpage (not here in my blog), hover over the icons to see which markets they predict will be impacted by these technologies.

• Infrastructure Gamechangers from ASCE on some cool projects gets an honorable mention.

• Better yet, Future World Vision is a collaboration of experts across the industry in how they envision 5 types of cities at 50 years out. The videos are SUPER cool and make me SUPER giddy about the future. Go watch them at https://www.futureworldvision.org/.

• I’ve heard a lot of talk about dispersed cities after COVID-19 so make sure you check that out too on Future World Vision. I was in a webinar where Dr. James Moore was talking about his work with and knowledge of cities around the world re-envisioning their infrastructure post-pandemic. I love how he talks about how cities “molt” over our lifetimes. I like to think of cities as the central technology to our economy functioning at scale.

• I am often linking to AECOM’s Future of Infrastructure which has technology innovations and also information on why clients would move to more innovative funding structures, like P3.

• NewCities has a section on the Big Rethink following COVID-19. Here’s one on transportation.

Newsy Websites & Blogs

Blogs & Sites

• Interesting Engineering - Innovation section. I think I also follow them on instagram.

• Board of Innovation also has a blog which has lots of gems. Check out this one to start about Unsexy but brilliant examples of innovation.

• This site newcities.org is a global nonprofit that has some great information and articles about resilient cities, sustainable, diverse, etc.

• The New Civil Engineer - Innovation section and one on The Future of. They have whitepapers which I’ve referenced before on my blog.

• Here’s AECOM’s innovation page which has articles and one podcast.

• Mel The Engineer put together a helpful list of other industry bloggers and influencers for STEM.

• My blog, The Watermark, has an innovation section called Furthering the Industry and often links diversity and inclusivity to innovation.

Less worthy Websites

• ENR has some information but it’s sorted by sector and not tagged with innovation. And there’s enough of a paywall that I don’t consider it a great source for me.

• The World Economic Forum sometimes has articles like this one but I find they are more technology-focused with a few infrastructure reports.

• Architecture - I always end up on AIA.org for some of the articles. Here are their featured projects.

Emails & Podcasts

Email Newsletters

• Interesting Engineering has a daily newsletter that is worth it just to read the few TLDRs at the top even if you don’t have time for the full email.

• Board of Innovation’s email subscription doesn’t come out too often so it’s a good one.

• One of my coworkers loves CB Insights for information on where our world, not just infrastructure, is going in terms of technology and innovation. I find it to be too fintech and other-industry based but you may enjoy it.

• I get daily ASCE SmartBrief on policy and other things affecting civil engineering. I know WEF and other organizations have similar newsletters. You don’t have to be a part of the professional society to sign up.

Industry Podcasts

• If/When podcast - This generally has an industry expert at Jacobs chat with someone else in academia or another thought leader. There’s also the Inflection Points podcast.

• SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers) has an innovator’s podcast and I love that some episodes are in Spanish.

• 99% Invisible - My favorite water episodes are the ones of the failure. That’s an interesting thought. They are the reversal of Chicago river and the making of Dallas into a port city.

• How I Built This with Guy Raz - Lots are great for entrepreneurial inspiration but I especially like the Toms shoes episode.

• The Engineer’s Collective from Bentley/New Civil Engineer gets an honorable mention. I find all the side tangents annoying and can’t speed it up enough.

• ASCE Plot Points also gets a mention. They are short and quick. I tend to feel the same way I do when I’ve just left a networking hall - like I learned something interesting and met someone new but ready to go listen to music by myself for a while.

For a few, innovation is the abstract, futuristic vision that refuses to follow managerial styles or fiscal years. For some, it’s all innovation theater post-it notes but no new changes that permeate what we do. For me, it is deeply rooted in diversity of thought as the root of little and big innovations. My favorite geek outs are about pushing our technological boundaries and implementing the social, human aspect into design. I love it when computers do what they do best (math, data, etc) and humans do what we do best (the human condition). And then together it’s a love story.

Inspiration should come from leaving our echo chambers and bouncing ideas on each other, throwing the crazy and the illogical at the wall and then slimming back into the innovation sweet spot:

• consumer desirability

• technical feasibility, and

• business viability.

Ideation is not innovation all on its own. Innovation takes your ideation and develops it into something tangible. And it is sometimes failure. But it allows our architectural and engineering industry to deliver higher quality work, implement latest technology and be more cost effective to the consumers (you all…the public).

But more personally, it lets us do way more fun work by helping to automate the repetitive, dull, or dangerous. Innovation is not the answer but the opportunity for us intra- and entrepreneurs. Even if it is a bit of a catchword.

Reading: First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins. I am the new program lead for an innovation program and have been trying to figure out what I need to do to set it up!

Listening: Tash Sultana’s Jungle and Notion. And also folklore just like the rest of you are. Don’t deny it. ;)

Watching: There’s a documentary series on Netflix with Zac Efron. The hosts are a little annoying but they basically have my dream job, traveling around and finding geothermal energy & water resources.

The trade-off is that only now can we go without pants to a live appearance on tv. Everyone has gotten comfortable being on camera…and sometimes a little too comfortable according to that one Florida judge. Pre-COVID-19 studies, which track 29% of college grads that already worked from home at least some of the time, showed that flexible work patterns provide more work satisfaction and increased productivity.

In our industry, we’ve been doing nothing but work in the time we used to spend traveling or commuting. Low interest rates, large capital infrastructure bills, and resource availability means that we’re saturated with things to do, trying to stay disciplined enough to remember to take breaks. I found no research that was looking into how our industry-wide WFH competency was before COVID, much less anything updated to now. And honestly, all the advice I’ve seen on working from home has been wholly unuseful - mostly targeted towards the white majority, traditional employee in mind, especially those with young children at home. In a universe where France, Spain and Italy have national laws for “right to disconnect” and innovation is the apex of engineering, science and architectural creativity we need to be working with all our managers and employees on how to safely break, refocus, enhance creativity, and avoid burnout.

Let’s use our modern-day understanding of psychology to re-imagine our modern future of work, instead of trying to “go back to work”. Let’s go forward. So I’m going to try to explain some science. (And nope, I have no credentials to be talking psychology.)

This is your brain on work

The brain has different biological, daytime cycles much like the REM sleep cycle. These are called ultradian rhythms. The Basic Rest Activity Cycle (BRAC) is a 80-120 minute rhythm of higher frequency brain patterns. These are broken up by 15-20 minutes of lower-frequency rhythms, but ymmv.

Productivity doesn’t mean performance

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in an average 8.8 hour workday, less than 3 hours of work was actually done. Which begs the question, with so many things to do, and so little time, how do we become more productive? One answer lies in how smartly you are breaking. If you try to work your brain at high activity levels, pushing through the natural inclination for it to recharge, you’d only be capturing 25% of your productivity, rather than a 90% output. Pushing yourself past your body’s natural inclination is not productivity. It’s fatigue. You’re selling yourself short if you aren’t taking those “rest” breaks.

The afternoon slump

While we don’t need as much sleep as cats do, your body is affected by low energy periods at certain times of the day. Something else is also at play here. The brain is a resource hog. It uses 20% of the energy of your body. After lunch, when you’re digesting and easing into the afternoon, more energy is required for this process.

So use this science to schedule smartly. Anything that requires deep thinking should not be scheduled when your body needs a rest. Not all meetings require the most high functioning brain (you know the ones…) so schedule those meetings during your low energy periods. #thismeetingcouldhavebeenanemail but is actually really important to recharge and potentially kick-start different brain wavelengths.

Brain-lengths

The reason that people have their greatest ideas while driving (or in the shower), is because your default brain functions and your executive functions work in parallel during times of rest.

There’s a subreddit I enjoy when I’m needing time to break away and let my brain literally browse in diffuse mode. It’s called Shower Thoughts and is dedicated to the daydreaming brain. It has gems such as “you always have teeth stuck between your teeth”.

Contrary to what you might expect, your brain is not lazy when it is unfocused. In fact, it has access to more creativity in those moments. Just as it does when you sleep, your brain processes in a more creative mode as it catalogs information. Which, in the engineering industry, we know is vital to opening up innovation for our projects. Be disciplined about breaks, especially if you are a highly technical person, and build that culture into your teams.

Brain Fatigue

To drive it too far, pushing for more output, the body will react with a stress response (our old friend: fight, flight, freeze). Actually, let’s talk about that for a second. We have our 3 layers of the brain, the reptilian [instinct, reactions], the mammalian [emotions], and the primate [logical]. Of the three layers of the brain, while I’m at work and especially if I’m heading into a meeting with many different personalities and opinions, I’d much rather be responding with my primate brain. That is, the part of my brain that thinks logically and responds instead of reacting emotionally or instinctively. In really high stress times (long projects, world pandemic…), you could have an amygdala hijack when you don’t have access to that third layer.

One of my senior geotechs likes to say “I’ve never worked on a perfect project yet.” And I love that - there’s always lessons to learn and personalities to navigate. We love our jobs because they are challenging. It’s very important for me that if I know the meeting is going to be difficult or that I’ll be working with people who are much different than me, I’ve stopped “getting ready” for meetings by reviewing materials and instead by taking a break. It’s a science to performing at your best, physiologically and emotionally.

Ready, Set, Break

For me, it depends on my mood, the weather, my workload, and (seriously) what I had for breakfast to decide how and when I break. If I’ve had a entire pot of coffee by 9AM, I need nothing more than a visit to the gym to work off some energy and think through how I should reply to an email. Or, if I’m feeling like I need to be around people for motivation, I’ll take a break to walk over to the coffee shop and set up there. Each of these options means that I’m better prepared to do more high functioning work by the time I start work again.

The other solid benefit to these times off is that by stepping away from a problem, I get more perspective and can re-evaluate my goals. That means I can worry about only the things that need to be worried about and make sure my time is spent aligned to my strengths and goals.

Types of good breaks

The autonomic nervous system has two parts: the sympathetic (fight/flight) and the parasympathetic (rest/digest). So you can break in two ways: enhance the sympathetic system in a positive way to increase focus; or let the parasympathetic system regain control to refresh your body.

Stationary activities. You can solve brain-teasers, doodle or a study in Japan found that looking at cute animals helped. Anything that puts the brain into diffuse mode will create psychological detachment from the hyper-focused or decision-making activities you do while you’re working.

Exercise. Intense exercise increases your body’s demand for oxygen. Just by taking a stroll you can improve memory and cognitive performance. One of the things I love to do during day-long workshops is to lead a group stretch. Everyone steps out of their comfort zone, you get a little blood flowing, and find some humor. In smaller groups it’s fun to ask people questions while they stretch to help with the creativity and belonging (an important aspect of diversity, equity and inclusivity).

Music. There is tremendous research that goes into music and the brains. It affects your moods, your preferences, and even your creativity. Playing an instrument will improve your motor and reasoning skills. And don’t forget that ambient noise can help improve your creativity while you’re working.

Meditation. Some of the greatest thinkers swear by their meditation techniques. Now every time I meditate I think of the diffuse brain image above and the science of calming your mind to make space for new ideas and creativity.

Some wrong breaks. Some unproductive breaks might be online shopping (or anything that your brain thinks of as intense decision making), venting to colleagues (unless that’s how you process and they are cool with it), and apparently scrolling social media (though I feel like it can be inspiring and energizing, too). The jury is still out on coffee & snacking. Basically, select your type of break based on the type of work you just did in the prior 90 min cycle or in the next upcoming 90 min work cycle.

Work Styles

Optimizing productivity

Just as doing things doesn’t necessarily translate to milestones, reducing the hours you work a day does not particularly mean that you lose productivity. It’s all about working with your autonomic nervous system. With highly skilled women and men, those with at least one child performed more than their childless peers throughout their careers. They are motivated people that find ways to better optimize their time spent in the office, can multi-task, and are flexible and empathetic. All necessary for high performance.

Don’t be afraid to lose the time that you were doing work for your breaks. Sometimes putting a little stress on the body will spur your ability to work, just as a deadline is a good way to focus your brain.

The Methods - rebooting your cognitive functions

The most obvious method is the 90 minute block method by taking 20 minute breaks for a healing rest. Take the average BRAC and schedule 90 minute blocks followed by 20-30 minute breaks. I often schedule my day-long meeting agendas in 90 minute segments.

The Pomodoro Cycle also follows this theory but works well for people who tend to follow more standard 30 min work cycles. By taking a short break every 25 minutes, you allow your eyes to rest and it helps to make small decisions faster. Plus, if I’ve been drinking lots of tea, that’s about when I need a restroom break again.

Similarly, the 52-17 method was derived from a study that found that the top 10% of employees work for 52 minutes followed by 17 minutes of break when they were tracked with desktop apps. It makes sense because it’s basically the middle of the previous two methods. Place 20 minute breaks between meetings and be very clear that these meetings are not to bleed over.

I don’t need to google research to tell you that everybody’s brain is different. There’s a few apps you can use to help you figure out yours, and most of them will help to track which projects/clients you are working on, but for me I can just take a look at my calendar and reflect on what’s been working. I fall pretty solidly between 80-90 minute work periods. That is when I start to rustle the papers around and get up for more coffee. Don't work against your natural rhythms. Work with them.

Future of Work

Even for a WFH veteran, I’ve also been forced to try different things during the past two months. I was reminded that I had a completely different way to work in college (cross-legged on my bed with papers spread out in a 360 around me). And then there was my way to work when I was in the office every day (hiding out in an obscured corner to read the news…otherwise I will start talking to someone). Anymore, I find offices distracting and umcomfortable. As a womxn, I need a different temperature (77F is chilly to me), lighting (I prefer daylights…shush architects I know I’m weird), and sound (ambient music is beneficial depending on the type but listening to one-sided phone conversations is more distracting than two-sided conversations). And remember how the average worker does 3 hours of work a day? How much of that is attributed to being an extrovert in the office?

The most important lesson learned from this pandemic is that you will never have it figured out. Being resilient and growing is about being adaptable as life experiences & projects change. Now is the perfect time for everyone to play with their habits.

Figuring it out for managers

The Future of Work is a hot topic right now. Managers are the front-line crew working within the organization’s tool and goals, but creating culture and teams that are diverse. Our pre-COVID professional life was built on a foundation of traditional families with white, male breadwinners. Which, duh, is why it is white males and we still struggle for diversity in engineering. That’s the demographic it is systemically built to support. So now we have a chance to change that paradigm, creating a new work environment that suits diverse people.

I get a little nervous when managers start talking about returning to normal. It assumes that normal is the dominant, traditional paradigm and that social distancing or “abnormal” is wrong. Not all managers are reverting back to old, or at least they don’t want to. So for those that are unsure how to go forward to new normal, University of Calgary has these tips for managers:

• Model breaks and how you are taking breaks to your employees

• Build a culture of mindfulness which means redirecting focus to different activities and thought-patterns with intention

• Avoid “should” thinking

• Use performance-based expectations, not time- or location-based

• Understand the chronic stresses of some projects that might require more breaks to avoid burnout

A water engineering small business owner, Rich Cavaganaro, tells The Guardian that “In the engineering community you come to the office. You have blueprints. You have drawings and layouts and you’re marking them up and that’s generally how our business has been conducted,” but goes on to say that the pandemic has taught us that it’s not necessary any more. We can work now with the future in mind, in a hybrid work way, using the science we know now instead of simulating what we had 10 to 20 years ago.

Maybe it’s a Wednesday Workdays in the office or videochat happy hours.

Play around with it. Let me know what you find out.

Listening: Improv and short sketches. I loved Middleditch & Schwartz on Netflix.

Reading: Where the Crawdad Sings by Delia Owens. A bit of an escape to the south for this hot summer.

Working: Setting the stage for the next phase of work on a dam and consulting the client on what they can expect in terms of cost. Which is good old engineering guesstimation with very large numbers.

As we’re all at home, baking with our homemade sourdough starters and trying to do our part to flatten the curve, there are people still putting on their gloves and heading into work. They’ve added extra hand washing throughout the day and temperature logging every morning. There is a sheet posted to the wall somewhere with my temperatures charted, all haphazardly over the place because I couldn’t decide on one body location to monitor. (I’ve since realized that is a HIPAA violation and now record as PASS/FAIL. We’re all learning throughout this process).

Right now, the “essential infrastructure work” is not the emergency work, not like in healthcare; but it’s the normal work that keeps those ovens on and toilets flushing and crops growing. It’s building the facilities that will produce a vaccine that hasn’t even finished lab testing yet. We chart across many demographics, social and political structures, ethnic boundaries and diverse personalities. We are just like you.

And more importantly, we work for you. That is why we have to be transparent about how these things are set up in our cities and why, though the status quo might seem progressive on the surface, is actually doing you a disservice. During my last post I talked about why inclusivity and diversity in the industry is important to you. This week I want to focus on how it could look for you as the infrastructure end user. But to do that I need to explain how it works first.

How it Works - infrastructure projects

Each project, plant, or public works starts with an idea. In the water market, sometimes it’s the operator saying, “I think you need to add another water tank to this pressure zone so you don’t have low pressure over there when everyone takes their morning showers”. The operators intuitively get it. They know, through trial and error, how each little change in the system effects their system. The independent variable experiment. They watch the dip in water pressure at 5AM every morning when a battalion of sprinklers turns on in everyone’s yards ready to fight off the drought. My favorite fun fact is that when Eastenders turns to commercials in the UK, they have to roll on turbines from France in order to meet the 1.75M tea kettle surge of electricity. You can see how the operators have lots of ideas on how to make the system better.

The engineers and planners and scientists also know this too and are instrumental in predicting how the system will react before a single dollar is spent on construction. They can design controls to help alleviate some of the burdens of unpredictability through calculations and fancy digital twins to make sure the system isn’t overwhelmed. They know the pump curves and automation to design a new pump station in the project; they are able to use their tools to reiterate scenarios and test the system. The more complex the system, the more complex the tools & workforce necessary.

The complex complexities

It’s this idea of interlocking people & strengths. If the engineers designed in a bubble, they may recommend a bigger water treatment plant when really all they needed was a community-based effort to curb water use at 5AM by campaigning people to reset the “default” time setting on their sprinklers. Or placing a restriction to conserve outdoor water on certain days of the week for certain households which would encourage people to actually take a look at the default sprinkler settings. Or the politicians can place different rate structures for different higher-use consumers that are more of a burden on the system.

Generally the higher-use consumers are manufacturers or “industrial users”. So maybe instead of upgrading the city’s system it’s better to build a relationship with a user and offer them a rebate to clean their own used water for “reuse”. This way it might be more efficient for everyone if the non-commercial clients have a small filtration system to filter out metals and things not found in domestic water. That way the engineers don’t have to overbuild a system that treats all wastewater for metals if it only exists in some of the streams coming into the plant. There is no right or wrong answer. Just lots of options.

Lots of challenges. Lots of what-ifs and issues that pop up even with the most thought-out design. [That’s why we enjoy this job.]

The Owners

The owners take these ideas and with their political agency they begin to capital plan for upgrades and projects. They allocate contingencies for emergency planning. They decide when to analyze some more or just get started and manage the risk. They are governments that get taxes put on ballots and grants funded for cities. They’re private companies that work with consumers. The idea then blossoms into essential funding, support and actions.

Once you have the ideas and funding model, the next step is buffing out the idea. Maybe it’s a full design project, or maybe it’s a small feasibility project to see if an ASR system would even work. Or maybe you’re trying to hire transportation planning engineers (those guys on the side of I-35 monitoring the traffic back when we used to drive to work) to study, learn, and revamp them.

The consultants

Generally a city has their own staff engineers but a lot of projects either take very specialized work (there aren’t many biosolids plants so therefore not many people who can call themselves a biosolids expert) or the projects take so much work for just a short time that a utility brings a different organization on board to supplement the workload. Consultants tend to know what is being done across the industry at all the different utilities and they have access to the engineering tools and specialists that it takes to do a very specialized project more efficiently. Depending on the complexity of the design there might be many different types of consultants — the program manager, the actual design firm, company that coordinates with land owners, you name it.

The next complexity

I was on a project once where we (the engineering consultant program manager) had a subconsultant contracted to us that helped us meet our diversity and inclusivity requirements known as economic inclusion. The reason this is necessary, and ultimately that you are paying for it as a consumer, is because the system is over-complex, over-encumbered, and politically looks good on paper but is logistically it can be a nightmare that requires a specialized individual to navigate.

In the industry, there are many policies and procedures that aren’t working for us. There’s a hodge-podge of different diversity efforts at different scales. Governments around the world recognize diverse company owners and staff diversity percentages. It is an easily quantified metric that is a distraction from initiating something that actually has positive impact. There’s not a whole lot changing: it’s limiting and costly, and ultimately the requirements are obscuring how we could do anything differently. As I mentioned last time there’s financial and social reasons we need to get better at this as an industry.

Get your tea kettles and sourdough baguettes ready because this is complicated and I’m going to attempt to explain it.

How it works - Teaming

Company Owners

When one works in my city, (which, full transparency, I don’t generally work for them so this is just an example) they have to follow what they call "procurement" rules which describe the minority-owned or woman-owned businesses. These businesses get certified as part of a city-run program that gives them the thumbs up on being a disadvantaged, local enterprise. There is a debate to be had here about how calling someone “disadvantaged” makes them even more of an outsider. Generalizations, even calling someone “white”, erases the experience of them as human beings. One white person is not all white people, and so on so forth.

Not all cities use the same terminology because of this. But in essence the current procurement dialogue boils down to who are the owners, not the workforce, of the organizations. As you read this, keep in mind that though attempting to be progressive, it’s still a capitalist-created system by things that capitalists value most: money and ownership.

The guidelines for Austin are:

• Have at least 51% ownership by a socially or economically disadvantaged individual (generally by race)

• Has to be small enough to be defined that way by Small Business Administration

• Must have a personal net worth less than $1.5M

• Must apply and be certified

• Must be for-profit (hmm limiting, no?)

When the city or utility releases a Request for Qualifications or Proposal (RFP, RFQ) for construction work or professional services, the applicants have to meet a specific mix of these type of “disadvantaged” firms (MWBE/DBE) for each team that applies to the request. For professional services it is:

• 1.9% African-American

• 9.0% Hispanic

• 4.9% Asian/Native American

• 15.8% Minority-owned

• 15.8% Women-owned

Meaning that if you want to do an architectural project for the city, you have to subcontract enough work out to 5 different firms or face penalties that will limit your future ability to win work with the city. No matter how small the project, you have to meet these guidelines if the city doesn’t have a scaleable program. That means for a $8k modeling project completed (this is a teeeeeny tiny project when others are in the billions) then they have to lump it together with other stuff so that the one qualified firm who can do it for that budget wins the project. The city project managers are smart individuals - they know who has the experience and resources to do it cheapest around town because only certain people have the model created (and it is not open source data - that would be a security concern). We’ve got a system that is working against the best judgement of our PMs on how to most cost efficiently deliver their communities an inclusive project.

Remember that for a project to actually be useful to you, it has to take into account your perspectives, experiences, and wants as the consumer. It has to improve your social value, be cost-effective, and be so seamless that you don’t even think about the engineering behind it. You need a diverse team to increase social value of the project. With our current model focused on owners it highlights talented businesses and helps to connect them to larger firms called primes. But it does not focus on the workforce and getting resources to disadvantaged people.

Inertia allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned. -Ursula Le Guin

Pitfalls of the program for Small outfits

Then some of the consultants do some weird stuff to try to help…or to game the system. I can name a couple of firms in my city that spin off parts of the company to keep their minority ownership above 51%. And you know what? Who am I to judge. Not everyone that went to school for engineering wants to own a business and deal with all these hoops. Talented engineers do not make talented business owners. If we were to graduate some of the “small” firms out of the program, it hurts the quality of the projects in the short term and makes it difficult for everybody to be able to meet the procurement rules. And as the industry is set up right now, we need them to do this otherwise no one meets these insane requirements.

The other issue in that train of thought is that a smaller company that is doing well in the program is limited in their growth. To do that means they would literally lose market share and become disenfranchised yet again because of the existence of the program. That’s part of the reason why a study at Zweig Group found that these firms are single-generation firms. The program is an obstacle to creating a firm that is sustainable for future generations. So now we have firms limited in their global knowledge as they are single-city based AND designing things that they will not personally be around to experience - how does that incentivize community-based designs, inclusivity, and doing the right thing?

And then there’s the case of these small firms getting a bad rep just by being seen as not being qualified or talented enough on their own. Regardless of the realities of the steep challenges minorities face in succeeding in our social institutions, by labeling them as disadvantage we actually shackle them with additional discrimination. It kills me to hear that people think they pay MWBE to not do any work but just to meet their goals. We expect them to be skilled business owners, have enough support to not be overburdened and burnt out, and be talented engineers. More hoops, higher expectations, less resources, and a stigma that they weren’t qualified in the first place. No wonder they have a bad reputation by some. And no wonder if they do underperform in quality or project budget and schedule. We set them up for failure.

Most importantly, This system incentivizes people to own their own firms but not to hire diverse people, be inclusive, be good bosses and worldly citizens concerned about their communities. I mean maybe they do. But maybe they don’t. And that was the whole point of this system anyway. The system we built isn’t doing what we built it to do.

Staff Percentages

So some cities try to enforce staff diversity percentages by requiring a list of how many “diverse” people are employed. And believe me, these are not comprehensive lists that catch the nuance of the human experience needed to inclusively deliver a great project. These additional rules require more overhead and more analysis during procurement to count up each person working at the firm, their background, know who will be working on the project (called resourcing) in advance, and renegotiating as the resourcing availability changes throughout the lifetime of a project (some go on for 20 years or more). Again, waste of time not actually helping but hindering.

I imagine this gets really complicated with global work because tracking this is limited by law in some European countries. The law is to protect against discrimination, specifically wartime persecution, which is painful trauma and an unfortunate reality. There is still discrimination out there.

By penalizing firms as not diverse enough, we’ve tipped our hand in a problematic cycle of call-out culture.

Some of these firms would like to hire more diverse because they do see the benefits to their projects and their stakeholders. Instead of recognition of firms trying hard to be part of a diverse world, we are alienating the very people who we need to be our allies to help us achieve our goals. While we set this up to support different minorities, we forget that diversity is not black & white. Neither are diversity efforts.

I don’t know y’all. Social justice is a complicated topic and I’m certainly underqualified to comment. So instead I’d rather ditch this whole system and focus on the end users and their benefit. That’s you.

A cultural shift

I’m not naive enough to think we can just tear down these rules but leave behind the dominant social construct. We make change by talking to people in their language, not by pointing out their biased conclusions with facts. So instead I want to put forth an idea that if diverse and inclusive teams are the literal gold standard, we encourage change through the primary capitalist agenda: money and personal values.

In today’s multi-cultural world, we need to be globally connected to the right resources. We need to be able to reach out in our network and consult with that top Internet of Things transportation expert in Switzerland for a project in Austin. And we need to support that expert for mentoring and being inclusive of the native americans and asian americans that xe is mentoring. So what if instead of trying to force people into this box of 4.9% asian/native american owned and jumping through these “small business” hoops specifically associated with geopolitical locations, we did something different? Let’s focus on being inclusive of these ethnic groups and giving them resources to do the job they want to be doing.

We can insist on best practices across the industry that recognizes the impact of inclusivity, not a state-by-city way of calculating diversity.

changes to inclusivity practices

Mentor Protegee programs

Early on in my career, I once had a structural engineering company subconsulted to me. They sent me their designs, I looked at it and went “ummm that can’t be right” and sent it to my structural guy to review. It wasn’t right. We offered them the changes, they agreed and revised it, and the package was submitted. Basically we were that group project where I knew the answer and redid the work of the others. That is the subconsulting model. I, as the prime (aka highest achieving kid in the group) concerned about a successful project for the client and end user, took away their agency and their full learning potential. It may have seemed like the best use of public funds at the time, but ultimately it was short-sighted as we left the privilege elephant in the corner. I mean, hopefully they learned a bit, but I got the sense they were just getting the project out the door.

A different way to do this is called a mentor protegee program to support development of staff at other companies and boost the reputation of the smaller firms. Coupled with subconsulting, it’s more like a tutor providing knowledge transfer of how to do the homework differently. We go from group work masquerading as equality, to specific measureable support. But more importantly, it builds relationships between people which ensures trust and mentorship in other non-technical areas as well as technical. That’s critical leadership to developing people as community-oriented engineers.

Politically it sort of feels like backwards progress - a better resourced group comes in as the savior - but in reality, this is basically just traditional mentoring. The leaders get more leadership experience too so it benefits both parties. It is something we do within companies and so makes sense to connect this way globally.

Non-profits and charity work

In the industry there are groups that do charity work, like Engineers Without Borders, or at my company we love to give financially to Water For People. Because engineers seal their designs, and because we are expected to perform anything we do to the most stringent standards for quality and safety purposes, it is more favorable for us to provide money or resources than actual engineering pro bono work. Lawyers expect each other to perform pro bono aid as a part of their professional culture but engineers do not. We can begin a cultural shift through this type of self elevation - creation of programs and incentives where we require engineering students & licensed engineers to give back to their communities where they work. That builds inclusivity by understanding.

Secondly, because these programs are all community-focused, there isn’t very many non-profits in our industry that provide social value insights to the industry. We need some grant structures that help to boost ourselves and our I&D efforts. This is a clear gap in our industry. We need an organization to drive filling the resource gaps and focusing on long-term change.

Sometimes be exclusive

Priya Parker, an expert in teams and meetings both social and professional, says in order to be inclusive you have to be exclusive.

“Over-inclusion is a symptom of deeper problems -- above all, a confusion about why you are gathering and a lack of commitment to your purpose.” Priya Parker

In our industry, this soundly resonates. Including everyone is a waste of their time, is not focusing on the strengths of the right people for the problem, and means you might have the more opinionated voices making the decisions instead of the right voices. Quality designs is relying on the unique strengths of each person, who is right for the job. If it were something that someone with any education or experience level could accomplish, then we’d probably already be on the path to automate it or program it with machine learning. Thus procurement rules should function more like guidelines instead of stop gates.

Sometimes you need local input that knows the communities but sometimes you need global input that knows many communities.

Measure creativity & Innovation

We can use tangible proxies for intangibles like creativity and innovation. Diversity might be the current twitter-able part of the story but we’re really interested in performance and impact from the diversity.

Obviously the team performs better when they're more creative, show up with their all, and work to everyone's unique strengths. Based on the tangible data such as the study by Catalyst that how that companies that build workplaces that support women are 34% more profitable to shareholders tells the story of what happens when you have inclusivity.

To measure diversity alone just tells you how many non-white men from middle class backgrounds are in the company. Who, by the way, also have unique things to bring to the table. The important part is being able to get the returns by MANY unique people bringing their ideas to the table. Then these ideas are community-focused and have compounding returns to the end user. Measure this through social impact valuation, modeling, and performance criteria.

FLEXIBLE HIRING REQS

For AEC companies, with a gender balance average around 20:80 for technical positions, it is hard to woo women. So I challenge hiring managers to understand their why. Ask the question 5 times.

Here’s an example: You’re looking for a candidate who has a masters degree and experience with infrastructure modeling. Why is this a problem? Because this is a gap in your resources. Why is that a problem? Because there are no other people that can train someone already. Why is that a problem? Because we look for internal training opportunities only. Why? Because it is more cost efficient. Why? Because we don’t assess time and experience into our calculation of training expenses. So you see, maybe it comes down to hiring someone with potential and desire to learn the modeling and work with them to get external training. You may even find this is the cheaper scenario if you calculate long-term ROIs over quarterly needs.

When it comes to hiring, experience and education are not the only indicators of potential. Attracting top talent means you need to be open to growth instead of looking for a perfect candidate. In this job economy, you’ll be waiting a long time to fill your backlog if that’s how you’re hiring. Instead recognize that there is no talent war if you’re being inclusive enough. Inclusion is your growth strategy. In the words of Carnival CEO Arnold Donald,

“If you wait for the perfect candidate, you’re never going to have diversity because the diverse people haven't had a chance to do it yet.”

Inclusivity is also recognizing that people who come up with different results than you would have, or their predecessor would have, does not make them wrong results.

leadership Imperative

Change in the decision making process is at the leadership level. There are no surprises with these stats. Companies with at least one women on the board outperform peer groups by 26% over last six years by having "higher return on equity, lower leverage and higher valuations". This is because decision making effectiveness is 95% correlated with financial performance.

Leaders need to be diverse and visible. They are who propagates the company culture that ensures increased psychological safety and increased variety in individuals. Put another way, inclusion and diversity. They create the structure for difficult conversations, they are empathetic, and they make space for people to perform better.

An example of this KPI is putting a process in place for allowing people to move into different departments without being constrained to something that fulfills only the leader’s motives. Leaders, not directors or managers on an org chart, are the key to inclusivity. Not everyone wants to be a leader but those who do are imperative to increased performance.

THe future

Now is the right time to talk about it. We’re seeing unprecedented changes all around us. This is one change that must happen because the longer we go about it, the harder it will be to change later. Let’s do it.

"Momentum at the national scale precludes making changes; too much is invested in the status quo by too many people." Martin Doyle

Working: We did a little fire drill trying to get some data off equipment on site. A night crew sub had a case of COVID-19 and it paused us for a bit. But as it is essential infrastructure, it is now back open and operating. Think our hand washing and social distancing helped as no one else got it!

Reading: Recursion by Blake Crouch. It is a mind trip. I keep thinking about what memory I would go back into if I (morally and ethically) would. How would that cascade changes to my career? To my personal life? My brain is all sorts of twisted up thinking about this… and I think.. I’d just decide not to redo anything. I like where I am.

Listening: To the drybar comedy stuff on youtube. Sometimes after work I’m a bit brain dead and just want to watch comedy while I cook or sit on the couch.

"Momentum at the national scale precludes making changes; too much is invested in the status quo by too many people." Martin Doyle

Doyle was referring to flood control and our unintuitive, complex, and sometimes mismanaged ways to deal with floods in the US. But the sentiment is the same when we talk about diversity & inclusivity. In the industry, we have a similar obscured system that needs its own black swan. There’s a federalist hodge-podge of different diversity efforts at different scales. Governments around the world recognize diverse company owners and staff diversity percentages. I think it's a cop out - an easily quantified metric that is a distraction from real change for our communities. To understand why diversity is a proxy, we have to understand what we're actually trying to achieve and need to be quantifying: inclusivity.

Before all this, I was sitting at a roundtable trying to understand what it means to be inclusive. We were iterating on the interconnections of our architectural/engineering/construction (AEC) industry. What motivates us to do the right things? Who decides what is right and who holds us accountable? I heard horror tales of people fired over disagreeing with leaders; but I also heard inspirational stories of managers supporting their people and families regardless of obstacles. My stance, as it usually is, was how to strive even more for excellence and progress by disrupting the status quo. I like to be curious and I like to dissent.

What we do here matters. In every little detail. We have an obligation to challenge each other because we are not just the link to world architecture but also to how our communities interact with each other, virtually or IRL.

Being bold is dancing

One of my work friends IMs me the other day, "I'm taking a dance class". Normally the conversations are about office politics, the tail-spinning stock market, or finding ways to write code to automate our work. So I'm justifiably confused. He responds, "I don't want to eff up in front of all my friends and family during our first dance." Ahh. Engineers are a risk-adverse bunch. That's why you trust us to build your bridges. For some getting out of our comfort zone is risky but for others failing is the greater risk. To do what’s right for our communities, we’re going to have to get better at both. Inclusivity & diversity isn’t easy.

This is the first of a series of posts that I will do in parallel to our thinktank. I am going to challenge our comfort zone, disagree, mess up, listen and above all, take risks. Follow along on my instagram for short snippets and sign up for emails here to get notified when I post new things. This movement takes all hands on deck, so please share with your friends and be a part of the conversation.

Defining diversity

Diversity for me is what each individual person brings to work every day. It includes (*takes a breath*): race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, nationality, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, socioeconomic background, age, education, personality, thinking patterns, neurodiversity, communication styles, conflict resolution styles, empathetic ability, motivation, professional experience, past work environments, political views, morals, worldly beliefs, past trauma, military experience, criminal background, personal style, skills, marital status, parental status, geographical location, accents, citizenship, and on and on… You get the pic. It’s more than your linkedin profile.

Inclusivity can mean being diverse, but that isn’t the full story. A meta-analysis conducted on 108 studies and more than 10k teams reported that the enhanced creativity produced by teams with higher diversity is “interrupted by deep-rooted social conflict and decision-making dilemmas that are rarely found in homogenous groups”. Meaning, diverse groups think better but only if they feel comfortable to do so and can converge on an answer together. Diversity and inclusivity are not the same thing.

Defining inclusivity

We know from hearing that buzzword a million times that inclusive teams perform better. This isn't because everyone is necessarily comfortable. It's because people are safe to disagree without fear or shame. Disagreement adds perspective. In other words, inclusivity is the beneficial outcome of pyschological and emotional safety. The buzzword comes with a phrase, "diversity is being invited to the dance, inclusivity is being allowed to dance".

Again with the dancing metaphors.

Inclusivity is the same strategy. It's complicated. It can be overwhelming. Not everyone comes forward with "hi I'm Andi; I go by she/her pronouns". Not even I feel comfortable doing that in front of all my clients. And I know if I feel like I'm going to be judged as "not professional" then it's certainly happening to other people. That’s the work we need to do for the betterment of our industry, our designs, and our communities.

Like dancing, getting better takes practice. Be kind to yourself. Leave your ego behind and let's see what we can accomplish together. You might find that there's no reason not to enjoy it.

Benefits of Inclusivity

For AEC, we trend right along with the changing needs of our 21st century demographics. In the past our predecessors enjoyed customization and then mass production. We now demand a combination of the two: personalization. We have 3D printed retaining walls (structural walls to protect against floods) and can send in our spit to be DNA tested by mail. Personally, I’m waiting for a 3D printed respirator that actually fits a womxn’s face comfortably.

Our landscapes are shifting: end users are becoming more diverse each year with the US projected to become a majority-minority nation in 2043. It’s been an interesting world for a while now. To be alive in this century means inclusivity of every diverse person. In the AEC that starts with our leaders, our employees, our clients, our suppliers, our customers.

Better designs For everyone

What we build has both positive and negative consequences for different groups of people. Our friends and families and neighbors. This is why it’s imperative that we understand the costs to the communities where we are building. They might intangibly be paying through transportation access, noise pollution, excessive flooding, or other social factors. They pay directly (bonds and taxes) and indirectly. Part of our job should be focused on understanding our customer base better.

There is no accomplishing inclusivity - there’s just always trying to get better. Inclusivity looks different for different projects and communities. Think about how there is generally a lack of resiliency projects for neighborhoods that are historically underserved. It’s not just the projects we do, but the projects we don’t do. We need to listen and always be striving for improvement.

Educating our people & our final customers alike

Education of people is key to being inclusive: education of technical professionals so that good designs can be replicated elsewhere; and education of the public so they can be empowered to disagree with things happening in our industry. The first is easy - we can characterize this metric through conferences and online interactions between professionals. Licensing requirements do a good job requiring knowledge transfer. Let’s focus on the second one.

IMO, community engagement can be biased (i.e. townhalls or focus groups) and is subject to the squeakiest wheel (a multi-faceted type of privilege). I’ve been reading up on modeling tools for social value measurements and how we can actually quantify a boost or draw to a region’s standard of living based on the types and places we put projects. For example, you can ask the program if the new highway project adds accessibility or if it disrupts life for too long and will be little use to the immediate area. If the social value is put into the return on investment (SROI) calculation, it can completely change the nature of the project.

Another example is in my travel post to Medellin, I took a look at designing for the most marginalized communities through communication, education and involvement with las comunas. Plus, fun travel pics so check it out!

Designing for the future

Inclusivity means that we design for the end user, however that might look right now and however it looks 50 years out. It’s not an easy task. We use past experience to drive our design considerations.

Put on your time travel glasses for this. Our models should be calibrated for future conditions, future people, and future populations (as best we know it in present day) and purposefully avoid getting stuck in present day politics. It is not just what meets the needs of development today, but how will this impact future generations if we are doing things like… building homes in floodplains. These are disagreements that should be considered and is beginning to be required by governments like the UK.

Responsibly growing & Surviving as an industry

Which brings me to my next point, responsible corporate citizens. Being diverse is the right thing to do. A lot of companies and governments are moving towards social governance metrics. This is our traditional triple bottom line.

Anymore, companies need diversity to have a competitive edge. But honestly, the companies that don’t already know this aren’t the ones I am focused on. They won’t last through this generation if they can’t meet future market demands. Our futures expect not just the bottom line but the triple bottom line. The triple bottom line is inclusivity.

decision-making that reflects the community

For the future, we need to focus on the things we can’t automate because they require too much of the human element. One of these things is advanced decision-making in the engineering context. From the highway impact example, the SROI model may seem like a one-size-fits all but the success is wholly dependent on having a diverse group of people who run the program. In the industry we like to say, junk in means junk out. This means that your model is only as good as your data and, in this case, the person analyzing the data. In my example, the model might say that it will raise the standard of living but that’s only true if people have cars or economically benefit from those that do. That’s the sort of decision my clients make for our end users. They are decision-makers with a knowledge of the intricacies of their community. If they use the model early enough, and avoid their own political and social biases, communities can then discuss changing the project from a highways project to…maybe a metroline project.

According to the research, teams outperform individual decision makers 66% of the time, and decision making improves as team diversity increases (15% better for gender diverse teams and 21% better for age and geographic location diverse teams on business decisions).

“That our decisions get sidetracked by biases is now well established. While it is hard to change how our brains are wired, it’s possible to change the context of decisions by architecting the composition of decision-making teams for more diverse perspectives.” Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School Professor

We need teamwork from diverse teams that better reflects local and global communities appropriately. Those teams can better integrate the needs and sensibilities of the customer base. Understanding and listening to diverse people isn’t enough. Diverse people need to be the leaders driving the growth strategy.

More Profitability for most

Just because you’re diverse doesn’t mean you’re inclusive.

There's lots of numbers floating around about how gender and ethnically diverse teams outperform monoculture teams. A McKinsey report from 366 companies showed an increased performance by 35%. The reason we still keep saying these stats is because they're just so easy to measure. You take financial returns and you compare to gender and race percentages. Filter it out and wa-lah. Knowing that diversity is the correlation but not the real causation, if you could easily measure teams rich in inclusivity the number would exceed 35%.

What if it is more likely 50%? or 75%? With those stats, companies can’t afford not to be working towards inclusivity. And with more profit for companies, is more profit for stakeholders and shareholders. And most importantly, cheaper AEC projects for our clients and communities when we partner together in inclusivity.

Innovation & Creativity

What we’re really talking about when we talk about profitability is innovation. This is the root of why inclusive teams outperform non-diverse teams financially. It’s all in the quality of the product they are producing and the decisions they are making. By increasing the individuality of project teams, you'll see more creativity. But by increasing the interconnections of the team, you’ll see higher quality.

Inclusivity is being able to freely think, freely fail, and freely dissent. The point isn't to have token minority diversity or to calculate percentages of diversity. It's to get real benefit from inclusivity by putting in the efforts. I’ll talk more about what these efforts can look like in future posts.

My personal opinion is that our industry is failing our communities if they don’t do better with inclusion & diversity. It’s not just about us and having an enjoyable workplace. It’s about our legacy for our friends and family. So I'm challenging myself and my teams to figure out how we do this better. To feel uncomfortable. To fail. And then to get better. Step by step. One step forward, two steps back until suddenly… we’re dancing.

Reading: The Source - How rivers made America and America remade its rivers by Martin Doyle. It was a gift and I love it. I’m trying to read it slowly and make sense of all of it from things I studied in school and some of the entities I interact with in my job.

Working: From home. Like all of you. Last couple weeks I’ve had some conversations with my client about scope creep. As we were trying to be agile to shifting project needs, we didn’t do a good job limiting creep and papering it all up. Now my client will have to explain to his higher ups the extended engineering cost after the fact. It will benefit the client in a more cost-effective construction but… people don’t like surprises even when you’re doing the best thing for the circumstances. Learning is unfun sometimes! Luckily, everyone in the management teams trusts each other and we had some very productive conversations.

Listening: Just finished Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. It was a well written book about women that was not superficial (true to SR’s writings) but honestly I thought the characters were hateable.

I've plucked a box out of the "trash" pile and am standing there on the other side of his desk holding a set of 35mm slides. The kind you put in a carousel and click along the slide projector. On it are little representations of groundwater wells and ASR rules of thumb.

What holds my curiosity is not that these slides are useful - they're decades from that. Not only are they out of date, but I don't even have a light projector. I'll never be able to pull them out at a party and wow my guests by clicking through the theory of storing water underground for future drought retrieval. But they are precious reminders of the past. Of the technology we had and how it's evolved.

Prior to the 1900s, there wasn't a way to "tell a thousand words" as simply as we do today. With the 1930s came along reversal slides and kodachrome for color images. The movie industry was born out of this technology. For engineering professionals in the 1950s, a person's whole job was to do drawings for slides. Each slide collection took painstaking hours to create. And because of it, the slides were never the most up-to-date information or specific to a project. They contained relevant information that could be recycled for the next project.

Yet surprisingly, even with improved technology, we still make this mistake. We reuse slides for the simplicity of not having to recreate for a whole different presentation. In fact, I've seen these exact images before of ASR wells and calculating the productivity of the well. At some point in the very early 90s, he digitally crafted these on a computer, sent them off to be made into physical slides, and then converted them back when digital powerpoint came along.

As our technology changes, so too should our understanding of how we implement this technology. Now we have the added bonus of being able to take from cognitive science theory, better understanding how people process information, to improve how we share science.

When we give technical information to any audience, there's a few key mistakes that we're likely all making.

Workflow Plan

The first key mistake is a failure to workflow plan. Many times when we're asked to present, we open up powerpoint and stare at the blank template. Or, like in the case with the old 35mm slides, we see which ones can be reused from an old presentation.

According to Melissa Marshall, a technical presenter expert, a blank presentation will make you all the more likely to develop your talk in the same linear progression in which you developed your theory. Instead, focus on how to explain the main point, regardless of the track you took to figure out that main point. Start with your why—what you need them to hear and what they came to find out. Then, plan out how to get that done. Once you know why you’re meeting, you’ll have a much easier time filtering out what does not need to be said.

Focus on Audience-Centered Teaching

In today’s world, being a talent engineer isn’t the only competency required. We have to be able to communicate with many audiences and that means telling others what we are experts in so we can coordinate with what they are experts in. Many times I've seen engineers get up in front of an audience and commandeer the time to bolster their ego or appeal to their insecurities. No matter what I say to get them back on track, they are singly focused on their self-serving mission. They'll go down a rabbit hole talking about what personally excites them or proving that their job is difficult. Worse, they'll be using big words to try to impress the audience instead of the main purpose of the presentation.

Expertise does not make good teachers. -John Medina

Instead, if you're really there for the why and you are respectful to their time, you'll put your own emotional needs aside for the presentation. An audience-centered approach is a technical term for telling your audience the information that they need to hear, in the way they need to hear it. The best teachers are ones that make you feel like you could teach someone else. They focus on how you are grasping the concept and know when to speed through something or go back and re-explain in a different way. The main idea is not to spend time on what's important to you or what you think they need to know but instead to spend time on what's actually going to help them. Do your best in setting up the flow in your pre-planning, but be flexible to changing as you evaluate the room during the presentation.

Cultural Mapping

This is something you also should do in the planning phase. It's understanding your audience, what they already know, what their personality is, and how they prefer to be presented information. One example is that an east Asian - focused audience may look first at context (the background, the environment) before focusing on what you’re discussing (the foreground, the detail). You may want to first talk about context, before diving into the big and little picture. It's a good idea to map how different your audience is from yourself before you start to put slides together. Use the Country mapping tool from Erin Meyer's book to help.

Lose the words

For shorter presentations, where you may want to rehearse a script beforehand, you can give the presentation more like a TED Talk. One option is to use the assertion evidence method.  Each slide has a full sentence at the top in case anyone gets lost in the presentation. For me, this certainly adds to the texture of the conversation. Most of my presentations look more like all-day workshops than 3 - 20 minute learnings so this isn’t always applicable to every slide.

Our brains, by function, do not multi-task well when doing deliberate tasks. The prefrontal cortex splits into paying attention to the two different functions, which causes us to make 3 times as many mistakes. That is to say, if you're giving multiple pieces of information to the same brain region, your audience focus is reduced to all of the pieces because your attentional ability is something your brain must do sequentially. It literally cannot do both in parallel. Instead, the trick is to use visual media to say what your words cannot. Interestingly, content is stored in a different area of your brain than context (and even moving pictures versus static pictures are stored in different places). Try to appeal to different parts of the brain during your presentation and it will be easier for your audience to understand fully.

The science behind this is known as cognitive overload. Your brain processing center is the same area of the brain used for visual words as for auditory words. This means that too many words will start to bog down that brain center. It doesn’t matter if the words are written or spoken. Another point is that the brain only remembers 10% of words - either heard or read. Visuals will be processed into memory much easier.

So the takeaway? Avoid using bullet points or many words on your slides. As a general rule, if you're not using the "notes" section to store your talking points, that's probably a good indicator that your slide has too many words.

Give Intelligence, Not Data

This takes practice. It's the critical analysis piece of understanding all the information and then how to articulate it in the message which you want your audience to walk away with. What's relevant to them is generally not everything that is relevant for you. This is the challenging art of shortening complex information. Good presenters, and authors, will be fluent in this skill.

For me, this is analogies. It's removing redundancies or restructuring so that your speech is focused on the key takeaways for your audience. When I'm writing a long blog post, I ruthlessly move paragraphs around until it's in a perfect order. This helpful guide likens it to moving into a new house. Rearrange the big furniture, then make the little stuff fit into the larger context.

Ask a Friend to Listen to the Presentation

The focus is not on dumbing down what I am saying but rather making it more accessible to everyone. I often find that my audience is technical, just not in the same discipline that I am technical. Nothing is worse than an engineer talking really slow and explaining things like "vector" or "pressure head". They may not be common words, but they're words everyone knows or words they will pick up with context. This is where reading the room becomes very important.

You can plan around this pitfall by having more conversations with a more diverse set of listeners. Pull in other people from your classes or your company. Chances are, if you have a really good presentation that's told in a relatable way with enthusiasm, it will be interesting to them.

Death by Powerpoint

The one advantage those 1950s slides had that our modern powerpoints don't is that engineers were unlikely to have too many slides. The hitch is that making slides with less information on them, means it takes more time. More planning time, more thinking through it, more doctoring up the slides to remove information that might seem necessary but not for the point you are making.

They used to say to plan on one slide per minute. I have often found that this means presenters spend more than one minute per slide and then rush the end. Time management is a critical skill for consultants who are paid by the hour so they need to optimize each hour. You can’t overplan but you also shouldn’t underplan. And remember, done is better than perfect. One thing is for sure: execution comes down to how well you set yourself up for success. Remember to use your visuals to supplement your other senses, your body language, and your words. Good luck!

Listening: Naturally Tan by Tan France. I just finished the audiobook and it’s so so so good. I’ve enjoyed it so much that when I fainted the other day (don’t ask…) I had a short dream about meeting him at a crosswalk. If only.

Working: Trying to come up with KPIs (key performance indicators) for some of our priorities for the larger solutions & technology group at my company. We’ll cover these at a global meeting next month. Have I mentioned how much I love business travel?

Reading: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. It’s so raw and emotional. Like I say on my goodreads review, it’s a very intimate reading about her finding a sperm donor and seeing open brain surgery. It’s the story of her own personal route through therapy and the intense and often sad stories of her patients with her as their therapist. It touches on the science without diving into it and normalizes therapy and learning how to work through different issues. I couldn’t put it down.

I also read Brain Rules by John Medina which is very well written and has a lot of information that I referenced here. He’s uses the theory of describing the core concept in 10 minute segments and starting each concept with an emotional association for better audience brain processing.

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This year when temperatures rose above 40C, I skedaddled to the land of Eternal Spring. Once the notorious most dangerous city in the world, sadly known for its past with narcos and violence, the city of Medellin has been transformed to a tourist must-see destination. Its transformation from those dark days to a global hub of innovation is many thanks to the public and social programs, including massive engineering projects, which make the city safe, vibrant, and enrapturing.

From industrial city to knowledge city

Even through the darkest days of Pablo Escobar in 1991 (an annual homicide rate that peaked the equivalent of 10 deaths a day in Austin) the city continued construction of the metroline which opened in 1995. This immaculate public transportation system links rich and poor neighborhoods with social and physical connectivity. When I think of US cities, this is something we don't do, whether from lack of public or financial support in most urban areas. However in Medellin, this project foreshadows the decades of architectural reverence and political backing that in the 2000s will play a part in the city's transformation.

Unlike engineering in the US, the wealthier citizens live in the flat valleys and the poorer citizens live up in the earthquake-prone hills on the outskirts of the city. Las colinas. Los cerros. Las comunas. These were settled by people who were displaced by the urban centers or fled violence in the rural areas. These settlements were once considered illegal by the government; poverty was exacerbated by the multiplicity of drug actors like gangs, a military group, guerrillas, and drug lords.In the vertical streets of the comunas ten years ago were fronteras invisibles. These are the invisible borders which split up the informal territories in the hills. This month, I walked across some of these invisible borders through beautiful park land. Our guide was giving us a tour of the greenbelt when a few young boys walked by. "Chicos! Bien o que?!" and they respond, "bien!". Everyone is friendly here. If you're not friendly, you will be called out.

Today, these areas have been fully integrated in Medellin with on-going social urbanism projects including utilities and transportation programs. In particular, the transportation programs (metrocables and electric escalators which reduced commute times into the city from 2 hours to just a few minutes) were part of the reason the city was selected in 2012 to be the world's City of the Year. In the award, Medellin isn't just recognized for the social mobility of these programs but also because these advancements in public transportation reduce burden on the city pollution, spur private investments and promote social equity.

In this case study, I want to look at four different types of engineering projects: public transportation, public utilities, cultural programming, and democratic architecture.

Obviously, there were many other programs like tenure land grants and Medellín la más educada, but the physical projects remain as reminders of change. This isn't saying that Medellin is a glimmering, Shangri-la. It's not. When people say Medellin is "safe", what they mean is that they were hyper vigilant, not daring to walk a couple blocks alone at night and always with a thought to pickpockets. But my city isn't perfect either. Transformation doesn't mean perfection, it just means that Medellin as an innovative, engineering city has a story to tell. In this global world, we need that story.

[Medellin is] representative of the global challenge facing many cities, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The fact that the situation in Medellín was exacerbated by the drug-fuelled battles fought on the rooftops of its comunas only makes its transformation all the more exceptional. citation

As I write this, I struggle because I know that this isn't personal for me. The Paisas I met all knew of a tragic personal story. Those are the stories that drove transformation en los años 80s y 90s and, quite honestly, aren't mine to tell. So I won't be talking about one of the most important threads: the people. And I won't be talking about tragedy - those are conversations that belong to those communities. I do want to paint a canvas of the possibilities of engineering, as it plays with policy and the two base layers of Maslow's pyramid. My words are based in my interpretation that an elevation from poverty to economic capital is a measurable way to define progress and a building block for safety, basic needs, and access to economic mobility. I am assuming that a universal goal, even for those with different corporate or political interests, is to protect those human rights. Though I know... that's not always the reality. 

Public Transportation

One of my favorite afternoons was spent with a tour through Comuna 13. It was a party.Our first, and most famous project, are the electric escalators. This neighborhood was specifically chosen due to its isolated location, stronghold for violence, and controversial peace raid. The escalators reduced transit times into the city from 4 hours to a number of minutes ascending 1,300 feet for 12,000 residents. This allows people to more efficiently get to jobs and resources in the city. The only place in the world where escalators engineer a bit more social equity.

My latest yt video has no engineering in it at all - just art, dance, and culture! Que chévere!

I've already mentioned the metro system which uses gondolas in the world's first fully integrated urban CPT system. Just like you'd jump on a gondola with your skis, you can embark at different metro stops to head up into the hills. A big tourist attraction is the Parque Arvi with its many hikes and farmer's market up in the mountain.

On the could-be-better side of things, ridesharing is alegal which only sort of detracts drivers from using it. It's said to be safer than taxis and easier to use if your spanish is rusty. Drivers are not always reliable (though I know a Paisa who'd argue with me on this point). It's also a bit awkward due to its alegality and the fact that Colombia has threatened to suspend the driver's license for 25 years to anyone caught being a driver. People aren't scared of this, they just ask that you sit up front and pretend like you know them.

Which only proves that it's useful, but not necessary, to have government-backed policies in transportation. The important part is that communities are part of the decision. Communities will do what's right and makes sense for them, regardless of the law.

Public Utilities

The next project is called "integrated slum upgrading" and started in the 1950s to level up informal settlements. It included provisions for household connections into the public utilities, quite a feat given the risky terrain and sociopolitical factors. In Medellin, the utilities are run by a public-private partnership (P3) conglomerate E.P.M. which is composed of 12 companies that provide water, sewer, gas, phone, and electric.

What's most intriguing to me is that because EPM's domestic footprint is capped by law, they've begun to reach out internationally and provide utilities to Chile, Mexico, and other countries. And what does the 9th largest company in Colombia do with all those profits? They turn around and feed 30% (about $500 million) right back into cultural planning like building plazas and parks in Medellin.

Public utilities are non-negotiable in Medellin. Each neighborhood is separated into Estratos numbered 1-6 where 6 is the highest socioeconomic scale. The higher the number, the higher the cost of services. In 2015, roughly 300,000 people live in the lowest designated strata, and 80% of Medellin's population in the lowest third. Social equity still has a long way to go.

Internationally, EPM is recognized for its aggressive policies for service coverage in poorer communities and it's commitment to the people: growth, social accountability, and improving the quality of life. Architecturally they have an intelligent building which I find fascinating that the public utility is participating in this extent of thought leadership.

Cultural Programming

In Medellin, urban interventions coupling cultural programming with engineered spaces has played a critical part in the transformation of the city. As you walk around the city, or any major city in Latin America, there are community spaces. As the sun goes down, you can see 20-somethings hanging with their dogs in the public parks cracking open a cerveza. Benches are filled with kids trading spit. The places are zoned and built differently than our grid-locked cities in the US. It's a parallel phenomenon: the level of planning we do and don't do builds the culture; culture builds the level of planning.

Planning is just one aspect of it. In some of the larger green parks, there are free yoga morning classes put on by INDER, a government-funded collaboration for sports and recreation. This is just one example of cultural programming.Our next set of big projects are called Unidades de Vida Articulada or UVA. Not to be confused with las uvas. This is a joint project that is funded by the mayor's office and EPM, often on EPM land, designed by EDU, and executed by INDER. Citizens are actively engaged in the building of sports, recreation and cultural venues which play with the five senses and are recycled from plots that were previously inaccessible or poorly used. The ideas and actions are developed by these players and the desires of the communities, but engineering and funding of $86M USD is what puts this transformation into play.

Though EPM funds some of the cultural programming, it's foundation is erected through community culture which drives policies. Garages are transformed into small tiendas. Walking the neighborhood is common. In this way, people police each other using the etiquette of their culture. In the US we halt that ability because we value heavy-handed regulation (and litigation) to smooth out our city functions and differing cultural norms.

Each social policy is put into measurable action by the engineering projects. A project, from a wastewater line buried underneath the city or a massive highway project displacing homeowners, has consequences. As engineers, its easy to think that what we are doing is unbiased. That politicians or clients have asked us to design x, y, z and we're doing it. It's important to remember that each decision effects the people it serves differently.

Democratic Architecture

Grand architectural landscapes are common throughout Medellin. It's hard to get on a metro in Medellin without looking out and wondering, "What's that building?". They are interactive social nodes, such as massive libraries or reinvented park spaces, and house the cultural and educational programming geared towards low income households.

For once, architecture-as-spectacle is not being used as a tool to market the culture industry, but to make poverty visible citation

It's so ingrained in the city's fiber that mayoral candidates run on platforms of visionary architectural planning. They know that it's more than just physical architecture, it's social architecture. Because of this, many of them are located in the hills and more difficult to visit. They're not for the tourists. It's this fierce culture of architectural elevation that provides civic pride and the physical reminders of the power of social urbanism.

Architecture alone obviously doesn’t account for the drop in homicides, but the two aren’t unrelated, either. Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself. citation

If you're an architecture buff, there's many more examples of this all over the city. 10 schools, 5 grand library parks, an interactive parque, botanical gardens and more. You'll just have to visit yourself to see it.

So what do we learn from all this? Transformation is multi-faceted. It's just as much social and political as it is structural.

Cities are beginning to understand this. They don't just create projects without public input anymore. Engineering isn't done in a cubical. What the engineer thinks makes most sense in terms of design (cost, constructability, land availability, technical solutions) may have a blind spot to unintended social or political consequences. But that just makes it all the more interesting as problem-solvers. In today's world, our problems are just a bit more complex so we need to be a bit more agile to think of out-of-the-box solutions. We have to be intentional about pausing and recognizing others' perspectives even if it makes our jobs a bit more cumbersome with those extra review cycles.

Medellín has come a long way from its past, sending a powerful signal that inclusive and collaborative governance can overturn even the most difficult circumstances. citation

Reading: I just finished Becoming by Michelle Obama and am still working through Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. I also read Melinda Gate's Moment of Lift which is what really spurred my research about structural inclusivity of marginalized people.

Working: I'm doing a few non-project tasks for my new role (promotion?) as executive advisor to the VP for global solutions & technology. The part of our org that connects the right specialized technologists to our projects and helps with technologist career development!

Listening: Rosalía - she killed at ACL this year. I am in loooooove.

Currently, I'm working on a small, low-hazard dam project that requires extensive data collection for geomorphic and submarine components known as bathymetric surveying. Because we're working on a dam, the trick is to survey when flows are low so that we can safely deploy a boat onto the river. At this point, we've created our survey specification about 6 times due to changing priorities, funding, and weather constraints. The usual. Each time we alter the document, we do internal quality checks through our intensive QAQC process. My coworkers are incredibly proud of producing this high caliber work.

An email just came through from my lead geotech on the latest version (Version #6). This time we've repackaged it so the client can implement with a LTC (long term contract) they already have executed. He's requested additional time to octuple check it, in detail, to make sure nothing has been lost in translation. A couple of hours at his billing rate is around $300 which is small change compared to the engineering fee. It's not even a hard decision for me as project manager: it's industry standard, it ensures reliable quality, and I need my geotech to feel comfortable sealing the drawing. I tell him to go ahead and get it to the client shortly.

But I often wonder if we're too focused on quality.

Because this is rework, we've already done this check at least 7 times before including sending to a QA reviewer the first time around. The dam itself is a low-head, low-hazard dam which is a classification to describe its triviality if it were to fail. And this isn't even for design of the dam, but surveying. Civil engineering has remarkable uncertainties in everything because of outside forces and unconstrainable variables. To sooth our anxiety with this uncertainty, we develop an auto-pilot response to over-analyze and ruminate on the problem, a tenant of perfectionism. It's become an industry-revered analytical response to an emotional problem.

Quality has a beloved place within the industry. We're agents of public and environmental safety and we wear that mantle seriously. We often forget that good does not have to be perfect. I like to characterize it by thinking of B+ work as having checked for design flaws, ensuring conformance with literature for current standards and processes, and satisfaction that the product meets the standard of care. It's not perfect but it's good enough.

Within our time constrained days, each time you recheck those CAD drawings you sacrifice a bit more productivity for a bit more performance. The balance is finding the threshold that has the most impact.

Matt Plumber and Jo Wilson argue that by focusing on productivity (quantity) you'll automatically be producing at the level with the most impact (HBR H04B8J 2018). I think this works well for engineers, scientists, and planners who already default to quality. It will ensure effectiveness of time investment to lean into the characteristic that is less natural for us.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good. ~Voltaire

Why a Goldilocks is better than a Hermione

For women in the work force, and especially white upper-middle class millennial women, we are often bringing with us the learned social habit of perfectionism, propagated by the accolades and validation we received for A+s from teachers and parents. Up until our first job in the "real world", we reinforce competence by letter-based grading standards. It's been well studied that girls in particular polish assignments to perfection, outperforming boys by 6.3% in all subjects.

Perfectionism is endemic to how girls are socialized. A study in the UK found that one-quarter of 7-10 year old girls felt they needed to be perfect. In academia this means that one-third of girls feel like they aren't smart, despite 4.0 GPAs. We begin to see the dark side of perfectionism where girls learn the behavioral value of perfectionism in school, beauty, and social circles, but it is inextricable from self-efficacy. It's no wonder that women have higher rates of anxiety and depression in the workplace (25% women, 15% men). Mental health issues are more ubiquitous with the younger generations who deal with more social pressure for perfectness (millennials) and lower risk tolerance (gen z).

Through my adolescence, Hermione Granger was a fan-favorite aspiration for grit, determination, and intelligence. She resonates with many future engineers and scientists. But while she may have time to produce 10 scrolls when Professor Binns only asked for 1, in the real world we have too many things pressing for our attention to mis-manage our time like that. We have work priorities, home priorities, and yes even relaxing and recharging priorities. We don't have time to ruminate on the last 10% of effort for minimal return. Yet in our current education system, we're rewarding perfectionism. The dark side emerges when this leads to elevated levels of stress and anxiety, the exact formula that makes it difficult for perfectionists to function.

A hidden double standard

At the leadership level a full half of women experience self-doubt, compared with a third of men, leading to the often-regarded feeling of imposter phenomenon. Some women feel like they aren't good enough until they're the top A+ performers. Women need to be 100% sure they meet all the qualifications to apply for a job compared with men who apply after meeting 50%, and then ask for 30% less than men. They're also expected to do more emotional labor and office housework, do 2.6 times more unpaid work and speak up less than men or else risk being disliked. Seriously. There was a study that showed that women who asked the same amount of questions as their male colleagues were perceived that they had less competence (Confidence Code). As NYT reporter says, "For [boys], school serves as a test track, where they build their belief in their abilities and grow increasingly at ease relying on them. Our daughters, on the other hand, may miss the chance to gain confidence in their abilities if they always count on intellectual elbow grease alone."

According to a 2009 US survey, all this high-achieving and functionality means that women are more likely to feel inadequate at home and the workplace, failing to meet their own standards and those imposed by others. In the work world, this translates to some women actively fighting self-criticism and socially prescribed criticism, a magnetic path towards perfectionism.Lately, perfectionism has gotten a bad rep in the workplace. Perfectionism is founded in a myopic failure to delegate because "I have to do this myself to get it done right" and a squashing of innovation and creativity when one views anything other than the "perfect" end goal as a failure. Engineers and scientists are disposed to this sort of cognitive behavior because we're always into the details, trying to perfect our designs. Meticulousness is confused with quality control. For women, this feeling may be accelerated due to our social fabric. The industry's insistence on quality, even when it's arbitrary to our end goal and has little impact, is adding an additional stressor borne by women.

D for Done

In reality, perfection is unattainable in our designs. The processes and standards we use may be out of date before the end of the product's design life. There's unknown or unexpected conditions that we can't always account for no matter how much we over-engineer. Reports we write up are often shelved and unread which can be demoralizing if its perfect quality is linked to how valuable we find ourselves. Yet as an industry we don't just see quality as an asset in our toolbox, but as the ultimate goal. The zenith of achievement and good work, regardless of the sacrifice to get to an unnecessary level of almost-perfection. We need to let go of perfect Hermione and instead get what's juuuust right if we're going to grow women in the industry.

Done is better than perfect. ~Cheryl Sandberg

My dad has a Bill-ism that he repeated to us all throughout college, "D for Done". I'd roll my eyes and continue to study. I thought if I'd just study hard enough I could squeeze out that 98% on the mechy mat final to get an A in the class. Spoiler alert: this Hermione could have done better things with her time.

In the case of the geotechs, the chance of them catching minor discrepancies in survey data locations will be caught in the RFI process. Or will be caught in the next round when we inevitably redo this assignment for Revision #7.  In my experience, the things I have designed to perfection have been removed from the construction bid at the next go-round (sigh, I'm looking at you alkalinity feed system) or contractors made a change during construction so that it is more constructable or cost efficient.

Rewriting our societal and personal expectations around impact

In the mantra of high-quality and perfectionism, we lose productivity. In today's fast-paced digital world, it's been said that "time management is dead" because no one has time for everything, especially those tasks that are less impactful (HBR Reprint H009XU). The pressure to be perfect may be felt more by women, but it's also propagated by the mantra of our industry.

Quality is important and cannot be disregarded. But it needs to be intentional. By thinking in terms of impact, we can manage our projects for risk and uncertainty instead of pushing for a gender-biased performance characteristic. The more we are okay with good enough designs, the more willing analytical thinkers will be to let people with different ideas give theirs a go. The more voices we have at the table. And with that nuance we will intrinsically have more innovative ideas and solutions.

So how do we build the industry? We build confident men and women who know how to invest their time in impact, not quality.

How to be less than perfect:

• Spend less time on emails that are internal. If needed follow-up with a phone call to reiterate or clarify something.

• Don't document to perfection. A B+ meeting minute will be just as informative if you need to refer back to it for something.

• Know that not every idea you have will be golden. Put a few ideas down first, then pick the best to move forward. Like they say in the tech world, "fail fast".

• Focus on your time investment. What is the reward or result? Is it something that will be caught in the second go round? What will be the overall revenue, sales, or cash brought in?

• Be kind with yourself. Find ways to let things with less impact slip.

• Don't compare yourself to others.

• Recognize that women ruminate more than men (making us better multitaskers but more prone to perfectionist-driven mental health issues). When you find yourself overthinking, ask yourself, "would a man do this?".

• Delegate. Allow others to surprise you with how they've completed something.

• Set project goals at the beginning and revisit them often. Was the goal to finish within 40 hours? Make sure that productivity part of the goal is judged just as much as the quality part of the goal. Revisiting the original goal will help you from altering the goal on the fly as a reaction to uncertainty.

How to have conversations with others:

• Provide feedback based on impact, not quality or productivity alone.

• Build confidence in the girls in your life. Encourage them to strive for impact.

• Think about the WHY in what you're doing as Simon would say. Is the Why being met by the amount of work put in? Could you get away with something less?

• Decouple worth from ability and perfectionism. Learn to be satisfied with good enough because it may never be perfect.

• When talking to a perfectionist, disconnect your feedback about the quality of work from their overall worth. Reinforce their value based on their personality such as compassion, kindness, openness, collaboration. These conversations may be difficult but we need to be allies in breaking down our social norms.

• Celebrate wins. This tells you and others that you are good enough even without perfectness.

• Don’t require an "attention to details" in the job listing. It's an "attention to details when the job warrants it and the impact of that time investment is great". Or maybe just leave it off the listing and instead create one with the help of specialists that can describe gender-neutral job listings (yes this is a thing).

Do you have any other tips? What are they?

Reading: The Confidence Code. I found the title while doing this research. It was one of the vanguards discussing the confidence gap between men and women. It's written by journalists so it's an easy book to follow and is data-checked.

Working: I did my own vision quest last week with two of my mentors in Dallas. I sat down by thinking about what sort of projects give me validation (highly visible, community oriented, for community safety) and the sorts of things that get me excited for work (traveling for business, integrated with large teams of highly specialized people). My mentor C pushed me to consider what I want 5-10 years out which was an interesting conversation because I've always thought that planning was futile knowing how much my career changes! My favorite quote, "don't be a turd, be undeterred."

Listening: Michael Pollan's new book about mushrooms. It's thoroughly researched just like all his books. He even find guides and therapists to join as he trips. My favorite line was about how he was "slipping the acute bonds of plausibility". So many gems in the book. It then takes a scientific look on the research and psychedelics, exploring theories about how this chemical component divorces the brain from the ego. I'm excited to see where science takes this in the coming years.