Engineering Isn't Broken-The Flow of Work Is

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Engineering Influence podcast.
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My name is Shreya Jain and I will be your host for today.
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Engineering firms are full of talented people doing important work,
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yet so many teams struggle with burnout, rework, slow decisions,
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computing priorities, and communication breakdowns.
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This conversation will explore a different way to understand those challenges.
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Rather than assuming the problem lies with the people, we're going to examine
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the flows and the workflow that are created through the organization.
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We'll discuss organizational conditions that create friction or flow,
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and how leaders can identify systemic barriers that make great people's jobs
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harder than they need to be.
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I'm very pleased today to be joined by Jessica North, the CEO and co-founder
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of Evernorth Solutions, to walk us through fixing these broken workflows and
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addressing the issues facing engineering firms. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jessica.
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Hi, Shreya. Thank you so much for having me on.
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Amazing. You always say that engineering firms aren't broken. Workflows are.
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So what are we getting wrong when we treat organizational problems as people
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problems? I'm really glad you asked that.
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Engineering isn't broken. The flow of work is.
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We're often too quick to blame people for poor performance when the real problem
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is incomplete information, unclear decisions, competing priorities, or broken handoffs?
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I think before we ask who failed, we should perhaps be asking what made it difficult
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for this person to succeed?
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That's a really great answer. And I think that really addressing what could
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have made it difficult for a person to succeed is so important because when
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you hire someone, you're not going to hire someone who you think is going to fail, right?
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It's just that they might not have been able to understand the communication
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within the firm that they joined. Absolutely.
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So what does this organizational flow look like inside an engineering firm?
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And in your experience, where do people most commonly see friction that might
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disrupt otherwise high-performing employees or teams?
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Yeah, so friction can really show up anywhere.
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And when we talk about flow, let's look at metrics.
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I kind of want to scooch over to the metric side because technically metrics are not a bad thing.
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Metrics are necessary, but I think they only tell part of the story.
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And at the end of a project, metrics can tell you that a project succeeded.
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It can tell you how well it succeeded.
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And same with our performance metrics as an overall organization.
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What those numbers don't tell you is how the organization accomplished that?
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What work had to happen in order for those numbers to become true?
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So when we're looking inside of an organization, the friction areas can really
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be from just about anywhere.
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Those extra 30-minute, hour-long meetings where they're not really necessary,
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but we have to have them five times because we haven't quite gotten the message
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through. That's a communication process.
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Problem, potentially a communication problem.
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Or we look at rework. How much of rework is actually necessary or is perhaps
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a learning gap or a capability gap or a communication, again, a communication gap.
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And so friction can come from anywhere. And it's not a single point of friction that causes an issue.
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It is the aggregation of a lot of friction that we're looking at that comes
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up and really starts showing a breakdown in organizational flow.
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Yeah. I mean, the whole, this meeting could have been an email thing.
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Like, I know it's a joke now, but sometimes it really can be emails. Yeah.
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And joking actually can be a really good sign that there is something in the
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system that is struggling.
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When we start joking about, oh, that's just the way it is.
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That's an opportunity to take a beat and be like, why? Does it have to be this
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way? Is there a way we could do this better?
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Often, our human path of least resistance is to do what we've done before or laugh it off.
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What we like to dig into and look at is, is there a different way to do this? Is there a.
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Maybe not a better way, but is there a way that's going to cut down some of the friction?
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Yeah. And like every firm's better is going to look different.
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What is better for one firm may not work for the other. Everyone is different,
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different priorities, different people with different personalities.
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So it's really about what works best for a single team in a single firm.
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Absolutely. And that's where we like to talk about culture, right? Right.
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100%. So speaking of different firms, different solutions, engineering organizations
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will respond to problems with new processes, new technology,
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training programs, initiatives.
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Why do those solutions fail sometimes if like the underlying organizational
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system was attempted to be addressed?
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Yeah. So that is something we often run into is either a process needs a workaround.
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So you've got an engineer that's creating their own spreadsheet,
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their own way of tracking, or training is set up to be done by individuals.
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Usually, from what I've seen and I've experienced, is senior engineering or
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senior leadership are the ones that are also doing the mentoring.
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And I think when we throw in a new process or a new technology or a new initiative,
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what we're doing is we're trying to solve an outcome.
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We're seeing an outcome that we don't like and we're trying to solve the outcome.
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Where we like to see and where we like to dig in is are we solving the conditions
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that created that outcome,
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and oftentimes adding a new process adding a new platform,
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adding a new training program actually just can create more friction you are
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asking more of your senior leadership or your senior,
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engineering staff to carry more of that burden,
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in order to accept these new initiatives.
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Definitely. And I think that's also like what you mentioned about culture 100%.
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And it also has to do with, I think the workforce shortage that's currently
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happening because so many of these senior leaders, they might be close to retiring
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soon and they don't want a loss of knowledge to happen.
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And this mentorship and making sure this knowledge transfer happens,
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that responsibility is on them, even though that's not technically something
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that can really be evaluated in terms of metrics.
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Yeah, absolutely. And there is not usually a very good mechanism for...
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Sending that information back and forth for maintaining what we call institutional knowledge.
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That tacit knowledge is a really difficult thing to pass down.
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And that is another challenge that we understand and we aim to help address.
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I think that's so important, acknowledging and addressing that problem.
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So moving on to the next question, how can leaders distinguish between an individual
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performance problem and a systemic problem that is making it difficult for people to succeed?
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Yeah, that's a hard one. I think that's kind of the crux of,
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why we're doing what we're doing and why we're seeing what we're seeing is we
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tend to see our issues as people problems,
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and that's where we look first because let's be honest the system's been the system,
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but I think what we've forgot is that as our projects have complexity and industry complexity has grown,
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what we've done is added more trade-offs more handoffs and more communication points So I think.
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A good way to look at this is that you can have great engineering teams.
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You can have great construction teams.
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You can have great permitting teams.
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But what is potentially broken in between those teams?
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You can have stellar PMs.
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And it's not that they're not getting the work done. It's not that they're not doing.
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We're of the belief that individuals are just trying to do their best.
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They're doing their best job.
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What is it about the organization that exists that's actually making their job harder?
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That's what we find really interesting.
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Yeah, definitely. I think that's so interesting. And what you described,
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like individually, teams can be great, but maybe collectively there could be issues.
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And, you know, like no company works, it should work in silos.
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Everything is interconnected. Everything is interdisciplinary.
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So I think that's an extremely important point.
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Yeah, and so often we do. So often when I have conversations with executives,
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I ask that question and, oh, yeah, well, we're so siloed is a very common response that I get.
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And that just tells me that we're building friction into our actual organization,
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and possibly calling it a people problem.
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We need more people. We need less people. We don't have the right people.
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Maybe it's not the people.
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And that goes back also to like the rework. And obviously you mentioned the
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friction also. Because if you don't know what another team is doing and then
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you do it again, then that is definitely a problem.
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Right. Exactly.
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So when you speak with these executives and like, you know, they admit sometimes
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they're siloed or they admit they have other problems.
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When a leader does suspect that organizational friction is costing their team
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the time, their energy, lowering their performance, where should they start
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looking? What should they address first?
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Yeah, I think it's hard. You can't just jump in and address something.
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And I wouldn't be a good engineer if I didn't say, it depends.
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What I would encourage leaders to do today is to ask hard questions and then listen.
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Don't try to solve. Don't try to give an excuse. Don't try to help them understand,
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why things are the way that they are.
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Really listen.
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And if you give them the psychological safety to start giving you honest responses,
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because that plays a big role in it too.
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Are they telling you what you want to hear or they think you want to hear or
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are they telling you what's really causing them heartache?
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Ask them hard questions.
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What is making your job harder today than it was yesterday? Let them go.
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I think that's really important, just being able to listen without immediately,
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trying to offer a solution.
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We had a guest speaker at one of our conferences last year, and she was talking
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about how it's important that the leaders be the ones to speak last in the room
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if they have ideas or anything, because if they present their idea first,
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then a lot of people are going to want to go along with that.
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But if you let everyone present their ideas, you might come up with something
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that you hadn't thought of before, but you can actually go along with it now
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because people aren't agreeing just to your idea as a leader.
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Absolutely. And I think it's important to understand when you've created psychological safety.
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Because I've been in those rooms as a leader, and I've put the question out
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there, and I've sat in silence for five minutes waiting for somebody to speak up.
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And I think that's a really big signal there, is if folks aren't willing to
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speak up, they either haven't thought about the question before.
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Or is there a potential that they don't feel safe enough to tell you what the real issues are?
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And then you've got a whole nother issue on your hand. Then you've got a whole
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nother thing to dive into and explore.
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I guess that's a really good place to start, though, to really understand what
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problems people might be facing. Yeah.
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I think we are getting close to about all the time we have for today.
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Do you have any other final thoughts you'd like to leave us and our listeners with?
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Yeah. You know, I would just like our listeners to understand that we're looking
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at what happened versus what produced that.
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So when you're looking into your organization, it's really important to understand
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that those existing metrics are there for a reason and they are important,
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but to possibly understand that they're only part of the story and that learning
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organizational flow and workflows is helping discover that other half of the story.
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Let's make decisions based off of better, more well-rounded,
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fuller data, not just partial data.
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That is extremely, extremely important. And I thank you for bringing that point
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and this whole issue of it's not a people problem, it might be a workflow problem
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to light to our podcast today.
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So, Jessica, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed our conversation.
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Thank you for being here.
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To our listeners, thank you for joining us for another episode of the Engineering Influence podcast.
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Please make sure to like and subscribe and we'll see you next time. Thank you.