The importance of human socialising cannot be underestimated. While we’ve had a bit of a break from it for a couple of years, don’t ever think we won’t get back to it.

Putting aside the reality of personality differences such as introverts, extroverts, shy and awkward, funny or serious, gregarious or sanguine, the ability to get along with others is a hallmark of a good society.

The human reality is that we want to make eye contact, maybe look deeply into someone’s soul, or just have a good belly laugh. The world is rich with opportunity. Let’s get out there.

Of the four factors that a successful career can be built on (mastery, autonomy, impact, and connection), connection probably matters the most.

Most jobs, roles, tasks, projects, and goals, have some interaction of some sort with another person. Many jobs have interactions with many, many other people. And that’s where connection comes in, and why it matters the most.

There is a plethora of advice and information out there about how to work with others. And it’s up to us individually to practise it: we need to make the effort to connect with others, not just to work with them.

Of the four factors that a successful career can be built on (mastery, autonomy, impact, and connection), impact is the one with the most emotion around it. When we’re making an impact, we know we’re making a difference.

In another context, impact is related to recognising “experiences” through our career. A definition of competence includes having the knowledge, skills and experience to do a task. When we’re aware of the impact of our work, we’re probably experiencing something. And that comes with emotion. We remember experiences based on how we felt.

Making an impact is equivalent to feeling our experiences.

Of the four factors that a successful career can be built on (mastery, autonomy, impact, and connection), autonomy is a mysterious one, which we might not know we want, and need, to feel successful.

Autonomy means we’re allowed to be self-directed. The funny thing is, knowledge work is 85% self-directed. I made that percentage up, but it feels right. Because it happens every time we start a new project or job – in work like project engineering, we often just ‘figure out’ how to do the next step. That’s pretty much being autonomous.

Using autonomy well is a sign of success.

Of the four factors that a successful career can be built on (mastery, autonomy, impact, and connection), mastery might be the trickiest but most important one.

Mastery is getting better at things that matter. This means stretching ourselves beyond the basics. But what makes this tricky, obviously, is the need first to master the basics before taking on the next level. It’s often tempting to accept a role or project that is beyond our current mastery. And we are also often encouraged to do just that. So, the tricky balance is to stretch but not leap ahead. Finding support helps.

Daniel Pink wrote a book called Drive, which introduced the motivation factors as being mastery, autonomy, and purpose. I’ve recently heard Cal Newport, writer of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, in a podcast, expanding this a bit further to mastery, autonomy, connection and impact.

These factors are key to a satisfying career and doing work that you enjoy. Mastery is about getting better at things that matter. Autonomy is being self-directed. Purpose is important, but better expressed as connection and impact. Impact means making a difference. And connection. Oh, connection – we do need so much of that in 2022.

If a book has a table of contents (ToC), then it probably contains technical information. Or, at least, it probably isn’t fiction (though some novels have them).

Tables of contents help orient the reader to what the document contains. It’s like a meeting agenda: it sets the scene for what to expect from that book (or meeting).

A document longer than 5 pages should probably have a ToC. For documents over 10 pages, I’d argue there certainly should be one.

The ToC shows the structure and organisation of the document. Without a ToC, a reader can’t get the big picture.

I’ve heard the word “nuance” more recently, in conversations, and, in my own head.

The definition of nuance is given as “a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound”. I guess the key there is ‘subtle difference’. The (perceived?) usage increase, for me, is about the real nuance of some of the issues we’re currently dealing with as a society.

I might be using the word wrong, but to me, understanding the nuance of a position or situation, is to respect the fact that not everything is easily put into right/wrong or good/bad scenarios.

Subtle differences abound.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge, ancient aqueducts and railways, the pyramids, and the moon landing. All of these wondrous engineering accomplishments were completed before computers. And before “management systems”.

Now, we have a plethora of company management systems, mainly because we can.

Ideally, the management systems might:

• reward the right behaviours,

• advocate for safety in outsourced work,

• have the right structure so bad news can travel up,

• encourage and act on hazard reporting, and

• create opportunities to share stories.

Ideally, that’s what management systems in hazardous industry companies might do. But I suspect they are more about budget and profit forecasts.

Many of us are guilty, especially recently, of just-in-time preparation. It must be a combination of growing role responsibilities, and the ‘times’ (being of frenetic information overload). I’m pretty sure work used to be a bit more leisurely, a bit more ‘controlled’, a bit less frantic. I remember being very prepared for meetings, having read the pre-work the day before or some such in advance. I find now I’m doing the preparation just-in-time, just moments before the meeting starts (but at least I’m doing that!)

Unfortunately, doing things just in time is fraught with risk. We need to slow down.

“Professions are characterised by a collective body of knowledge, and education process, standards for admission to the profession, standards of conduct, a recognised status, and collective values. A key value for professionals working with potentially hazardous infrastructure, is that public safety is paramount.”

This is from the recently published engineering practise guide: ‘Public Safety in the Pipeline Industry’, a document for which I was part of the author team. Those 45 words are really… dry, hard to interpret, and often skimmed or overlooked entirely. Yet they mean so much. That’s what the 25-page guideline is trying to bring to life.

I have a box full of t-shirts that I don’t wear anymore. They are from concerts and events, and, of course, marathons and Ironmans.

They are symbols of things I’ve done, been and represented. I can’t quite bring myself to dispose of them, but they do take up space. (A practical solution, which I’ll do eventually, is to take photos of each, and then turn them into rags).

The human need to have artefacts of things we’ve done, and places we’ve been, is an interesting quirk. With all the stuff in the world, we seem to still need symbolic souvenirs.

Continuing on with a theme around rhythms and structure to our life, work, music: it’s true that predictability and structure actually allows freedom and innovation (hello, jazz). 

Back in 2014, I remember going with my parents to the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.  It features mostly Shakespearean plays. I’m not a Shakespeare aficionado, but I love a challenge.  We had a marathon attendance of five Shakespearean plays over 3 days, all of them stellar productions.

Afterwards, for a while, I ended up thinking in iambic pentameter. Weird, but true.  The lilting, rhythmic predictability of poetic language was hard to ignore.

I naturally lean towards structure and organisation. I like to know what’s on for the day, and having some autonomy over it, a little bit of control. And I mostly have that, most days.

I believe people perform better when there’s some predictability about outcomes, behaviour, and expectations. This works both ways in relationships – both work and personal relationships. When you know, for the most part, what’s coming next, there’s less anxiety and uncertainty.

I’m not naturally musical but having a rhythm to life is another way to think about structure and organisation. But don’t ask me to explain jazz.

I’m not ignoring the issues swirling around society in 2022 ….but I kind of am. Certainly 100 words isn’t enough to delve into them properly anyway. So, I generally don’t write about them here. I do think about them, of course, but it really needs to be background noise rather than front-and-centre.

And there is a lot of background noise right now. Energy systems change, pandemics, mandates, mental health, masks, protests, hydrogen, politics.

It’s difficult to be a Gen-X in the resources sector at the moment. But – we shall prevail. There’s still a lot of life left in us, right?

Who really knows what the year will bring; but with a steady mind, mild expectations, and a willingness to find joy, it will be a good year. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway.

There will be ups and downs, lows and highs, successes and failures. Every year has those, in varying levels of importance and attention. Nevermind, the best we can do is keep forward momentum.

After posting all about me throughout December, it was nice to take a break for the full month of January. But it’s time to get back at it, 100 words a day and all.

As 2021 winds up, let’s look into that crystal ball and think good thoughts for the future. We’re not through this yet, but I do like to think ahead to what it looks like after (whatever “it” is, whatever “after” might be defined as).

I think there’ll be many new opportunities for all of us. Meanwhile, it’s valuable to take time to reflect on our achievements, and values, as well as how we can best interact while we’re facing a little bit of uncertainty about everything.

Be gentle with each other. Let’s connect in 2022, in whatever form we can!

Identifying as a project engineer puts us in an elite group of specialists. We’re specialist at being, well, generalists. Thinking both widely and selectively deeply about many things: that’s how to be a great project engineer.

There’s a sweet spot, between 8–15 years’ experience, to make a huge impact on your industry, and your career, by being an amazing project engineer. And it opens the door to so many future opportunities.

Some of my best work was as a project engineer. I’m looking forward to helping the project engineering discipline to become a community of like-minded, wide-ranging, interesting experts.

I’ve read quite a few competency frameworks, even developed a few, in which we’ve painstakingly written out the knowledge, skills, experience and behaviours a person should have, to be considered competent in that topic area. This is a good start, definitely.

It’s the next step that gets overlooked: guidance on what to do or where to go, in order to achieve that competence.

I’m looking forward to helping with that next step in competencies: providing the training where I can, but otherwise providing a facilitated clearinghouse of references, resources and tips and tricks on actually how to get the competency.

I’ve heard it called “copy-paste engineering”, or “find-and-replace” engineering. It’s a terrible process that has invaded the habits of good engineers everywhere.

We used to have to write out the design report or project report by hand, to be typed up by someone else. This meant that the content was original, and bespoke to that project. Nowadays, I’m pretty sure all of us in computer-land have done the ole ‘find and replace’ to produce a ‘new’ report.

I want to be helping to fix that. I want us to be more cognizant of the folly of doing engineering that way.