In France as elsewhere in Europe, engineering no longer attracts enough young talent, and this shortage poses a mortal threat to the Old Continent’s industrial capacity. To attract them, traditional leadership (“the engineer as lead climber”) and innovation, as the product of engineering intelligence, are promoted. In both cases, the “top of the class” syndrome. What if the real issues lay elsewhere?
The collaborative practices of French engineers are little studied by French researchers and authors. Yet elsewhere, and particularly in the English-speaking world, this is a major concern – both for companies, which demand that engineering programmes develop these skills and practices, and for teachers, trainers and researchers, who are multiplying and promoting innovative practices.
Raising the question of collaborative practices in the world of French engineers often meets with indifference, disdain, even hostility. A taboo, or a pointless question?
Yet collaborative work is vital for companies (and more broadly), both in their daily operations and for their ability to find innovative solutions – particularly when it comes to breakthrough innovation, challenging usual approaches that no longer fit a world in perpetual motion.
The French difficulties are many and intertwined, and therefore complex, but three structuring ones can be identified.
The “top of the class” syndrome
It all starts with the definition of the French engineer. For some, there are “the top schools”, which attract prestige and attention, and “the others”, which are compared somewhat distantly with German “training programmes”, for example – even though these feed the most dynamic industrial fabric in Europe. The point here is not to disparage the exceptional, world-renowned education provided by France’s grandes écoles of engineering. But this view of “the others” reflects a segregationist, even clannish approach, which isolates and weakens – partly inherited from a unique and formidable selection process. It is indeed because they have cleared the successive hurdles of the best lycées, the toughest preparatory classes and the most difficult competitive exams that the “chosen few” can enter these elite schools, which will give them every chance of professional success. They will achieve this result through talent, relentless work, resistance to stress and the sacrifice of the best years of their youth.
So it is easy to imagine that, consciously or not, these engineers have gradually acquired the conviction that they are “the best”: the most brilliant minds, trained to solve the most complex problems. And it is often true.
Yet the most complex problems are not always solved by purely “intelligent” approaches. In a truly “complex” situation, particularly one that includes human parameters, one often has to “tinker”, accept a departure from the ideal and a large share of uncertainty. And elite engineers don’t like that…
This response to a complex problem can only truly come from genuinely collaborative work between diverse skills. Not just from combining several engineering approaches (because collaboration between engineers is an operational reality, even if the interfaces between specialities are sometimes problematic), but between truly different rationalities. And that is where the real difficulties begin – particularly when experts in the “hard sciences” (the top of the class) have to collaborate, and not merely coexist, with supporters of the “soft sciences” (did they really choose this path, or was it by default, some wonder…). Because in the French school system, the premium goes to the “maths types”, even when they don’t like it…
This is not a recommendation to level down, or a wish to break up streams of excellence, particularly in engineering professions, which are already insufficiently valued. But to accept, too, without any sense of hierarchy, that other training paths are also useful to collective success. Provided that, during the years when they choose their path, pupils have access to advice from professionals who introduce them to the business world – beyond Zola, psychosocial risks and the unemployment rate.
In fact, far from clichés and from ignorance, whether endured or accepted, the world of industrial companies has no lack of appeal in terms of quality of working life, concrete and useful achievements, and lifelong career development.
The will to power: Descartes, useless and uncertain
This difficulty in “living together”, between professionals from the hard sciences and the soft sciences, stems from an old French tradition marked by Cartesian philosophy and its offshoots in the so-called “management sciences”.
This tradition is no doubt at the origin of the excellence of engineering education. Its project is indeed to master nature, to impose human will. This will to power is an extraordinary driving force for trying to move mountains, to surpass oneself. It is also a terrible handicap, because it equates the necessary humility before the complexity of our world with a reprehensible weakness.
In the face of complex phenomena, this posture is mere arrogance. Here again, a French peculiarity, lecturing the world and accepting no lessons from it… Yet since the beginning of the 20th century, physicists have known that the behaviour of a three-body system is by nature unpredictable. So how can one imagine fully mastering phenomena in which the complexity of matter is compounded by human interactions?
Technological progress is undoubtedly a source of benefits, and it is easy to criticise the modern world while comfortably settled in front of one’s television… Our understanding of the world progresses every day. But it is by nature an unfinished quest.
The design and mastery of complex systems must therefore seek reliability rather than control. And this quest cannot draw on an omniscient, omnipotent constructivism, because it is essential to accept uncertainty, the fog of war – smoke rather than crystal. In the same logic, the human factor should not be seen as a “weak link” but, on the contrary, as the key element of system resilience.
The engineering approach must therefore integrate the contributions of the “soft sciences”, individually as well as collectively.
Individually, this can mean contributions to initial training that go beyond mere “general culture”, to feed problem-solving ability and challenge the engineer’s rigour – and certainties. It can also take the form of cross-disciplinary training paths, beyond simply accumulating successive diplomas (ideally prestigious ones, to be first among the first). Collectively, it can mean bringing diverse areas of expertise together on projects, combined to learn together.
The development of joint programmes between French training centres is an encouraging sign for the future, and there is no shortage of examples abroad to draw inspiration from best practice.
And then, collaborative practices must not rely only on tools, but on the people who shape them. In today’s engineering world, “collaborative systems” refer exclusively to IT tools for sharing data, in the most complex environments. But however open a system may be, it only feeds on the data people are willing to put into it, and that they will be able to retrieve from it, whatever the rules and directives, managerial or automated…
Finally, collaborative practices cannot rely exclusively on cleverly designed organisations either, or on scientifically managed processes to “force” collaboration… Collaborative practices are flows that feed on individual, voluntary and contributive practices. Organisations and processes are then merely snapshots, reference points to be shared, built and dismantled to adapt to the current objectives of the people who make them.
Power as goal and status: a Maginot logic
Individual perceptions of collaborative issues feed on each person’s inclinations, but also on collective factors, inherited from the past or currently experienced. Throughout their years of training and professional practice, engineers had to prove they were “the best”… And now they would have to convince themselves that the solution – even “power” – comes from the “bottom of the list”, the unclassifiable, even from “university people”?…
French society suffers from the persistence of “castes” that clash and hold back collective dynamics, when they do not break them.
Let us briefly take three examples of large French industrial companies whose leadership was entrusted to non-engineers: EDF, Orange, SNCF… The reactions outside betray, or reveal, many reactions inside, when transformations cause difficulties, as they do everywhere. A “political” choice (influence rather than competence), a company abandoning its (noble) industrial vocation to become a service company (the “yoghurt sellers”…)…
Admittedly, such clashes also exist within the “grands corps” – the elite bodies of the French State – whether of engineers or of administrators… But when it is a matter of losing a bastion “held” by engineers to other profiles, it is even more violent. And rightly so, because it reflects a recent change in industrial organisations everywhere in the world, one that affects many people’s professional identity.
Until recently, engineers imagined a product to meet an identified need: travelling faster and further, producing energy safely and at lower cost, facilitating exchanges, sharing data at very high speed…
Today, service providers – even marketers – imagine uses for which machines and media will have to be produced. In the United Kingdom, as James Dyson put it in a recent interview with Les Echos, engineers are seen as washing-machine repairers, whereas they used to design them…
This reversal of the creative process has taken place within a generation, and it is humanly understandable that it should be very hard to live with for those who held “power” until now – collectively, but also, very often, throughout their own careers.
In reality, when it comes to producing in a complex world, or innovating, the “hierarchical” approach to power is no longer appropriate. It is counter-productive. The question is not who – engineers, énarques or salespeople – has taken “power”. It is to bring these energies and skills together towards the same objective. And to do so without asking the insoluble question of “governance” – in short, the question of who will be “the boss”.
Beyond the engineering population, French society suffers from this logic of bastions and status: a logic frozen in the past, in immobility. Whereas in collaboration and innovation, leadership is, in essence and by necessity, shared.
The collaborative engineer: talents to mobilise
“Technology” may no longer make young people dream, because they think first of uses… But without innovative physical media, what services? The “Cloud” itself illustrates this complementarity between many engineering specialities, from the most physical to the most virtual – from designing efficient, durable, economical media to the complexity of intangible data flows. Perhaps engineering professions are equated with “manual” work, which is undervalued… Except for those who put their reasoning skills at the service of financial flows, which are also dematerialised… But do engineering schools have any reason to train people for these professions, lucrative certainly, but so far removed from their vocation?
Younger generations are hungry for mobility, fluidity, ad hoc and informal exchanges. But what better opportunity than an engineering education, provided it opens the way to working with others, to constructive confrontation with other rationalities, to the practice of other areas of expertise, with respect for everyone’s contributions – rather than the pursuit of antiquated hierarchies, Stalinist statues just waiting to be toppled while some keep them standing for the edification of the masses.
Young people “pick and choose” among training courses, areas of expertise and professional experiences? So what, as long as they come together in the service of a common objective. The challenge is not to straitjacket them, control them or restrain them; it is to mobilise them. But that is obviously more complicated…
The engineer, tomorrow’s leader, will be neither a “boss” nor a “subordinate”. Like others – and perhaps, in some cases, better than others – they will be a facilitator of talents and skills, of energies and projects.
Engineering education is not a ladder to “power”, now out of reach since it is shared. It is a school of rigour, problem-solving and wealth creation. It opens onto the world, to help understand it and live better in it, but without vainly seeking to dominate it. It is therefore, itself, open to others.
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