Last Friday in my Systems Design class something incredibly wonderful emerged from the students. It was the first time I’d observed this in an engineering course. In short, it was professionalism– an evolved form of professionalism that I will attempt to describe here. But first, some definitions for context.

For many years I taught “professionalism” in Experimental Design via the standard US-Engineering way, starting with the Attributes of a Profession:

Work that requires sophisticated skills, the use of judgement, and the exercise of discretion. Also, the work is not routine or capable of being mechanized.
Membership in the profession requires extensive formal education, not … » More …

We ran an interesting experiment in the HYPER lab the other day. The following picture was handed to all of the lab members and they were asked to:

Identify which diagram best describes how work/tasks/information flows in the lab (dots are people, arrows are flows).
Identify which diagram best describes how things should ideally flow.

The exercise helped change how we communicate. We now have a weekly member lunch and activity on the blog has increased. I’ll leave you to decide on how the image relates to spiral memes.

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What if I told you that the key to effective communication lies in following just three simple rules? I’ve found that the following three rules tend to correct the majority of engineering communication problems, and indicate when I consume information:

Relevancy

Credibility

Efficiency

I haven’t seen these rules elsewhere, so let’s expand on each. I’m going to use the Spiral v-Meme value taxonomy to apply each rule on many value levels.

1) Relevancy — to the audience. Indicators of relevance depend on audience and include one or more (if not all) of the following:

Story/fable approach (“…and that’s why we no longer … » More …