Failure and Guanxi

THERE is a broadly perpetrated fiction in modern society. . . The fiction is that society consists of a set of independent individuals, each of whom acts to achieve goals that are independently arrived at…

Roger D. Goddard

Imagine you are in China; you do not speak the language; you do not know how to behave; you don’t know what those around you consider important. But you have important business to do. You will likely fail, not because you are incapable, but because you do not understand the system. Your failure will seem unfair.

The UM is a very selective place. All of our students were amazingly accomplished in high school. But some fail when they come here. A few fail by choice, but more fail because they do not know how to succeed, and do not learn the tools necessary for success in a demanding, complex, foreign environment. For many students the transition to college is not just a shift to a new academic environment, but is rather a move into a foreign culture. This transition is all too often disguised by the apparently familiar language (English) and activities (going to class), and the feeling of alienation and isolation goes unrecognized for the culture shock that it is.

Back to China: What do you do? Change China? Not likely. You will need to make connections with those who can help you. The social network you will build gives you what the Chinese call guanxi. You can think of it as capital on which to build success. Just as you need financial capital on which to build your business, so you need social capital on which to build success in any complex community setting. The importance of such social capital is demonstrated in the business setting by GM’s entry into China, as deftly described by Michael Dunne in his book “American Wheels, Chinese Roads.” GM’s many failures, leading to eventual success, can be traced to a failure to understand China and a failure to understand the importance of guanxi. But the principle applies more widely; there is a considerable sociological literature on social capital and its utility in creating success in a social setting, and a branch of this literature focuses on the role of social capital in college success.*

To succeed you need connections within the existing power structure and you need to understand the norms of the community – in the university setting you need connections with faculty and staff and other students, and you need to understand what is expected and what works. Students who understand the university as a community of people and understand this community's expectations – especially its implicit, hidden, unarticulated expectations – can much more easily do what is needed and can more easily find the support that we all need to be successful. Students with good guanxi are more robustly positioned to deal with roadblocks and setbacks. Those for whom the university is unfamiliar, like a foreign country, need to build a store of social connections and understand to help navigate the place or else they will fail.

These human connections can share understanding of community expectations, knowledge of success strategies, and transmit the social norms that lead to success – what are the most productive study strategies? where can you reach out for help? what are good co-curricular activities? ... and so on.

Your social connections can share their own connections within the broader organization, and they can even take actions to your benefit. I’ve met many students who succeed, and many who fail: those who fail often feel they have little control over their situation; they feel buffeted by outside influences and lack a sense of agency. Your social network, your guanxi, will provide information, influence, and control over your fate. Your social capital provides confidence.

*Roger Goddard, “Relational Networks, Social Trust, and Norms: A Social Capital Perspective on Students’ Chances of Academic Success,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 25, pp 59-74 (2003) is one example of this literature.

The Day I Became a Study Abroad Parent

I put my son on a plane today.  He’s headed to Shanghai to study for 8 weeks at the University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint institute. I’ve written before in this blog about the benefit of international experiences, and this experience is going to make a huge difference to him. He’s stepping outside his comfort zone and will discover capabilities within himself that he does not know he has.  So why am I uneasy?

He’s talked about spending a summer in Asia since middle school. He’s now a young man just about to turn 22, and will realize this dream. He’s traveled overseas on shorter trips with me, and he’s even been to Shanghai before. He’s highly capable. I know that there will be unexpected challenges for him, and things will not go “according to plan.” But that’s the whole point: a huge part of the value for him will be learning to cope with the unexpected.  He’s well prepared for this.

But this blog is about me, and why I’m uneasy.  I really should not be: I’ve lived abroad several times, and know it’s doable, adventurous, and leads to growth; the folks in Ann Arbor who have arranged this program are amazing and I trust them completely; I’ve been to Shanghai many times, and I know most of the staff and faculty in China with whom he will interact.  With all this inside information and all these personal contacts, if I’m even a bit uneasy I can only imagine what other parents, lacking my contacts, might feel.

As we pulled away from the airport I picked up his smartphone, which is not going to China because the cost would be prohibitive.  It physically represents the loss of contact: I can’t call to see if he made the flight; I can’t email tomorrow to see if he arrived.  I probably won’t hear from him for several days.  The journey he’s launched is something like a test - the work will be his alone, and he will completely own the successes and failures of the adventure.  It’s that loss of control that causes my unease.  Seeing my son head to China is an act of faith: an act of faith in him.

It occurs to me that I too am going to learn something from his overseas experience.  I too am stepping outside my comfort zone and I too will discover something within myself.  But I don't yet know what.

Working Around Black Boxes

Our engineering students all take a senior capstone course in which they design and sometimes even prototype a system.  This is a great way to apply their knowledge, and to synthesize what they have learned in the preceding years.  And of course it’s similar to what many engineers do in the real world.   But something strange happens in these classes: we assemble a team of 4 material scientists, or a team of 4 chemical engineers, or a team of 4 nuclear engineers, or a team of 4 biomedical engineers …, and tell these mono-disciplinary teams to do a design.  Where in the real world would that happen?  Such mono-disciplinary teams present an artificial constraint in knowledge and approach that would be foolish to replicate on most real engineering projects.

I heard from students recently about how they approach this challenge: they “black box it.”   Chemical engineers are required to specify the material from which they would build their reaction chambers: they select stainless steel.  Why?  They don’t really know, they are not sure it’s the best choice for their application, but stainless seems to be used a lot, so it’s a safe choice.  They simply eat the extra cost in their economic analysis (although I have to wonder if they include long-term maintenance costs in that analysis).  They don’t really have a solid approach to decide the issue of material for a reaction vessel.  They are busy with developing their chemical reaction and process control ideas, and don’t have the time or expertise to think about materials selection.  So they “black box it.”

Similarly, materials science students working on a project involving a coal power plant recognize that there is fluid flowing through those pipes, but they don’t know about that, so they “put it in a black box.”  Because they don’t work with a mechanical engineer they know little about the fluid flow issues that might constrain or inform their materials selection and design.  Temperature, pressure, velocity? Those are just givens, not subject to real consideration. They black box it.

Given a team of 4 mono-disciplinary engineering students, what do you suppose the business case for their designs look like?  It’s a recipe for failure.

We have always known that this mono-disciplinary team approach to design classes is artificial, but our goal has been to teach the design process, so a bit of simplification might be understandable.  But perhaps we have not realized that we are creating a careless attitude towards design.  The students I spoke to described how they would minimize portions of their design in order to work around the black box gaps in their knowledge.  Because they were strongly constrained in time to finish a project they had to hand wave over components of the system they were designing, and dismiss parts as unimportant, not because they were unimportant but because they were black boxes.  Imagine if they were to approach the design of a real mission critical system in such a fashion.

The solution is clear: student design teams need to be multidisciplinary.  But because we still assemble teams with insufficiently broad disciplinary expertise, what choice do the students have other than to design around the black boxes in their academic universe?

Magnitude Nine

One year ago a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the east coast of the Japanese island of Honshu, displacing the 1300 km long island 2.4 meters east in the process.  The immediate damage to the infrastructure of Japan was intensified when the subsequent tsunami flooded the Japanese coast.  The earthquake and tsunami caused over 15,800 deaths, and left the nation severely challenged to provide even basic necessities to the Japanese people.  A year later the wreckage of towns near the coast remains.  As engineers we must consider the extent to which our systems compounded the disaster; the failure of power and transportation systems, for example, left the nation less able to respond in a time of dire need.  But most notable in this respect is the failure of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station.

I have previously written about the core competencies that an engineer should have for the 21st century.  Within Michigan Engineering we are continuing to refine our understanding of these competencies, but among them is Social & Environmental Responsibility, defined as “an understanding of human, social and environmental impacts, and the ethical tools to make sustainable and responsible decisions.” The crisis created at Fukushima on March 11, 2011 makes the importance of this social and environmental thinking manifestly plain.

We expect it may take 40 years to fully clean up and dismantle the six nuclear reactors at the site. One hundred thousand people remain displaced from the towns closest to the plant, and some still uncertain area around the plant may remain off-limits for normal habitation for decades or more.  Produce from the area, whether contaminated or not, is treated with suspicion all over Japan and the livelihood of many is gone.  This is unacceptable.

Fukushima Dai-ichi (DigitalGlobe www.digitalglobe.com)

This engineering failure will have long-term social implications.  Since the disaster all but 2 of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants have been shutdown for “stress tests;” these plants represent 30% of Japan’s electrical generation capacity.  Without doubt some of these plants will operate again, but a county that had previously been convinced that nuclear power was vital for electric power production is discovering, in a sudden and brutal way, that they can in fact survive without it. Combined with renewed distrust for the utility companies and the government, this will lead to significant rethinking of priorities and strategies for energy generation in Japan.  Japanese society is learning that they can operate without their nuclear plants.   Long a staunch supporter of the Kyoto protocols on reducing carbon emission, Japan could increase reliance on fossil fuels; this could lead to increased tensions as more nations contend for access to dwindling sources of such fuel.  Or Japan may drive new ideas in energy conservation or in renewable energy; but Japan is land poor, and renewables require repurposing of large open spaces to energy production.  Will Japanese cities become even denser to make space for wind and solar energy production in the country?  Will Japan's already strained ability to produce food suffer?

Whatever the outcome, our many failures at Fukushima: our failure to make the engineered systems more robust; our failure to realistically assess the potential earthquake magnitude and tsunami height; our failure to provide a better system to control the process of decay heat production and removal in the plant; our failure to develop better emergency response; all these failures by engineers will have an unintended impact on the structure of Japanese society.

The disaster at Fukushima Dai-ichi reminds us, more than can any lecture or recap of a code of ethics, that as engineers we are responsible to society and to the environment.  Even the very wise cannot see all ends; we must remember that our actions may impact many lives – for good and for ill – in ways that we might not intend or foresee

Online?

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.”

Walter Isaacson, in Steve Jobs

Some of my colleagues tell me that my head is in the sand over online learning.  We should be teaching all our students through the internet, and reaching orders of magnitude more students than we currently do, they advise.

These colleagues point to the online tutorials like the Khan Academy and Stanford’s experiment in teaching 35,000 students in a computer science class, and extol the virtues of those modalities.  The best lecturers in the world should give the lectures in all our courses, while our students watch whenever and from wherever they are.

I look, and all I really see are video textbooks. These online lectures are sometimes fine ways of conveying information: interesting, engaging, and occasionally richly visual. But so is a good textbook. The lecture, as a pedagogical device, makes most sense when there is information to share that is difficult to share in a written form, such as when describing a process or a subtle idea requiring human body language or intonation, or when sharing information that is not easily found in written form, either because it is so fresh it has not been written in an accessible form, or when it is so scattered that the bringing together of the various strands is too complex for the novice scholar.  In these cases, the lecturer is a curator or editor of ideas.

Where such lectures can be replaced with videos, go ahead.  But we should critically examine first: could such lectures be better replaced with a written text?  Compared to reading, listening is a very slow process.  Indeed, when the UM Medical School started providing podcasts the medical students listened to them sped up by 3 times, in chipmunk mode, to hear the lecture at more efficient speed.

But the real problem with the online utopian vision of education is that it physically separates the students, from each other, and from the teacher.  While online advocates enthuse on the virtues of online discussion and online community, these fail to replace the face-to-face human process of learning.

Silicon Valley is a physical place, it is not a virtual place.  The Valley has two things: high tech companies, and venture capital firms.  They don’t physically separate or do their business with each other online.  The innovators in this ecosystem want to bump into each other in the coffee shops of Palo Alto.  The investors want to go down the street and talk face-to-face with those in whom they invest.  If the companies that are driving the internet -- Facebook, Google, YouTube, and others -- need face-to-face work, why should we expect that the even more social construct of learning would require any less?

Online learning makes sense only for the lowest levels of education – teaching facts to be used to pass a test.  To teach creative thinking, self-reliance, and values, requires human interaction, face-to-face.  It requires action and practice, and for young people it requires structure.   Those who look to online lectures as the future of education are burying their heads in the sand.   We should not be looking at how to enshrine the lecture as the video textbook – this is a harmless but non-adaptive strategy.  Put em online, I don’t care.  We should instead we working to develop education based on authentic creative effort, with students learning to work in teams and solve real problems in the face of insufficient information and critical choice.

"There is a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat.  That’s crazy.  Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.  You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas."

Steve Jobs

Intercultural Skill

An engineer in the 21st century needs a host of capabilities.  These capabilities start with deep technical competence, of course.  But this is not enough.  Within the volatility that will characterize the new normal an engineer must also develop creativity, an entrepreneurial mindset, a collaborative approach to work, social and environmental responsibility, communication efficacy, and intercultural skill.   These are not independent capabilities, of course.  Intercultural skill, for example, encompasses the ability to deal with ambiguity, the development of flexibility, respect for others, cultural empathy, and awareness in communication informed by a knowledge of culture; these attributes contribute to many of the other capabilities.  But how does a student develop these intercultural skills?

It is possible to study other cultures, or take courses on intergroup relations such as Sociology 122, or pursue an academic minor focused on a specific part of the world, or a broader minor such as the International Minor for Engineers.  But intercultural skill requires practice; it cannot be learned only by listening in lecture.  So wise students will elect to collide with another culture and perhaps learn intercultural skills by experience; the obvious way to do this is through the rich experience of study abroad.

The efficacy of study abroad has been studied in several ways, and these studies inform how students can best take advantage of the experience.  Williams (Journal of Studies in International Education, 9, pg. 356, 2005) shows that students who study abroad have a greater increase in their intercultural communication skills than those who do not.  But his work also shows that simply studying abroad is not enough: it is the meaningful interaction with other cultures that leads to growth in intercultural communication skills.  The experiential environment of study abroad can work, but only if students really interact with another culture in as many ways as possible.

Yet it is also important to recognize that a student’s intent plays a role in their learning in an experiential environment.  Just experiencing another culture will not make students better at dealing with another culture.  Kitsantas (College Student Journal, 38, pg. 441, 2004) shows that students doing study abroad increase their intercultural skills when they approach their study abroad with the intention of learning intercultural skill. Students must approach the experience with the intention to learn, and must reflect on the experience in order to gain the benefit.

At the University of Michigan our students are ideally placed to greatly increase their intercultural skills.  They can interact with other cultures through many study abroad programs, and they can interact with other cultures right here on our campus.  But they must invest in the effort with some intentionality, reflection, and honest discussion on the experience.  Doing so will help students gain one of the core competencies of a 21st century engineer: intercultural skill.

Competencies

Photo by Linda Peterson

Phil Hanlon is the Provost of the University of Michigan.  His job requires thinking about the future of higher education, and I recently listened to him reflect on the skills our students will need in the future.   He observes that the last 50 years in the United States have not, when seen the broad sweep of human history, been normal.  Most of us have grown up and been educated in a time of unprecedented prosperity and stability.   All the indicators are that the 21st century will be more volatile, activity will be globally interconnected, organizations will be smaller and more flexible, employees will shift jobs often, and they will have to reinvent themselves many times.  How, in four years, do we prepare students for this uncertainty?

In engineering education for the last 50 years, until very recently, we have focused on “engineering science,” fundamental scientific and mathematical tools that can be applied to the analysis of engineered systems.  More recently there has been increased focus on design and open-ended problem solving.  It’s not enough.

To prepare our students for a lifetime of contribution to solving the uncertain problems of the world, our graduates need to possess:

1. Sophisticated learning skills, because what students learn in college will be woefully inadequate to their subsequent 50 years of active contribution to society.
2. Communication skills, to allow them as engineers to communicate with each other, with clients, and with the broader society they serve.
3. Global and cultural understanding to analyze the human needs and human contexts, and ethical implications, of engineered solutions.
4. Creativity and an entrepreneurial mindset to identify opportunities, create ideas, design solutions, and persist through setbacks.
5. Leadership and project management skills, including ethical tools, to support working in and leading diverse teams for the benefit of diverse clients.
6. Sustainability principles to evaluate the environmental consequences of engineering choices.
7. Fundamental knowledge of a discipline, to give focus to their education and early career work, and a foundation on which to build later disciplinary knowledge.

Traditional engineering education focuses mostly on the last, and most specific of these competencies.  But the broader competencies of the first six are the more generalizable ones, that will support a graduate over many decades of productive life.   These broad skills can be inculcated in a college education, but to master many of these skills requires not lectures, but instead reflection on experiences.

Provost Hanlon believes that we need to provide more active learning experiences for our students.  Experiences like study abroad, service learning, student project work: these activities provide the environment in which teachable moments can arise that allow discovery of the generalizable principles of learning, or effective communication, or of cultural understanding.  The challenge for us as teachers will be to ensure that these teachable moments actually lead to learning.

Acknowledgement: the ideas in this post are built from contributions from many colleagues, most notably Stacie Edington and Phil Hanlon.