Monthly Archives: May 2019

This book will change the way you think.

I have recommended this book to many of you. It was pivotal for my career and yet is specifically not a self-help book. It is filled with facts and observations, but has no advice or recommendations. It sets up the problem; the solution is left to the reader.

The title is just a colorful reference to a Random Walk, a mathematical term for a path comprised of successive random steps. Each next step begins at your current position, but you don’t know which direction you’ll move. There’s no way at all to know where you’ll end up.

The basic premise of the book, at least the way I read it, is that our career paths (and our lives) are strongly influenced by unexpected events, that our paths are far less under our control, than any of us want to admit. I started my career intending to follow my grandfather’s advice: “Plan your work. Work your plan.” It was calming to think that I controlled my destiny. That the actions I took, the decisions I made, controlled where I would end up in my career. What I learned, though, was that the important steps were always the ones that I could never have anticipated. Dr. Mlodinow’s well-selected examples, plus a little math, illustrate how naive I was in my initial plan.

Luck, it turns out, has far more influence than careful planning. I might even postulate that luck is more important than late nights at the office, but that’s a topic for a different essay.

My career path has been nothing if not a random walk filled with lucky happenstance. The 2002 move from Portland to Honolulu was a single step that only happened because my office was across the hall from Sean Ragain’s. All that I learned on the Midway project, the really interesting people I met and the projects we worked together, were steps that could only have happened from the “Midway” place along my walk.

Farther back in 1988, when I left Berkeley for San Diego to see about a girl, there’s no possibility I could have predicted I would be running a construction-focused geostructures shop from Santa Cruz 30 years later. And the 5-year stop on Maui? Really? Who could have planned that? Yet I walked my path, made my decisions, took my opportunities, and ended up right here. While I have some ideas about what happens next, intentions and preferences, my path so far has taught me that I can’t control the next step, nor should I want to. My best priority is to maximize exposure to good fortune for myself and the people I care about.

You all should read the book, think your own thoughts, and see how they pertain to your experience. If you agree with my assessment that increased exposure to good luck can be as important as technical competence or diligence, then making efforts to increase your exposure to good luck is a legitimate career development strategy. Here are my thoughts, refined over about a decade of thinking:

Have Good Friends: Embrace relationships with peers and collaborators. Good luck doesn’t happen just to you, it happens to your friends as well. More friends, more good luck. And when it does, they need reliable team members (often right away) to help them maximize their opportunity. We’re working on an important project in Pennsylvania right now because of a friendship I’ve enjoyed since 1997.
Just Say Yes: I borrowed this from my son’s Improvisational Comedy work, but it’s good advice for any venue. On 2 April 2002 Sean Ragain leaned out his office door across the hall and asked “Hey Doug, can we run Midway?” Yes, I replied. Just yes.
Be Prepared: It worked for Baden Powell, it’ll work for you. Do what you can to prepare for an extraordinary opportunity. Maybe keep a little money in a “war chest” account. Keep your field kit all in one place so it’s ready to go. Have a Council Record so you can get registered in the new state before your report needs stamping. (More here.)
Demonstrate Sincere Interest: You can’t be enthusiastic about work you don’t like. Your interest doesn’t need to be about the work itself. Some of my best friends are sincerely committed to time off with family. They’re great at jobs that accommodate more time off. Those jobs have advantages and disadvantages. They’re great at their jobs and achieve their overall goals.
Persevere:If you believe that you’re working a fantastic opportunity, rearrange your finances and priorities to make the most of it. Be visible in drumming up support. Speak at conferences. Let people know that you’re got something different to offer.
Fail Faster: This is the opposite of perseverance. (There’s no single right way to walk your path, remember?) If you’ve truly given it your best shot, and it’s just not working out like you had hoped, embrace the failure and move on. Put your extra effort into the next great opportunity. But be sure to maintain the relationships that you cultivated.
Work in Small Groups: The Law of Large Numbers states that the average value in any data subset tends toward the overall true average as the sample size increases. Engineering ability has an average just like coin tosses. Atlas Geotechnical, with a sample size of 6, has no below-average engineers. We’ve tossed 6 “heads” in a row (well we tossed a “tails” once but quickly corrected.) A company with 5,000 engineers, unavoidably, has about 2,500 below-average engineers.
Meet your Commitments: Schedule and quality are the most common commitments, but possibly more important are nuanced commitments that make you unique to your particular client base. Here at Atlas we’re committed to constructability. It’s worked out pretty well for us so far.

The crew at Atlas are working through a strategic exercise with our good friends at Cosmic. They prompt critical thinking, challenge preconceived notions, and bring out the best in businesses. They document the results websites and logos, but the hard work happens at a much deeper level. Organizing my thoughts here is one way I prepare to get the most out of our project. I’m hopeful there might be something equally helpful for some of you.

The best children’s story is Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. About this there can be no debate. It was my favorite story growing up, and it remains pertinent to my work today. You dads and moms can get a copy here: Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne

You’re welcome.

It’s about a hardworking owner-operator named Mike, his stalwart coal-fired excavator Mary Anne, and how together they navigate the difficult transition from steam to hydraulic power in the North American construction industry. There’s a heartwarming ending. I won’t spoil it for you.

Pertinent today is the way that Mike and Mary Anne dig a hole: neat and square. At each stage the hole is manifestly neat and square. When they finish, you guessed it, the hole is neat and square. The book doesn’t emphasize excavation techniques; it’s not a trenching manual. Neat and square is just how Mike, an operator so skilled they wrote a book about him, digs a hole. If you’re not digging like Mike and Mary Anne, you’re probably digging wrong. Read by my parents with great enthusiasm, this story taught 4-year old me the two most important characteristics of an excavation:

Neat
Square.

I have time to write these thoughts on a Friday afternoon as the crew works diligently to wrap up a shoring submittal for a hole that is not square. Not by a long shot. It’s not pear-shaped or anything; but it zig-zags all over Honolulu through some comically soft ground. There are odd-angled corners. Several of them.

The reason that we’re struggling to wrap up the design is because I failed to insist that we dig like Mike. The Contractor, a highly experienced excavator, prefers long stretches of braced sheetpiles with open corners that allow in-trench pipe fusing. The the shoring has angles that are measured in 32nds of a circle. It is not at all square, and our bracing design are far from neat. The level of effort has more than doubled.

To avoid suffering similar difficulties, I encourage you all to stay true to the example of Mike and Mary Anne, a lesson so important that every right-thinking parent reads it over and over again to their budding young engineer-children. Dig your excavations neat and square. Your shoring designs will go smoothly, and your Friday afternoons will be greatly improved.

The Atlas Geotechnical crew is privileged to work all over the world, collaborating with squared-away engineers of varied backgrounds and sharing stories that range from tall tales to practical advice.

I’ve learned that every community includes at least a little folklore in how they design and build. Always there is some inexplicable local practice, unique to the area and unknown elsewhere, that designers, regulators, and builders all assert is necessary to project success.

A fairy tale is created when the lesson learned from a real experience, over time, becomes disassociated with its context and starts being applied to all projects. What started as sound practice turns into a guiding fable that, more often than not, just adds cost and difficulty without any benefit.

As an example: “House your family in the sturdiest structure you can afford” becomes, over time, “don’t build a house out of straw because a wolf will come and huff and puff and blow it down.” Practical advice. Brick houses are better against wolf-blowing and also generally. But if all you have is straw, and you’re a professional engineer, maybe your best course of action is to engineer a wolf-proof straw bunker.

Vibratory Pile Hammers: On Oahu in the early 1980’s a contractor was extracting timber piles from the sand backfill of a closed wharf, some of which were near the sheetpile quaywall. A few interlocks had separated below the waterline. Of course vibrating the sand flows it out the defective interlocks. Subsidence broke the wharf; it was a legitimate problem. Instead of learning to inspect interlocks before extracting waterfront piles, the Owner invented a myth that vibratory hammers are dangerous and shall not be used. Henceforth all piles, including sheetpiles, are driven with impact hammers. Far far away from the water, on different islands, specifications prohibit vibratory hammers. This Owner is influential; engineers accept that vibratory hammers are dangerous and ban them from all of their projects, not just their wharf projects. It would be a charming superstition if it weren’t so costly. Vibratory hammers have been proscribed for nearly 30 years. The engineer who made the rule nears retirement. It may take another 30 years for the fable to fade into distant memory and for Engineering once again to prevail in Honolulu.

Scarify and Recompact: In San Diego and parts of southern California, all earthwork begins (after stripping) by removing 6″ of soil, moisture conditioning, and rolling it back down as fill. Maybe at a few sites this upper soil might have been compressible, in which case for heaven’s sake perform remedial grading and make it suitable. But blindly converting 6″ of competent semi-formational flat ground into fill just increases your fill thickness. It is equally effective as stepping over the sidewalk cracks while walking home from school. Upon arriving you find that your mother’s back is, in fact, not broken. Maybe your superstition works; maybe you just walked home funny.

Detensioning Tiebacks: At this year’s Spring Seminar in Seattle an engineer asked a panel of experts “why does the City require detensioning tiebacks?” Two panelists offered straightforward answers: (1) “that started before I took over administering the rules,” and (2) “yeah, we’ve been trying to get that requirement dropped for years now, despite running full-scale demonstrations.” One senior community member shared a story from the ’80’s about a bar tieback that got broken and jumped part-way out of its hole. A close call, sure, but how does that experience relate to strand tiebacks with heads confined by a cast basement wall? Folklore. An irrelevant cautionary tale, pure and simple. That community has recognized it and, over time, will dispel the local myth that tieback strands are unreasonably dangerous.

So here’s the question: What folklore have you incorporated into your practice? I promise you there’s some nugget of superstition in your reports and designs that your peers in other regions would struggle to understand. Do you test micropiles using an ASTM setup instead of PTI? Do you insist that only your techs are capable of performing quality assurance testing? Require 6″ of compacted crushed rock beneath footings even in dry weather?

I don’t advocate that we expunge all local traditions from our work. Consider, though, examining your practices, understanding the origins of your folklore, and retaining just the beneficial parts. The practice of engineering evolves constantly through the work of our whole community. The generational shift currently in process is our opportunity to improve our practices and better serve our communities.