Download PDF Fall Bridge on Engineering a Diverse Future September 25, 2024 Volume 54 Issue 3 Guest edited by Wanda Sigur and Percy Pierre, this issue of The Bridge addresses the issues around sustaining a U.S. engineering workforce that builds on and integrates the talents and ideas of our diverse nation. Endless Talent Is the American Dream: A Draft Blueprint for Realizing the Full National Potential Wednesday, September 25, 2024 Author: Megan Smith, Wanda A. Sigur, and Puneet Ahira Methods are presented for strengthening and fully leveraging a flourishing ecosystem of talent. Towards the very end of World War II, after America had borne witness to its greatest societal mobilization of women and men, young and old, more undeterred by state lines, racial lines, and religious lines, Vannevar Bush penned the report Science: The Endless Frontier (1945). Bush, President Roosevelt’s trusted counselor and the country’s first science advisor, wrote the now-iconic piece in response to all that had happened, and all that still needed to happen. Speaking of the country’s vast and yet unrealized shared economic potential, he said: It can be achieved only by releasing the full creative and productive energies of the American people. Nearly 80 years later, it is worthwhile to take stock of where we have reached in fulfilling this vital pursuit, which underpins not only America’s economic viability but its social, cultural, political, and physical viability. When the members of the Academies and their networks of friends and affiliates assess the make-up of their organizations, leadership, partners, and allies, will they find the intergenerational, interracial, and interscholastic richness that has allowed Americans to stand tall and resolved in the face of impossible odds? Given a compelling accumulation of data (Greesonbach 2019) and historic evidence demonstrating higher rates of innovation, productivity, and profitability from diversified teams, what kind of wake-up call will it take to prioritize the obvious? There is both precedent and process to make disproportionate gains in fully harnessing the endless talent of this country, both native and naturalized, and doing so is of the highest strategic, economic, and political national interest. The good news is that proven practices and capabilities already exist, ready-made to be scaled and institutionalized, alongside pathways for continued iteration, adaptation, and the development of more. Like the trim tab, seemingly inconsequential changes to approach can radically alter direction, and ultimately the nature of the frontiers discovered. The first task at hand is to share what works (proof points, methods, innovations, collaborations) and get to work. The second task is to ask each other the hard questions for shared consideration and to be relentless in our resolve to help one another. This article includes references and examples for actions that all organizations can incorporate today (see the “Bolstering Organizational Mechanics” section), and then delves into existing methods for priming, strengthening, and fully leveraging a flourishing ecosystem of talent (see sections covering methods 1–5, e.g., “Method 1. Scout & Scale”). The intent is to demonstrate that there is both precedent and process to make disproportionate gains in fully harnessing the endless talent of this country, both native and naturalized, and that doing so is of the highest strategic, economic, and political national interest. Bolstering Organizational Mechanics Several years ago, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy canvassed colleagues across federal agencies, corporate management, employees working within technical industries, and workforce inclusion experts and published an action grid called Raising the Floor (Smith and Powers 2016), which presented measures to immediately scale into effect. These diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are not aesthetic attempts to configure a Noah’s Ark. They are conceived out of the unrelenting truth that unexpected genius emerges from all quarters. History and science provide continuous empirical proof, particularly at moments when stakes are high. The practices outlined in the grid have been demonstrated to work across organization size and industry domain, yet many are still not widely known or commonplace. A condensed version of Raising the Floor has been provided with the permission of the co-authors (figure 1). Spanning four organizational areas—leadership, retention and advancement, hiring pathways, and the talent ecosystem—it includes pragmatic steps to be taken, with suggestions for contextual additions and evolution. Raising the Floor is an evolving tool to be kept close at hand for action and iteration by C-suite, managers, strategic/operational leadership, and, where relevant, the board. Foundational Tenets: Creative Confidence and Widened Apertures Further in Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush describes how the committee advising him on scientific personnel offered the following foundational tenet to guide future planning for the country: We think it very important that circumstances be such that there be no ceilings, other than ability itself, to intellectual ambition. We think it very important that every boy and girl shall know that, if (s)he shows that (s)he has what it takes, the sky is the limit. Creative confidence empowers, activating common sense, critical thinking, eternal optimism, and a widened aperture of shared respect and belonging. It is the substrate necessary for co-creation, course correction, invention, and resilience. Each one of us reading these words has been empowered with a creative confidence at some point in our lives. In order for American institutions, organizations, companies, and communities to be capable of partaking in the revolutionary change that lies ahead (e.g., across AI, quantum, bioengineering, regenerative agriculture, etc.), the people that exist within them require creative confidence. There are many pathways to achieve this objective, among them are high-impact ecosystem methods (often overlooked) that accelerate emergent individual and collective genius. These methods are outlined in the following five sections: “Scout and Scale,” “Build Communities of Practice,” “Network the Networks,” “Sprint, Prototype, and Iterate,” and “Circulate Stories and Share Data.” When used together, they dramatically advance progress. Teams in every corner of the country (and across the world) are already using these methods to drive economic growth for all and to contextually address highly complex, generational challenges. Method 1—Scout and Scale: Make Visible the Doers, and Help Them Accelerate During an address on jobs at the University of North Dakota in 1963, President John F. Kennedy said, “Things don’t happen, they are made to happen.” And quite often they are made to happen by tenacious, iron-willed individuals with creative confidence who attract strong, well-rounded teams. The entire model of venture capital relies on such teams. VCs don’t make companies; they scout for the individuals and teams already in process and provide fuel to accelerate progress. This method of scout and scale, especially when applied beyond the sole metric of shareholder profit, creates tremendous economic and social impact. Innovation and experimentation using the open tools available to most of the population on the planet today allow for the breaking of echo chambers and a groundswell of additional talent never before made visible. Yet today, conventional scouting is so often limited to relatively closed networks that circulate the same usual suspects from one venue to the next. A global example of this kind of whole-scale upgrade is the UN Solutions Summit,[1] which ran annually for five years from 2015 to 2019, with the first convening held just one hour after the global ratification of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN NGLS) hosted an open webform inviting the world to share what they were already doing to advance one or more of the SDGs, and then facilitated an independent global committee for selection and curation. More than 800 submissions were received from individuals and teams from over 130 countries, from a mechanical engineer (who also happened to be a princess) from Burkina Faso innovating on solar energy distribution via 3,500 female-run cooperatives in Sub-Saharan Africa to an entrepreneur from the Peruvian jungle extending opportunity by organizing indigenous innovators of all ages to deploy a Floating Fab Lab across the distant tributaries of the Amazon River. The points of light of works already in progress were staggering. Teams in every corner of the country (and across the world) are already using these methods to drive economic growth for all and to contextually address highly complex, generational challenges. With the organizing leadership of the UN NGLS, joined by high-level representatives from the UN, alongside government agencies including the US Office of Science and Technology Policy; the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation; the Kenyan Ministry of Information Communications and Technology; the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and the Chilean Ministry of Economy, Innovation Division; and the support of the UN Foundation, with contributions from corporate partners, academic partners, and community partners, fourteen teams were given a stage at the UN in the hours immediately after ratification of the SDGs to share their work and solicit help and collaboration. An audience of policymakers; donors; leaders of industry, foundations, and community organizations; academics; researchers; students; designers; and storytellers assembled to workshop each solution and provide immediate offers of support, with mechanisms for longer-term engagement and advancement. Examples like the UN Solutions Summit are plentiful. Inside corporate environments like Google, platforms like Solve for X[2] were convened in order to surface global teams working on “moonshot” scale projects amongst a community of captains of industry who served to connect dots, unblock barriers, and accelerate progress. Solve for X became a formative catalyst for the creation of SOLVE at MIT, which uses similar mechanics but gives greater emphasis to social impact and social entrepreneurship, including the co-creation of the Indigenous Communities Fellowship. Fellowship programs like Vital Voices and the Unreasonable Group, amongst many others, have existed for decades and rely on scout and scale as the main throughline of their organizations. Rise of the Rest is a venture capital model with the thesis that high-growth companies can start and operate anywhere, not just in a few coastal cities. For many years, the Rise of the Rest team visited five American towns during a five-day multi-stop bus crawl, investing ~$500K in local startups by scouting for under-the-radar founders, and dramatically increasing the visibility of a whole ecosystem of local innovation partners. Method 2—Build Communities of Practice: Placemake (Physically and Digitally) Truth is still stranger than fiction, especially when open, Wonka-esque spaces are hidden in plain sight. Valuable for everyone, more than 2,531 fabrication labs (figure 2) with tight-knit communities exist today in every far-flung corner of the world, which collectively form the Fab Lab Network,[3] and most people still have no idea such resources are at hand. The Fab Network began from a seed of an idea, when in 2001 the NSF provided funding for an ambitious proposal to create a Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT equipped with one of (almost) every tool (research instruments, manufacturing machines, rapid prototyping, and component processing tools) to make (almost) anything—from a skateboard to quantum dots. Out of this assemblage next emerged the pragmatic course “How to make (almost) anything” as a means to learn how to use the tools that had been amassed. Surpassing all expectations, the course was overenrolled on day one by an order of magnitude, and it continues to be. Students show up from all across campus, not just to do research but because they want to make things. From this initial outburst of interest in personal fabrication, alongside a mandate from the NSF to demonstrate broader community impact from the grant, the first open-access Fab Lab anchored within a community (Boston’s South End) was conceived. One to two, two to four, four to eight—the number of new Fab Labs spontaneously doubles every year, each lab equipped with machines to make, and also machines that make the machines to make (i.e., one Fab Lab can make the next). The connectivity of this “community of practice” is its lifeblood. That connectivity has a constant digital pulse that beats via the “Academany,”[4] which includes a version of the original course “How to make (almost) anything,” an evolving suite of daily communication and process documentation platforms (e.g., Mattermost, Gitlab, etc.), and distributed co-creation tools for impromptu, urgent problem-solving, as happened globally throughout the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The physical placemaking of the labs, from small towns with a sparse population of a few hundred to the most dense metropoles on the planet, has helped to catalyze creative confidence warmly, openly, and extemporaneously. Every year, the community meets on a different continent for Fabx[5] (e.g., Pune, India — Fab5; Shenzhen, China — Fab12; Montreal, Canada — Fab21), a weeklong gathering of community building, learning, sharing, and co-creating along a specific theme (2024’s theme, convened earlier this summer in Puebla, Mexico, was “Fabricating Equity”). The Fab Lab community is possibly one of the most economically, socially, culturally, and scholastically diversified communities of practice in existence today, with a clear and deep focus on access and relevance. And there are so many more communities of practice that are addressing critical needs in geographies where resources may otherwise be scarce, serving populations ranging from kids in pre-kindergarten to the eldest elderly. In Memphis, Tennessee, and Water Valley, Mississippi, CodeCrew and base camp[6] provide an on-ramp for underrepresented talent to learn hands-on real-world technologies, including app development and software engineering, through various programs, some entirely free. Of the 800 K–12 students CodeCrew works with every week, about 92%[7] are African American and LatinX. These kinds of communities of practice are coming together above the local grocery store to gain mastery together, sharing their successes at city-wide BBQs to inspire curiosity, and resurrecting the tried-and-true methods of artisan guildcraft. They exist everywhere on the planet, from the 12 Tech Meetups happening in Boise, Idaho, this month to the 81,000 Women Techmakers in 193 countries supporting each other as advocates and mentors. Method 3—Network the Networks: Invite and Advance Cross-Fluency From President Washington’s Army Corp of Engineers to modern-day IT and CIO groups to world-class STEM experts leading national programs related to energy, space, defense, and health, nations around the world have always recognized the need for technical talent inside government. Yet this technical bench has often advanced in silos and lacked full integration within the most senior government leadership. In 2009, a newly commissioned role of US chief technology officer was established and empowered with the mandate to harness the power of data, technology, and innovation on behalf of (and working in collaboration with) the American people. Following the catalytic 2013 disaster of the healthcare.gov launch, awareness of this urgent need grew in both the government and commercial tech communities, which helped the US CTO with rapidly expanding the technical talent pipeline into government—recruiting senior leaders, some of whom had helped to build the largest tech companies in America (and the world), to come and serve one- to two-year tours of duty. They were paired shoulder to shoulder with a cadre of dedicated bureaucracy busters and, together, given directives to begin to overhaul the government’s digital infrastructure. From the president to his chief of staff to his cabinet, these newest tech recruits were supplied with air cover, agency colleagues, and working space inside two newly established units: the Tech Transformation Services (within the General Services Administration), notably including Presidential Innovation Fellows and 18F, and the United States Digital Service (within the Office of Management and Budget), aligned and embedded across agencies, and empowered to grow agency-based technical capacity. Headlines in the media described a mass exodus of top-tier technical talent flocking east, with the tongue-in-cheek reference “Silicon Valley goes to Washington.” Engineers, developers, data scientists, designers, and so many more answered the call to dig deep alongside expert civil servant colleagues and solve critical service delivery challenges, including across veteran affairs, immigration and border control, social security, and healthcare. Others were embedded within senior leadership to upgrade capabilities and processes as part of the highest-level national security and economic security efforts. A kind of TQ (tech quotient) was added into meeting rooms across all aspects of government, threading technical fluency into the mix of cross-functional strategy, planning, operations, and decision-making. Tens of billions of dollars lie waiting in dusty budgets, ripe for better utilization. Collaborative tools and techniques, networks with enabling environments, and scaling factors with the elasticity to adapt over context and time have already been tried, tested, and proven. Importantly, the gains in fluency also ran the other way. Tech leaders, heralded as the authority in their respective fields, were suddenly confronted with new problem sets offering a dimensionality they had previously never considered. Public service became a real career option for advancing the state of the art. From inception through today, the urgent and vital work of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (est. 1976), the Tech Transformation Services (est. 2014), and the United States Digital Service (est. 2014) continues uninterrupted, and has since expanded into additional teams including Tech Congress (est. 2016), the Census Open Innovation Labs (est. 2016), and the US Digital Corp (est. 2021), amongst others. The US government is not unique in this respect, leading amongst some countries yet losing competitive advantage compared with others where cross-fluency integrations are elevated and prioritized as a linchpin to the national interest. The advantages gained are applicable to all organizations: commercial, philanthropic, academic, civil society, and informal and formal associations. Today, in high schools across America, a networking of networks is also gaining critical mass. Students deeply inspired by STEM, who otherwise might not run for or be elected as class president, have invented a new role for themselves alongside student government bodies—chief science officers (CSOs). This network of CSOs, who fly under the banner of “don’t just hope it happens, make it happen,” are charged with the mission of evangelizing STEM opportunities with their classmates and collaborating to make positive impact across their communities using STEM. Today, more than 1,500[8] elected CSOs from parts of rural Alabama and Arizona to metropolitan districts in Michigan and Pennsylvania are weaving pathways between their high school peers and administrators, locally based science organizations, regional cabinets (sometimes including local and state elected representatives), and a national network of STEM advocates. Method 4—Sprint, Prototype, and Iterate: Begin as a Way to Begin No amount of conjecture and postulation can offer the practical insight of context-driven experimentation and application. And yet in organizations across the country, committees and consultants are convened to offer singular studies at high opportunity costs, which frequently result in further admiration of the problem. Decades have passed in this manner, with often very little to show by way of meaningful outcomes. One fail-proof method to begin, is to begin. Using all the methods described above, it is possible to scout for talent across adjacent communities of practice and network them together in the form of a “sprint,” a concentrated burst of discovery, concept design, and collaborative experimentation that often results in the beginning of some form of multi-disciplinary prototype (e.g., a template, tool, early software, and/or hardware) that can be tested in the real world for further open development and iteration. As preeminent scientist Ellen Swallow Richards (Wylie 2005) advocated, some conclusions can only be caught, not taught. Sprints can take many guises: data jams, data paloozas, hackathons, codefests, editathons, fix-it-days; whatever the name, the intent and bias for action are the same. This type of approach has been used to bring energy and creativity to long-standing evocative challenges like the gender pay gap (e.g., Hack the Pay Gap) and the use of police force (e.g., the Police Data Initiative). In the first instance, Presidential Innovation Fellows at the US Department of Commerce, working with newly released census datasets on income, went on a six-month roadshow across the country, convened 350+ data scientists across 15 markets, and hosted a public Slack channel for ongoing examination of data related to motherhood penalties, hiring biases, and the economic impact of wage discrimination. This was followed by 12 weeks of intensive prototyping by 45 individuals from around the country organized into seven teams, and culminated in the first-ever White House Pay Gap Demo Day, with the secretary of commerce testing product prototypes ranging from a VR salary negotiation simulator to a personalized pay gap calculator—all of which was covered in the Wall Street Journal (Morath 2016). The gains may seem incremental, but it is the steady beat of action that advances shared knowledge and the probability of righting a generations-long struggle for the benefit of everyone. A Moody’s Analytics study (Holland and Ell 2023) projected a gain of ~$7 trillion per year to the global economy by closing the gender pay gap in OECD countries; in the United States this figure is estimated (Shaw and Mariano 2021) to be a ~$541 billion per year gain to the economy. These are not conceptual gains but fully realizable opportunities for substantial economic growth. Method 5—Circulate Stories and Share Data: Inspire Creative Confidence Taraji P. Henson, the award-winning actress who plays NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in the blockbuster Hollywood movie Hidden Figures, gives an apt glimpse into the film’s impact. At the Toronto Film Festival, prior to its release, she said between tears, “I’m a girl from the hood. I didn’t grow up with much, so all I had was dreams and hope. The reason why this is so overwhelming is because when you come from a place where you have no dreams, no hope, and all you see is that people that look like you don’t belong or they have no place in society … If I had known about these women coming up, maybe I would have aspired to be a rocket scientist.” The force of the media has never been more potent than it is today. It has the power to reinforce and propagate debilitating bias, stereotypes, and prejudice, and it has the power to break all three. Katherine Johnson was an unnoticed, elderly African American woman in her 90s in 2014. Very few people in the country, let alone the world, knew that she existed, and even fewer that she was an invaluable member of NASA’s Langley Space Task Group and responsible for calculating and verifying the trajectories that took the first Americans to the moon and back. By the time Hidden Figures was released, Katherine had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and had become the centerpiece of a book (a #1 New York Times bestseller) and a film (the highest grossing Best Picture nominee at the 89th Academy Awards), read and seen by hundreds of millions of people, young and old, all over the world. Katherine’s story is one of an untold number of untold histories—historic and current. It takes concerted, collective effort to rewire hearts and minds and reveal a long-deferred, more accurate past in order to steer towards a more gracious future. Often, that means mining through vast amounts of data and confronting harsh realities that may be entirely unintentional, for example, as demonstrated by the “Film Dialogue Dataset” (Anderson and Daniels 2016) published as a visual essay for The Pudding, where across 2,000 popular films the number of lines of each role is broken down by gender and age (figure 3); or by “GD-IQ” (Paul 2017), a tool developed by the Geena Davis Institute and USC Viterbi School of Engineering that uses signal processing and machine learning to objectively process the details of movies, for example, detecting gender by facial recognition, tracking on-screen time, and analyzing linguistics/word choice. Spurred by the confluence of efforts to circulate better stories through better tools that help to make sense of underlying data, the Association of National Advertisers launched the SeeHer movement with a mission to “increase the representation and accurate portrayal of all women and girls in marketing, media, and entertainment to reflect culture and transform society.” The effort includes the Gender Equality Measure, a data-driven protocol for identifying gender bias in media, which has now become a global industry standard for measuring and mitigating gender bias in ads and other programming as a means to increase effectiveness and boost ROI. Given that women control nearly $32 trillion in consumer spending,[9] taking the time to help each other to get the story right makes moral and financial sense. To date, GEM has been used across 7,250 brands valued in aggregate at $70B+ in ad spend. The vast archive of untold stories, historic and contemporary, extends far beyond gender. It includes race, class, creed, geography, trade, and aptitude and covers both tragic and heroic experiences of everyday Americans that have gone unnoticed for far too long. It includes stories of unexpected allies with the courage, tenacity, and generosity to expect more. Americans won’t grasp the full richness and context of their country until they see with honest eyes what “home” looks like for every American. The state of the union must be known in human terms before it can be meaningfully advanced. A Draft Blueprint to Advance and Evolve America’s greatest strategic asset has been and will always be its talent, both latent and realized. In today’s grand global arms race for complexity, there is a growing, tacit resignation to the idea that humans will be pushed further and further out of the loop, disintermediated from the detail, and distanced from decision-making. This narrative is both naive and dangerous. Only where there is space for a plurality of approach can real resilience take hold and flourish. Every American deserves to be empowered with a critical understanding of how the world works today—from atoms to bits to nodes to quanta—so they have the means and opportunities to bring their insights, vision, and experience to bear and participate in what comes next. To settle for anything else would be to squander a national inheritance. Stuck up on the wide bricks of a third-grade classroom is a wall-to-wall poster that reads in bright colored letters: In effort, there is joy. To unleash the full creative and productive energies of the 342 million people alive in America today would be the greatest undertaking this country (or any) has ever made. Perhaps more than any other concerted effort, it has the power to vastly transform industry, commerce, trade, science, technology, the arts, politics, culture, health, and education in one fell swoop. Amongst the organizations represented by the members of the Academies, we have the means, the methods, and the money to direct towards this bigger work—complex problem-solving through diversified inclusion. Tens of billions of dollars lie waiting in dusty budgets, ripe for better utilization. Collaborative tools and techniques, networks with enabling environments, and scaling factors with the elasticity to adapt over context and time have already been tried, tested, and proven. There is an urgency to the present moment that demands bold and decisive effort. Endless talent exists. There is actually nothing standing in the way of success except the will to get started on the opportunities shared here (and elsewhere) and the collective will to scale by helping others do the same. References Anderson H, Daniels M. 2016. Film dialogue. The Pudding, April. Bush V. 1945. Science: The Endless Frontier. National Science Foundation. Alexandria, Virginia. Online at www.nsf.gov/about/history/EndlessFrontier_w.pdf. Greesonbach S. 2019. Diversity and inclusion research roundup: Top studies you need to know. Glassdoor, Feb 22. Holland D, Ell K. 2023. Close the Gender Gap to Unlock Productivity Gains. Moody’s Analytics. Morath E. 2016. Narrow the gender pay gap? There are apps for that. The Wall Street Journal, July 19. Paul B. 2017. Shri Narayanan teams up with Geena Davis to combat gender bias in Hollywood. Viterbi Magazine, spring. Smith M, Powers LW. 2016. Raising the floor: Sharing what works in workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion. The White House, Nov 28. Online at obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/11/28/raising-floor- sharing-what-works-workplace-diversity-equity-and-inclusion Shaw E, Mariano H. 2021. Narrow the gender pay gap, reduce poverty for families: The economic impact of equal pay by state. IWPR #R653. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Washington, DC. Wylie F. 2005. Ellen Swallow Richards: The first oekologist. Jamaica Plain Historical Society, April 14. [1] medium.com/@ObamaWhiteHouse/it-takes-a-network- 9e7831333 906 [2] blog.google/alphabet/solve-for-x-2014-celebrating-and/ [3] https://www.fablabs.io/labs/map [4] https://academany.org/ [5] fabevent.org/ [6] basecampcodingacademy.org/ [7] www.code-crew.org/about [8] chiefscienceofficers.org/program/ [9] www.seeher.com/what-is-gem/our-impact/ About the Author:Megan Smith (NAE; former Google executive) was the third US chief technology officer, and is a lifetime board member of the MIT Corporation and the CEO and founder of shift7. Wanda A. Sigur (NAE; former Lockheed Martin Corp. executive) is president and founder of Lambent Engineering and an independent consultant for emerging space exploration. Puneet Ahira (former Amazon and Google speculative technologies lead) is the CEO and founder of Omission Studio and an independent consultant for complex and critical systems design.