Problems that Matter | EWB Co-CEO Honourary Doctorates at Queens Convocation

Queen’s University Commencement address, June 1, 2010
Parker Mitchell and George Roter, Co-CEOs - Engineers Without Borders Canada

Parker Mitchell: Chancellor Dodge, Principal Woolfe and most importantly, graduates. Thank you for this wonderful honour. Thank you for that warm introduction.

It’s hard to admit how daunted we felt when we received this invitation in the mail. Most recipients we know have a lifetime of experience and wisdom to share. When we inquired with the committee they said, “don’t worry, it’s a dual degree and so the sum of your two ages puts you right in the target we’re looking for.”

They also said “we’ll give you one tip, because you do have to make a speech, Queen’s has a deep set of traditions and a great culture, and it would be great if you could make reference to that.” So after an exhausting 3 or 4 minute search of Wikipedia we discovered this interesting fact; which is that apparently your pipe band doesn’t wear anything under their kilts. And then we found out we’d be wearing robes…

We want to begin by saying thank you. If we’re up here today it’s because of countless leaders across Engineers Without Borders. From the very first person who stepped on board in the year 2000, to the most recent member who’s joined the Queen’s chapter or a chapter across the country. It’s in their honour that we accept this.

We’d also like to say thank you to our families, whose value to us just increases over time—thank you.

We might not have a lifetime of experience to draw on, but we are, we hope, able to share a few thoughts about this coming decade for you, which we think is potentially the most important decade of your life.

A decade can hold a lot of failures, which is actually a really good measure of your personal progress.

A decade can see the emergence of successes. A company like Google, or dare we add, an organisation like Engineers Without Borders.

A decade can define the rest of your life.

And the question that we would like to pose to you today is “what will you do with that decade?”

Ten years ago we were sitting where you were. Happy, proud, excited, and probably a little bit anxious about the future.

I know that personally, when I was graduating, I don’t think anyone would’ve bet one penny on me being where I am today. I did well in school, but I didn’t really have any leadership experience. I was shy, reserved, and perhaps most importantly, I was pretty insecure. I looked to the outside for approval, for indicators of success.

And that works in the first two decades of my life. We’re all the product of a school system that defines success for us religiously and then rewards us when we get the right answer.

Looking outward for approval can continue after graduation. And indeed it did for me. I was interested in development issues; I felt a passion for this cause of bringing about a better world. But society deemed that a management consulting job was the right path. And so that’s what I took.

It took me these past ten years to realise that in school you’re rewarded for your performance, but in life you’re rewarded for your choices.

I’ll say that again. In school you’re rewarded for your performance, but in life you’re rewarded for your choices.

The fact is you have a lot of choices. This decade is one of freedom for most of you. While you come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, you are the recipients of a superb education at a superb university. You’re graduating in a superb country and in an era of global prosperity.

Your choices are almost unlimited. But it might not feel like that – and indeed for me when I graduated it sure didn’t seem to be so.

What I realised was that my choices were more restricted by my internal fears than by my external circumstances. George and I had been ruminating over this idea of engaging engineers to tackle the global injustice of extreme poverty for months and for years. But for the longest time all we were doing was talking.

It was hard to realise that this idea would remain stillborn unless we were willing to quit our job or quit our Master’s program and throw ourselves into this fulltime. It was hard to give up the conventional path and all the certainty and approval that came from it, for an idea that, at the time, many called an absolute long shot.

Now, most commencement speakers cast their mind back to antiquity to find an inspiring quote for the graduates. You might hear someone mentioning Seneca or Shakespeare. We thought we would update that and draw a lesson from reality television. That’s right “Fear Factor.” This isn’t about eating worms or anything like that. This is about the idea of being willing to identify and to confront your own personal fears. Find out what makes you slightly uncomfortable, and then go do it.

For me the fear of failure was central. Both with how I worried others would view me, but also internal fears if I wasn’t able to accomplish something. But choice after choice, I started to realise I was willing to take the risks that lead to the possibility of failure.

When I graduated, I wouldn’t have thought of myself as a risk taker. Yet two and a half years later I found that I had quit my high paying job, George and I had sunk $30,000 of our own money in to start Engineers Without Borders , I had moved into George’s parents’ basement for a couple of years, and we drew no salary.

This risk isn’t for everyone, but the challenge I put to you today is to find out what your risk tolerance is. Being able to discover that is a wonderful thing.

You’ll only discover it when you realise what it is like to fail.

There’s time when Engineers Without Borders has been humming along, we’ve been excited and proud. And there’s times when we’ve been questioning its existence and our very roles, when we’ve felt failures and were questioning ourselves as leaders of an increasingly complex and difficult to lead organisation.

And it’s only when you’ve confronted those fears – when people outside have potentially stopped believing in you, and when you might even wonder if you believe in yourself – that you realize the core values that matter to you. Finding that foundation of core values allows you to build on an undercurrent of passion that exists in all of us. And it allows us to experience the freedom to make the choices that we think the world really needs these days.

George Roter: That undercurrent of passion, that spirit, that’s what started Engineers Without Borders.

Perhaps I can illustrate why that was so important to us by telling you a little story.

It’s the story of a trip I took to Ghana a few years ago. But it’s actually not a story about me, it’s a story about a young girl. Her name is Idrisu. She’s from Northern Ghana, an expansive, hot Savannah dotted with small scrub.

Idrisu is a recent graduate, just like yourselves. Or so I hope.

It was four years ago when I met her, this bright 9 year old girl who came up to me. She was one of four or five people in the 1,000 person village – adult or children – who could speak to me in English. She told me that her great ambition in life was to finish grade 6. Grade 6.

I don’t know if she made it. Her parents are both dead, and she’s being raised by her aunt. She has likely been sick from poor water and unable to attend school. Maybe she’s working as some servant, or getting married off to some farmer to work the land for the next 30 or 40 years.

That’s one path.

But I have hope. I saw energy in her eyes. I saw her struggling by the light of that LED flashlight I gave her, long into the night practicing her math homework, practicing her English. I hope she made it. I hope that she’s standing, as proud a graduate as any of us here today.

That’s what our work is about with Engineers Without Borders, it’s about people like Idrisu. It’s about seeing them with more opportunity. It’s about seeing them with more choice.

Now Idrisu’s life might seem quite far away, quite exotic. Morally important, but not practically relevant. I assure you it is relevant. Her choices and our choices in the world are inextricably linked. Let me share a story with you of why.

It’s a story of two frogs and two pots of water – you may have heard this before. The first frog is dropped in a pot of boiling water – and presto, hops out unharmed. We in the world are pretty good at dealing with that; when we’re threatened with a drastic situation, we leap into action. Human spirit and ingenuity prevail.

The second frog faces different circumstances. He’s placed into a pot of cool water, the heat is turned on and he gets a little grin on his frog face. He’s getting a little bit warmer, more comfortable. The water starts to get too hot and … wait, he jumps out.

You haven’t heard that version of the story before perhaps.

That’s the updated version, the updated version of this metaphor that we need to rewrite for the 21st century. It takes an act of choice, but that’s a choice we can make.

The underlying premise is as true as ever. We know that societies are not good at handling slow change whose consequences are distant. It’s hard for us to see the slow trends. I mean, it’s only when I look back at my grad photo with those long locks of hair that I sit there and say “wow, hm, well, where did that go?”

More seriously, it’s tough for society to see the slow change. It’s tough for us as human beings to have that perspective.

So let’s do a thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that a time machine brought your granddaughter back here today – from the future. She’s nineteen, she’s about to enter Queen’s, carrying on the long family tradition. Of course, she’s going to be an engineer.

The question is: what would she share from her perspective? From her vantage point? What would she tell us matters to her quality of life?

Would she thank us for tackling global warming? Would she thank us for helping bring down the increasingly technical costs of health care? Would thank us for improving resource productivity use and therefore halting the annual destruction of the rainforest?

The rainforest, god that’s clichéd right? That’s so 1999. But what if I told you that still today, while we are sitting here, since we’ve started this speech, an area the size of the entire size of the Queen’s campus has disappeared. Does that statistic matter? Sometimes if you don’t see it with your own eyes it’s just a statistic, just a math problem.

These cauldrons of hot water are huge, and they’re complex, and they’re ever-present, and they’re difficult to solve – and we get used to living with them.

I think if your granddaughter came back she’d say:

“Please, do whatever you can, work on problems that matter. Work on problems that matter to me and my generation. Please work on problems that matter.”

Whether that problem that matters is around finding solutions to promote greater justice, whether it’s something as huge as promoting sustainability, or something as small improving health records in our health care system, work on problems that matter.

The nice part is that as engineers we’ve been trained for this. In the first few days of engineering, four or five years ago – or for those of you just finishing your victory lap, six or seven years ago – those first few days of engineering, that first problem “how on earth do I get up that greased pole?”

Seriously, engineers are trained to solve problems. But today you are graduating with more than an engineering degree. You’re entering into the engineering profession. There is a difference.

A profession has collected wisdom and knowledge. A profession has the bonds of shared values and an ethical code. A profession is charged with serving the public.

But professions must evolve and ours is no exception. You’ve heard today one moment of that evolution, that you’re now engineers and applied scientists, rather than merely applied scientists.

The engineering profession will require more evolution, it will require all of you to shout from the treetops or the hilltops or the rooftops “wake up”. Let’s not always be behind the scenes as engineers, let’s not always let ourselves be put into this technical box of solving technical problems. Let’s discover what it’s like to lead around serving society, let’s discover what it’s like to lead around issues that are of greatest importance.

And I tell you today, this is actually embracing engineering tradition – believe it or not.

About a century and a half ago, Joseph Bazalgette was the chief engineer for the city of London at a time when there was a choleras surge that decimated the population there. Faced with that human challenge he came up with an idea for sewers. Not so sexy, but pretty important.

He sold the idea to Parliament and convinced them to invest more money, than had ever previously been invested in the history of the city, in this idea that had never been built before. It wasn’t just more money, it was five times as much money. Then he designed them and then he organised a team of engineers who in five years built a thousand kilometres of sewers – many of which are still in use today in the city of London. And over the next ten years after those sewers were built, life expectancy increased by ten years.

The engineering profession is at its best, at our very best, when we define problems that matter and harness the passion and ingenuity that will leave a legacy of service to society.

I don’t think I understood this entirely and I don’t think I understood what it meant to have the freedom to choose this path until I saw what it’s like not to have that freedom.

Idrisu happened to be born in the wrong country; she barely had any freedom to choose.

We do.

The collective power of choice in this room is unbelievable. This is powerful and we should celebrate it.

Today is all about celebration. You should be proud about what you’ve achieved. Your parents are proud about what you’ve achieved. We’re proud about what you’ve achieved.

Now it’s tradition for us to leave you by saying “we’re proud of what you’ve achieved,” and to say “harness this pride” and send you off into the world and wish you good luck for the future.

But we’re not going to do that because you don’t need that.

Instead, we want you to have a little hint of fear. Because with fear comes freedom, with freedom comes choice, and with choice comes that underlying passion that I saw in Idrisu’s eyes that I want to be able to see in your grandchildren’s eyes, and that I want every one of you to be able to contribute to as the graduates of Queen’s University 2010.

Thank you.