Humble Practice in Engineering: What does it look like?

• DOI: 10.24908/pceea.vi0.14217
• Publication Date: 2020-06-23T04:00:50Z
• Authors: Ellen Lynch; Amy McLennan; Jeremy Smith
• Keywords: Social Skills

To tackle modern challenges, engineers must be able to work within complex teams, environments and projects. Collaborating across disciplines sectors requires honing nurturing specific interpersonal skills attributes. These include open-mindedness, collaboration communication, emotional intelligence, stakeholder management empathy. All of these attributes require high self-awareness other-orientedness. In my research, this is encapsulated by the term "humble practice". Unlike concepts such as empathy (Hess, Beever, Strobel, & Brightman, 2017; Hess, Pan, Wather Morris, 2013), humble practices have not been investigated in engineering, despite behaviours actions being reflected engineering competencies (Engineers Australia, 2012a, 2012b, 2018).