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ET9121 Introduction to Entrepeneurship Student Notes

Introduction To Entrepreneurship (Nanyang Technological University)

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Tutorial One

Introduction to Critical Thinking & Engineering Leadership

Learning Objectives
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to

 understand and appreciate the relevance and importance of critical thinking,

communication and engineering leadership literacy to the professional expectations of a
global engineer

What is Critical Thinking?

For a brief orientation to critical thinking, check out the starter sources below by clicking on the
hyperlinks.

1) An introduction to critical thinking

2) A look at some principles of critical thinking

3) A brief history of the idea of critical thinking (By The Critical Thinking Community)

4) The importance of critical thinking for engineers (This article discusses how critical thinking
can be taught/learnt from an engineering professor’s perspective)

5) The 7 Missing Basics of Engineering Education (By D.E Goldberg)

Online Activities and Preparation (Required)

This section must be attempted before meeting your tutor and class in the face-to-face
tutorial session. Tutorial meetings will proceed on the assumption that you have completed
the required online activities and preparation and seek to develop the work done in the online
tasks.

1. Read the article by Niewoehner and Steidle (2008). (Click on the hyperlink to access the
article).

2. Post (write) a personal response to the following question in the online class discussion
forum.
“Ultimately, the loss of space shuttle Columbia was a consequence of leadership
failure.” To what extent would you agree with this conclusion?

3. Respond to the views above and below yours in the forum (i.e. you should respond to
two views other than your own).

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Leadership Awareness

Class Activities 1 to 3
The following activities, adapted from Barsh (2014) and LeanIn (2018), are based on The
Centered Leadership model (Barsh, 2014). The model aims to help you lead with impact,
resilience, and fulfilment at work and in your life. These activities, taken from Part 1 of the
model – Meaning, concentrate on developing strengths and purpose – drivers of long-lasting
fulfilment.

Trigger Activity (Group) – 5mins

One by one, fill in the sentences below and share them with your group. Listen carefully as each
member takes a turn and say thank you when you’re done. Avoid the urge to slip into
conversation.

• Today I am feeling ...

• What I most want to bring forth in my leadership is ...

• That is truly important to me because ...

Activity 1: Personal Leadership Inventory – 5 mins

Step 1: Identify the characteristics of your favourite leader (Individual)

Imagine a leader who is truly distinctive in your mind—someone who has had a profound
impact on you. This could be a leader from any walk of life, real or imagined.

Spend a few minutes considering the characteristics that distinguish this leader. Think about
what makes her or him head and shoulders above the rest. Be as specific as you can and jot
these characteristics down:

Step 2: Identify the characteristics you see in yourself (Group)

One by one, share the top characteristic you admire about your chosen leader and why. Keep
track of everyone’s favourite leadership characteristic to create a full list for your group.

We often find a group’s collective list touches on:

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• technical skills like engineering skills/expertise and project management

• emotional attributes like passion or making personal connections

• values like integrity or authenticity

We all admire and want to be like leaders who bring out the best in us. So often the traits we
admire in others are traits that we have ourselves. Take a moment and reflect on which traits
you most admire on your group’s list—jot them down below if helpful. Then one by one, share
the one or two traits that you see in yourself and/or would most like to bring out in your own
leadership:

Activity 2: Strength Awareness – 10 mins

Step 1: Reflect on the activities that energize you (Individual)

Now we’re ready to deepen our awareness of our strengths. Let’s go back in time to recall three
moments in your life where you felt high positive energy. As you reflect on the questions below,
close your eyes and allow the images, words, and feelings to flow. When you’re ready, open your
eyes and jot down your answers in the present tense.

As a young child, what fantasy games do you love playing? What do you get to do and who do
you get to be in these games?

As a young adult, what activities do you feel drawn to? When do you feel so absorbed in an
activity that you lose track of time?

As your recent self (during the past eighteen months), what activities leave you feeling strong,
energized, and alive?

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Step 2: Identify your core strengths (Pair)

This activity lets you use your responses in step 1 to identify your top three strengths.

Break into pairs. One partner should be the interviewer, using the questions below to probe
with curiosity and appreciation. The other partner should be the interviewee, responding to the
questions openly and honestly. Each interview should take about five minutes, with one to two
minutes for personal reflection at the end.

Interview questions:

• What patterns do you see across the three moments in time? What do you most value about
yourself in these moments?

• What do you value about the activities that you describe? Why are they important to you?

• What lies beneath the strengths that you see in yourself? Are there deeper strengths buried
below?

• What has always been true about you that you value?

Before wrapping up, the interviewee should take a moment and answer one final question:

• Based on your answers, what do you see as your top three strengths?

Then switch roles and repeat the exercise.

Step 3: Share your core strengths (Group)

One by one, share your strengths with the group. Simply state your strength without elaborating
on it, and consider cheering on one another as you go.

Activity 3: Future Possibilities (Pair) – 10 mins

Now that we have started to identify our strengths, how will we use them to live into our
purpose? In this next exercise, we visualize ourselves in the future.

Break into the same pairs. One partner should be the interviewer, using the questions below.
The other partner should be the interviewee, imagining herself ten years from now giving the
best of herself to work and life—and feeling energized and fulfilled. As you answer, close your
eyes and allow yourself to think and dream boldly.

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Interview questions:

• Complete the sentence: I am most proud of the contribution I have made to the lives of others
and who I have become because I have ... and because I am ...

• If you assume for a moment that everything is possible—without constraints and knowing
that you cannot fail—what do you want to experience?

• Standing in this ideal future and looking back, what do you need to start doing differently
today to make your unique contributions and achieve a deep sense of fulfilment in the future?

Spend ten minutes on each interview, then switch roles and repeat the exercise.

References

Barsh, J. (2014). Centered Leadership: Leading with Purpose, Clarity, and Impact. New York:
Crown Pusblishing.

LeanIn. (2018). Lean In Education. Retrieved from https://leanin.org/education.

Engineering Leadership, Critical Thinking & Communication

Class Activities 4 to 9
4. The following extract from The Thinker's Guide to Engineering Reasoning aptly
summarizes the loss of the space shuttle Columbia incident that you read for the online
activity.

Consider how the causal factors listed in the extract below may apply to your reasoning
in your day-to-day experiences as a student engineer (e.g., in your core modules,
internship experiences, etc.). Support your views by giving specific examples from
personal experiences as far as possible.

The Cost of Thinking Gone Awry

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over the southern U.S.,
killing its crew of seven. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) met over
the months that followed to identify the direct and indirect causes, and provide both
NASA and the U.S. Congress with concrete direction with respect to the future of both
the shuttle program and American manned space flight. The direct technical causes of
this tragedy have been widely publicized. More significantly, the CAIB reserved its
most scathing findings for an institutional culture with NASA fraught with poor
thinking practices that appeared to have learned nothing from the 1986 loss of the
space shuttle Challenger.

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Note the use of our critical thinking vocabulary in the following causal factors
identified by the CAIM report, and rife throughout NASA and its contractors.

 Failure to challenge assumptions or patterns

 Unsupported/illogical inferences
 Assumptions confused with inferences
 Suppression/dismissal of dissenting views
 Failure to evaluate data quality or recognize data deficits
 Failure to weigh the full range of implications
 Narrow points of view
 Confused purposes
 Failure to pose the appropriate questions
 Application of irrelevant data and concepts
 Vague, equivocal language

The CAIB report specifically charged NASA leadership with a reformation of their
culture to improve and encourage good thinking across the agency and its supporting
contractors. The promotion of good thinking practices was to be designed into the
organizational structure.

From Paul, R., Niewoehner, R. and Elder, L. (2007). The thinker's guide to engineering
reasoning. Sonoma, C.A.: Foundation for Critical Thinking.

5. The following is a definition of critical thinking adopted in Niewoehner and Steidle’s

(2008) article.

Consider the relevance of critical thinking to the professional and personal lives of
engineers, giving concrete examples to support your views. What may be some barriers
to critical thinking?

Critical Thinking is a deliberate meta-cognitive (thinking about thinking) and

cognitive (thinking) act whereby a person reflects on the quality of the reasoning
process simultaneously while reasoning to a conclusion. The thinker has two equally
important goals: coming to a solution and improving the way she or he reasons.

6. What might the following jokes suggest about the way engineers are perceived to be
thinking and/or communicating? What are your views?

(a) An engineer and a sociologist were tasked with finding the height of a church
steeple. The engineer measured the angle to the top of the steeple and
calculated the height using trigonometry. Then, to check the estimate, the
engineer climbed to the top of the steeple, lowered a string until it touched the
ground, climbed back down and measured the length of the string. The
engineer compared the measurement to the estimate, calculated the standard
error, and drafted a report documenting the methods and results. The
sociologist bought the sexton a beer in the local pub and he told her how high
the church steeple was.

(b)

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(c) A pastor (rabbi/imam/priest), a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one

morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. Annoyed, they decide to ask
the greens keeper, who explains that they are a group of blind firefighters who
lost their sight fighting a fire in the clubhouse years ago, and they play for free
whenever they want. The pastor remarked, “That’s so sad. I’ll pray for them.”
The doctor said, “I know an ophthalmologist who might be able to do
something for them.” The engineer said, “Why can’t they play at night?”

7. The following is an excerpt from Goldberg’s article The Missing Basics and Other
Philosophical Reflections for the Transformation of Engineering Education.

Is it your experience or observation that the (seven) basics are missing in the thinking of
student engineers in general? Do a personal profiling of your thinking based on the
missing basics and then compare your findings with those of your groupmates. What do
you discover? Share your group findings with the class.

Failures of Engineering Education and The Missing Basics

The semester has begun. The projects are assigned, and teams of three student
engineers and their advisors are ready to go on the plant trip and find out what the
project is really about. Over 19 years of advising such teams, I’ve found seven
important skills that students have difficulty with. Although there is significant
variation, the following composite set of difficulties is common enough that most
teams require coaching along many, if not all, dimensions discussed.

In particular, senior design students have difficulty

1. asking questions
2. labelling technology and design challenges
3. modelling problems qualitatively
4. decomposing design problems
5. gathering data
6. visualizing solutions and generating ideas
7. communicating solutions in written and oral form

Each of these is briefly considered in turn, associating each of these failings with a
prominent name in intellectual history (Solomon & Higgins, 1996):

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Questions. Students go on the plant trip, and the first job is to learn what the project is,
what has been tried, what critical sources of data and theory exist, and what vendors
have been helpful in solving related problems. Unfortunately, most student teams
have trouble asking cogent questions. We call this a failure of Socrates 101 in
recognition of that philosopher’s role in teaching the world to ask.

Labelling. Engineering students learn math and science but are largely ignorant of
technology itself, exhibiting difficulty in labelling the components, assemblies,
systems, and processes in their projects. Moreover, many projects exhibit novel
patterns of failure or design challenge, and the students have difficulty giving such
patterns names and sticking to those names. This we call a failure of Aristotle 101 as
the systematic naming and categorization of concepts is often attributed to that
philosopher.

Modelling. With sufficient coaching, students learn the names of extant components
and processes and are able to give names to novel patterns, but then they have
difficulty modelling design challenges qualitatively. Of course, if the problem lends
itself to simple calculus or physics computation, engineering students can plug and
chug with the best of them; however, companies don’t pay real money for someone to
do routine engineering calculation. Where students have difficulty is in making lists of
system elements or problem categories or in describing how things work in words.
This is a failure of Aristotle 102 or Hume 101 because of the connections of those
philosophers to categorization and causality.

Decomposition. With some help in understanding key causal and categorical relations
the student engineers regain their footing, and then they have trouble decomposing
the big design problem into smaller sub problems. We call this a failure of Descartes
101 because of that philosopher’s discussions of the fundamental role of
decomposition in the solution of problems.

Gathering data. With the job separated into pieces, usually a number of the pieces
depend on careful data collection from the literature or from the design and execution
of careful experiments. The students’ first impulses are often to model
mathematically, but an efficient and effective solution often depends on simple
experimentation or library work. We call this failure to resort to empirical work or
extant data a failure of Galileo or Bacon 101 because of these individual’s contribution
to the creation of systematic empirical science.

Visualization & Ideation. Students have trouble sketching or diagramming solutions to

problems, and more generally they have difficulty in brainstorming a sufficiently large
number of solutions. Calling this a failure of da Vinci 101 because of that individual’s
renowned imagination and ability to visualize, the problem again is solved with some
coaching.

Communication. Finally, the students have solved the problem, done the experiments,
put together the analyses, and largely solved the problem, and the time has come to
make a presentation or write a report, and to quote the famous line of the Captain
from the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
Calling this a failure of Newman 101 (Paul Newman), the situation again calls for
significant coaching.

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From Goldberg, D. (2009). The Missing Basics and Other Philosophical Reflections for
the Transformation of Engineering Education. Retrieved from http://philsci-
archive.pitt.edu/4551/1/deg-grasso-2009-the-missing-basics.pdf

8. Who is an engineer? What does he/she do? The Faculty of Engineering website
(http://www.eng.nus.edu.sg/ugrad/prospective/engdo.html) states:

Engineers innovate and create all kinds of functional systems, products and services
for modern living by applying a combination of mathematical, scientific and
engineering fundamentals. Engineers solve problems and make things work better,
more efficiently, and less expensively. We have to thank engineers for modern
conveniences at our homes, schools, offices, hospitals and even on ourselves (for
handphones, MP3 players and notebook computers, etc.).

Engineers are designers and builders, making everything from nano-electronic

devices, robots, biopharmaceuticals, and medical equipment to skyscrapers and
highly efficient transportation systems that move millions of people in relative
comfort and safety on the ground, sea, air and even in space. In addition to pushing
the frontiers of science and technology to design and create new products and
services, engineers are also involved in the planning, logistics and management of
people, processes and machinery used in the manufacture of products. Engineers
ensure that the products they manufacture are of the highest quality and meet safety
standards. Engineers are also involved in marketing of technological products and
services.

Engineers administer large-scale technical, engineering and research projects by

being involved in designing, planning, organizing, allocating resources/budgets and
controlling activities that have engineering/technological components. In such
projects, engineers oversee and manage teams of technical and non-technical
personnel. Engineering managers are distinguished from other managers by the fact
that they possess both an ability to apply engineering principles as well as being able
to organize, plan and manage technical projects. Engineers constantly keep pace with
the ever-evolving technology and must be adept at handling resources and budgets in
order to deliver the most cost-effective results.

Engineers not only contribute to modern technology but also to other fields including
architecture, the global environment and medicine. Our world has indeed been
shaped by some of the greatest engineering achievements.

In light of the above description, what is the relevance of engineering leadership to

professional and student engineers? Support your answer with specific examples of
your own as far as possible.

9. Chan and Fishbein (2009) argue that engineers must be cognizant of the notion of the
global engineer:

A new engineer for the 21st century

Engineers need to embrace a broader vision of their professional role as a response to

two inexorable developments: globalization and global issues reaching critical levels
(e.g. global warming, extreme poverty, rising health care costs). All cry out for

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engineering input. These issues are by no means new to the world, or to engineers,
but their current magnitude and scope require more innovative responses. As the
world becomes more complex and interrelated, so do the problems engineers face.
The engineering profession and individual engineers need to adapt or else risk getting
lost in these global changes, thus abandoning our social responsibilities.

Partly in response to these needs, the CEAB recently revised its accreditation
requirements. Attributes that graduates from an accredited program should possess
are now specified in the latest accreditation documents (CEAB, 2008) and are being
phased in over the next five years (see Appendix 1). These new graduate outcomes
represent a shift in the CEAB accreditation philosophy from focusing exclusively on
the class hours that comprise engineering programs to investigating the competencies
of undergraduate engineering program graduates to see if they possess the desired
attributes. The new outcome-based requirements put a greater emphasis on ensuring
that graduating engineers understand the role of the engineer in society; professional
ethics, accountability and equity; and the impact of engineering work on society and
the environment.

But the CEAB did not stop there. In revising its graduate attributes, the CEAB also
responded to a set of complaints from the profession and employers. In the past
decade, there have been increasing concerns about the lack of professional awareness
and low levels of communication and teamwork skills among engineering graduates
(Rugarcia et al., 2000). Indeed, the most common criticism of recent graduates by
industry leaders and alumni is that they lack communication skills and the ability to
work in a team (Mechefske et al., 2005). As a result, the CEAB now requires that
graduates demonstrate competence in teamwork and communication skills.

Why “global engineering”?

As technology develops, especially in the fields of communication and transportation,
it links even more closely every part of our rapidly shrinking world. We are
experiencing increasing global interdependence, with engineers expected to exercise
leadership in confronting the world’s most dynamic and complex challenges.
Engineers are uniquely positioned to offer solutions because of their creative
problem-solving abilities and systems thinking.

However, there needs to be an increase in engineers’ core capacities that will enable
them to work more effectively on global issues. The world needs “global engineers.” In
addition to the graduate attributes specified by the CEAB, the global engineer must
also demonstrate additional characteristics and qualifications.

Over the past three years, in collaboration with engineering faculty members from
across Canada and around the world, and with industrial leaders as well as
engineering students, Engineers Without Borders Canada has led an effort to define
the global engineer. Some of the key attributes are:
• superior communication skills and understanding across different cultures and
languages;
• a facility for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teamwork;
• a well-developed sense of social responsibility and ethics, with due consideration in
his/her personal and professional activities;
• being entrepreneurial; and
• an ability to deal with complexity and systems thinking.

Appendix 1

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CEAB graduate attributes

In 2008, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) mandated that
engineering program graduates must exhibit the attributes under the following
headings:
• a knowledge base for engineering;
• problem analysis;
• investigation;
• design;
• use of engineering tools;
• individual and team work;
• communication skills;
• professionalism;
• impact of engineering on society and the environment;
• ethics and equity;
• economics and project management, and
• life-long learning.

From Chan, A. & Fishbein, J. (2009). A global engineer for the global community.
Journal of Policy Engagement, 1(2), 4-9. Retrieved from
http://globalengineeringinitiative.com/wp-content/uploads/A-global-engineer-for-
the-global-community.pdf

Discuss the importance of (i) critical thinking and communication, and (ii) engineering
leadership for the global engineer, giving concrete examples to support your views as
far as possible.

Reflection
10. How might an appreciation of critical thinking, communication, and/or engineering
leadership literacy help YOU grow as a student engineer? Set three specific personal
goals to start your journey in this course.

Before you leave this class, please form a small group of 3 persons and set up a shared
document in Googledrive for online collaboration next week. Head the document with
your names and tutorial group, and email your tutor access to read and edit your shared
document. Instructions for the online activities can be found in the Tutorial Two
worksheet. Please be sure to complete the online activities before meeting the next class.

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