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Virtues & Vocations, Part 21: Meaningful Work with Guru Madhavan and Chris Higgins

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Episode Topic: Meaningful Work

Kick off the 2025-2026 series with a conversation with two contributors from the August 2025 issue of the Virtues & Vocations magazine, focused on meaningful work. Guru Madhavan is the Norman R. Augustine senior scholar and senior director of programs for the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Chris Higgins is the Chair of the Department of Formative Education at Boston College. He recently published Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education with MIT Press. Join us for a conversation about the purpose of education and how universities can educate for flourishing.

Featured Speakers:
-Chris Higgins, Boston College
-Guru Madhavan, U.S. Academy of Engineering

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/c21824.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Virtues & Vocations.

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Welcome and Introduction

1

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Virtues Invocations Conversations on Character and the Common Good. This is our very first webinar of the New Academic Year. We are so grateful you are joining us at this frenzied but hopeful time. Uh, this series is part of Virtues Invocations, a national forum that is housed at the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame and supported by the Kern Family Foundation. My name is Suzanne Shanahan and I direct the Institute for Social Concerns. I'm also host for this series, virtues Invocations is an effort to foster community, amongst scholars and practitioners from across disciplines who are keen to understand how best to cultivate character and moral purpose in higher education and the professions. This webinar is one of the ways that we facilitate this conversation and this community. Today we have a very special webinar where we welcome two authors from our most recent publication at Virtues in Vocations. It's a crossover event. If you will note, our conversation will run till about 1240 and then we'll open it up for questions. You can submit your questions through a Q and A mechanism, and I'll ask them directly. And with that today, we are just absolutely thrilled. To introduce two extraordinary writers and wildly capacious, often provocative thinkers who contributed to our most recent magazine on meaningful work. Professor Chris Higgins and Dr. Guru Madang. Chris Higgins is associate professor and chair in the Department of Formative Education in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. He also directs transformative educational studies and co-directs the Formative Leadership Education Project. You can already tell there's a theme in his work as a philosopher of education. Higgins works to articulate the existential dimensions of teaching and learning. Defend the idea of education as a public good and recall education to its humane roots. He is the author of two books. The good life of teaching and ethics of professional practice and more recently undeclared a philosophy of formative education, uh, which we had the opportunity to discuss with Chris last fall. Guru Maban is the Norman r Augustine Senior Scholar and senior Director of programs at the US National Academy of Engineering, where he also serves as the founding director. Of the forum on complex UNFI systems. In addition, he has served as technical advisor to the US Department of Health and Human Services and the European Union Malaria Fund. Marvan is the author of Applied Minds, how Engineers Think. A wildly acclaimed book translated into multiple languages and the more recent wicked problems, how to engineer a better world. Also a must read Guru and Chris served on a book panel at our May conference where they struck up quite a conversation. So, everybody out there get ready. This is gonna be a wild one. Welcome Chris. Welcome guru.

2

Thank you, Susanna.

1

Wonderful. Hello Suzanne. Great to have you both here. So I wanted to jump in a bit with the argument each of you is making in the most recent magazine. Chris, in your essay titled The Romance and Reality of Vocational Fit, you Absolutely and dare I say predictably given your fascination with Dear John Dewey. Start with one of his quotes. Uh, where you note nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business and life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance. Into an uncongenial calling. I love that expression, uncongenial calling. Can you give us a sense of what your core argument is here? I know you start out with this tension between sort of work labor and then calling on vocation on the other hand, but maybe a quick summary for those who have yet to read the article.

3

Sure. Yeah. First I'd like to admit that it'd probably be more, um, refreshing to have a philosopher of Ed say, I don't like Dewey at all. I'm sorry, I'm unpredictable. Dewey's awesome. I'm still learning from him. I mean, I've been living with this line that you just read. I've been living with it for decades, and it's been important to me and it's, I'm still evolving in my understanding of it. and that the panel with Guru really helped with that. I tossed out the idea of vocational formation, people needing to confront the question, what's a meaningful form of work to which I'm suited? And, you know, I might have even mentioned this Dewey quote and guru, I'm gonna, I don't know if this is a direct quote, but Guru basically said, I don't know, I think work might be more like an arranged marriage where love comes at best, after some time. And I found that really provocative and really helpful. it didn't seem quite right to me, but it definitely didn't seem wrong to me either. And that's the kind of idea I like. Um. What it put its finger on, I think is a real danger that when talking about the life of work, that we might lapse into a kind of romanticism and we might not be realistic about, for example, just the contingency that you find yourself in one line of work rather than another. maybe it's the what you knew in your family background or maybe it's, a certain course you took in college. There's a lot of contingency. It didn't have to be that way. and yet there's talk about finding your one true calling or the work I was meant to do, and I feel like that does tap into something real as well. So, I set myself the task of trying to meditate on the pull of a kind of realistic side to thinking about vocational choice and enactment without letting it collapse into cynicism. An idealistic side of thinking about vocational choice, vocational fit, vocational enactment without letting that lapse into fantasy. So that's the task I set myself. And maybe I'll pause there and see if you have a follow-up question or I can say more.

1

Yeah, I wonder, um. If we could think a little bit about this tension because, and maybe we can do that best by having gurus share his reflection on an arranged marriage, because I do think this notion of coming to love what you do is an important piece of the equation, and I think you bring that out well in this piece. But I think the way Guru put it was perhaps, uniquely distinctive. So, mm-hmm. Could you reprise that particular thought guru?

Guru Madang on Engineering and Meaningful Work

4

Thank you, Suzanne. And Chris. It's quite an honor for me to be a footnote in your article. So I'm, I'm really, uh, I'm really tickled by this one. the way I even presented, this thought, and I'm very fond of saying this because that is absolutely true. that's precisely how I entered engineering, because everyone around me was doing that. So as an arranged marriage. Years later, I found it as a calling and, uh, I'm glad that you picked up on it because one thing I never heard in my entire upbringing through the end of my college in India was, follow your passion. Something that is ubiquitous in this country, here. And, uh, so I, uh, early in my career, I worked in a power plant, so I was checking, circuit breakers, balancing rotors. dusting switchgear event. And then at a control valve company, I tested for leaks and vibrations and then came a sweeter assignment. I worked on a confectionary plant and I was tuning controllers to keep, um, candy crisp and toffee smooth. Uh, but you know, the point is the stakes weren't always that sweet. at, at a medical device company, I worked on cardiac catheters. I mean, these are lifelines for surgeons. I mean life and death. Accuracy and accountability needs to be maintained in that clean room. So this testing, tuning, checking, just over and over again made me realize that engineering, like life is mostly unglamorous. But that's where, you know, you have a column or a cantilever or a cathedral or a civilization stands or falls, and that's where the true, Vocational meaning emerges. It is in this duty bound, diligent, otherwise boring enterprise that keeps the world going. You truly understand the, the meaning of it. And as I write in my essay, I mean it's a meaningful work should really crack you open. and like show you what you can build and who you can become. Amid this duty boundedness. there's another favorite saying of, um, um, that I, that I like to share. Claude Clark Claremont, uh, British writer who wrote in the 1930s, in a book in a short book called Spanning Spaces. it was, it's, it's a book on bridges. He said The engineer learns most on the scrap heap, so you're dealing with. Stuff around you that might be rusted, discarded. How do you make sense of that? it's, it's, I think, um, a deeply meaningful book to provoke, thoughts on what meaningful work should be. And, uh, engineering, as we all know, at least in, in this context, is, how does the work perform and who will it touch? and how do we carefully account for them? engineering can be an utterly punitive profession. If things go wrong, I mean, you will be, held, accountable and, uh, mother nature is unforgiving. So there are these broader forces here, that is, that are not easy to fall in love with at the get go. One has to really, gain a deeper appreciation of, uh, meaning. in some cases it's a basic DIY project. I mean, meaning is basically what you do, whether you like continuity or not, or whether it's a gig from gig to gig. so I think it is utterly subjective the way I see it. But I think meaning comes also in the impact that the work, produces, uh, the unseen generations, the people we will never see, like the water workers, uh, supporting sanitation at night, uh, and, um, so many other forms of invisible engineering that we take for granted. So it is in the sure invisibility. Becomes visible over time, the meaning of the work that we conduct for others.

1

Great. Great. Um, so Chris, if you think about this in terms of your argument, uh, which early on you talk about this polarization in our thinking, can you flesh that out a little bit more? Because I, I think Guru is offering a. Slightly less, a slightly different way to understand that than your notion of this polarization between the two, but also the relationship and how one builds into the other. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.

3

Yeah. In the beginning of the essay, I start with this observation that if you look at our words we have for work, they tend to divide into very idealistic conceptions of work. Or sort of very, uh, reductive, materialistic, sort of cynical conceptions. There's a kind of polarization that sometimes it happens even in the same word, like a word like vocation means to some people a kind of spiritual calling, and to others it means manual skills taught in avo ed class or something like that. So there's this kind of dichotomy in our language, and I suggest in Dewey and fashion that that. Flows from the fact that we have these other dichotomies that we really haven't dealt with. we're not that comfortable thinking about how work that involves the head and work that involves the hands fits together. I mean, we have campuses, as I mentioned, some devoted to, you know, head type work and others to hand type work. And we have a society that draws invidious distinctions between blue collar work and white collar work. I think there is, some polarization here, some dichotomizing between our instinct to say, work is something, noble work is something fulfilling. And to say work is a job, a word that means originally the amount you can carry in a cart by a horse at one time, you know, uh, we punch in, we punch out. So I think this is a more general problem. I, I've always thought that to be a true, real realist. You have to also be an idealist and vice versa, but they, they pull apart. And it's hard to find that middle ground where you are looking at the world with eyes open, not through misty-eyed sentimentality. And you're acknowledging that there are things beyond the bottom line in life. so I'm, I'm trying to get us to see if we can't sort of cure ourselves from some of our cynicism of work, cure ourselves of some of our romanticism about work. And then see it in a way that's at once realistic and idealistic. And if I could just pick up on one thing, guru said one place. I think we agree. I love this phrase of yours. It's very dramatic

2

that,

3

that work can crack us open, you said, and that, that's, I think that overlaps with my argument. I want to push back against the idea that vocational choice goes like this. First I'm formed and I figure out who I am. Then I decide what kind of work fits me, given who I am. I think that picture's wrong for multiple reasons, but one of the main ones is our working lives are one of our best resources for figuring out who we are and what makes us tick and what we stand for. So when Dewey defines vocation, he defines it as a kind of educative or possibly miseducate environment that sort of funnels. Aspects of the world and brings them before our attention, and therefore shapes the world we live in, in fundamental ways. So, uh, he hated the idea that vocation edu vocational education meant you know what your job's gonna be now train for it. He thought instead, we should be learning through occupations about ourselves, about the world, and of course about the work.

1

So, I. In each of your pictures, I have a sort of an almost idealized sense of, of how work and vocation operate. And so Chris, I think Dewey's model, the way you're thinking about it, makes perfect sense. And if I think experiential, that makes sense as well. but how do we confront the student who is living in a world of constant bombardment? Of these polar opposites, which is get a job, make money, repay your student loans, be able to live in an increasingly adverse, challenging society and find a passion. and you're trying to get by, but you're also supposed to be finding meaning. Sure. In guru's mind. However, meaning meaningless or menial, perhaps our work is, we could see the bigger picture. but I'm 23 and I'm stressed beyond belief, just trying to get by and I, I feel overwhelmed by the simultaneous need to be thinking about what my true calling is or to try to understand how this trivial task. Is creating a world saving civilization

3

guru. Could I start, I'll try to be brief and I hand it to you. please go ahead. Yeah. So today in our opening faculty meeting, our, our dean told us that in 2027 BC like a lot of institutions, is gonna cross the$100,000 mark for tuition, fees, room and board. And you know, this truly staggering number. Um. So I hear you like to expect someone to pay for a process that expensive and then be like, and then after that, take your sweet time figuring out what you want to do. I mean, there are absolute real pressures even in spaces, that are elite and well-funded. I think one of the things I'm trying to do in the piece though is take a little bit of stress around the idea that finding your, your calling means figuring out. Which line of work you should pursue first and perhaps most, but rather finding your calling is as guru suggests with the metaphor of the arranged marriage is something you do within your work. And no, it's not easy. I'll just mention one last constraint and then hands it to guru, which is that, you know, it's nice to say that you're gonna find your vocation within your, your work, but actually I think that a lot of practices. They get swallowed up by the institutions that were originally built to house them. And you know, sometimes you, you might be looking for the kind of core vocational practice that orients you toward the goods, the common good, and, you know, truth, beauty, goodness, what you name it, and you find instead, uh, a form of work that's been kind of cannibalized by its institutions and everyone is. Is working instead toward what the late great Alistair McIntyre called external goods, money, fame, power, prestige. And we've lost track of the internal goods. So it's possible for a university to become a credential machine. It's possible for a hospital to become a lawsuit avoidance machine, and so on and so forth. So I never meant to suggest it's easy, but it also doesn't have to happen in the second semester of your senior year all at once.

1

Great. Thank you, guru.

4

I mean, good, good engineers, uh, know how to effectively blend idealism and realism. The point that Chris was talking about, I mean, like, this is a, a core feature of engineering design. I mean, you start off with this blank sketch with the grandness and the vastness of the, of the, of the planes in the west, western part of the country. Then you have to reduce it to practice. It becomes, you know, takes on the constraints of Fifth Avenue in New York City. So you have to really, you know, be comfortable at, what's typically called the levels of abstraction. Thinking at the level of a car leading to a billion cars, which means climate change, how do you go think logarithmically is a good habit. Uh, the second related point here is like, pertains to. Profound ignorance that we all, experience here. most of us navigate freeways with GPS, but start panicking when there's no cell service. I mean, and, and I, you know, and most of us can't explain how electric kettles work, but then we run around giving advice on. Electric grids and what is the future of electric infrastructure and so forth. So it is this kind of, um, the, the continual, that we all navigate here. So there's this selective comfort that we derive from this mystery. here. I mean, I, I think, and a Dutch, that, that should tell us something about, when a work is meaningful and what makes work meaningful. Uh, and that requires us to acknowledge, the boundaries of our personal knowledge and the systems that we construct, we trust, built on collective expertise. So there's this general vague, phenomena that's happening here that sometimes engineers struggle with. That's why it's so easy for them to be focused on their work and deliver. On the project per the milestone. And um, and that is one of the reasons why also, reflection is, uh, discouraged, even inhibited, uh, at the workplace in the engineering. You want, reflect on philosophy, go do it in your spare time at work. So I think that is a real problem that we have sometime is in engineering and that is just the nature of the. The enterprise here. I wish, uh, you know, I could have a, a Chris Higgins, mold in my mind so I could, uh, think about these things and, um, whether we should do certain things or not, kind of thing. But unfortunately, that is not how the engineering enterprise incentivizes our rewards, people. So, that kind of takes me to, you know, how. Also another dichotomy. Much like the idealism, realism kind of thing. one can learn a lot about their work through failures, and I think it's an integral essential part of the work. But in engineering, I was also taught how not to fail. In fact, failure avoidance is preeminent here. You're dealing with this simultaneously conflicting goals, where you have to fail in something, uh, but it shouldn't affect others. But at the same time, the product shouldn't fail in, in the, in the real world here. And that is especially difficult for people in their twenties to understand it probably. there's even a saying, um, um, in the world of systems engineering that, is somewhat controversial or can you teach systems engineering? Can you teach people thinking holistic systems or does one big. Become, uh, systems in practice so you can get a degree in systems engineering versus be a systems engineering practice. And I think that the same argument is applicable across different, forms of, inquiry here. So how do we go back to that scrap he that I talked about earlier, which is literal and figurative in this case here? I mean the, the broken parts, the failed experiments, uh, the, the, the, the discarded prototypes, shall we say. What do they have to tell us about, this, I mean, can they be meaningful or, I mean, at the same time, we also have, uh, these devices that are fast vanishing. I mean, they're no longer relevant. I mean, even this application is irrelevant in a few weeks when the next upgrade comes. So, this is the kind of, uh, the true challenge, where reflection is required, but you have no time for reflection. Or you're not incentivized for reflection about the kinds of stuff that Chris is talking about. So that's my intervention for this moment. Let's see where we go with it.

1

Yeah, so I think this, um, point on failure is a super interesting one. And I think as an engineer it's especially interesting because essentially what you've said is we learn from failure. and failure is really important part of the engineering process, but you have to do that. In private or before it becomes a public, right. We don't want some huge disaster of engineering in a plane, on a, on a bridge, whatever it is. So there's, that needs to be built into it. I think that it's interesting because it think so much of, the work that's come out over the past decade about. sort of finding, you know, sort of your place in the world has to do with discerning what you're good at. And so failure, is something that it seems very disruptive to young people, so they, they don't do well in a space. It's hard for them to have passion for it. Right. So, Chris, if you think about sort of the role of failure in how you're thinking about things, how do we. Cultivate a sense of failure within our educational processes and systems so that it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm not good at that. I need to then move on to something else.

The Role of Failure in Vocational Development

3

Yeah, it's, it's really challenging, right? I mean, a lot of the students I see at bc, they have a sense that they can and should have like the next 10 years after college mapped out. And that if they make the correct choice, they will be moving onto a pathway that is known in advance, which is, I'm sorry to say it's false. Like it's not the way the world works. Like, I mean even like studies of rationality, haven't they shown that, like with examples, like the famous traveling salesman example of how do you pick the best route to cover all the cities in upstate New York? what order it turns out, like even our best supercomputers struggle with that. And what you have to do is you have to pick a good first step. Then reassess from there, what does the world look like? Where do I go next? And then from there. So, you know, one thing is just trying to tell our undergraduates, you don't need to have it all mapped out. In fact, you can't have it all mapped out. you're gonna take a good first step and then you're gonna say, what have I learned about who I am and what I want and how the world works and what's the best next step? I have a former, grad student who. Ended up on the committee, she didn't even want to go to her 20th college reunion. It was a Ivy League school. She didn't want to go and she ended up actually on the committee to plan it. And she put together this panel where people talked about basically all the things that kind of messed up their plans and went wrong with their lives. but saying it went wrong with their lives is maybe a little too simplistic. And it, and you know, at a place that breeds a sense of we're all the top and we have to be the best. It's hard to think, not to think Well, I must be the only one that my plans didn't work out. But finally, 20 years later, there was a group of people willing to admit life has been a series of weird and wonderful and disturbing, you know, sudden left turns, right turns, and um, and it was so well received.'cause everyone can breathe a sigh of relief, right when we admit to each other. Um, that things that plans, you know, are made to be rewritten and things are can't be planned out in advance like that,

4

you know, Jose Ortega go, said that, I mean, to be an engineer and nothing but an engineer is to be everything and actually nothing. so I think he was talking about this, this basic identity of an engineer and picking up on Chris's theme here. How do we, what do you become 10 years from now? I mean, we have all become something else from what we originally set out. I mean, looking back to my high school essays, psych, college, essays, I'm, I'm a completely different person, yet I think I'm going in the general direction, of what it is. And I think Mother Nature somewhat operates, I mean the greatest designer, depending on how you read the word designer and use this in context here. Three simple principles. I mean, vari selection, variation, replication. So you basically pick what it is and, you know, and then you vary the fitness function, and then you select the best practices, see what works. It's a very iterative, boring, unglamorous procedure, that, uh, mother nature, employees. And, uh, I think, um, we have, uh, gotten really good at copying some of those techniques and some of our really, iterative algorithms and so forth. But, um, evolution also works differently. That conveys, meaning in fairly stunning ways. And let me give you this example, from, again, from the biological world, uh, the concept of rain species. Byron Newbury, who's a, you know, uh, scholar of engineering as well, has written about this in a paper, and I'm struggling to remember which year, but he talked about, again, the ring species as a metaphor. so if you look at the California Central Valley, uh, you have, uh, the encina salamanders that are all over there and, uh, they can't cross the, that valley because it's hostile, but they move around it. So they interbreed with neighbors and they maintain a gene flow. So in the south part of the value we see two distinct species of salamanders. All evolved from a common ancestor, but they look completely, different. One is, uh, completely spotless and brown in color, and the other one is, uh, yellow of a big black blotches on this. They're all from the same ancestor, but they look completely different to the point that when they look at it, you think it's two completely different species, but they're not the in the full evolutionary, Context. It's difficult to tell where one salamander type ends and where another begins. So it is this one of those blurry, domains. They slowly turn into each other. Engineers too, I think similarly cross that line from being an engineer into being something else. And, um, and again, I can see that in my own career I'm a different kind of a salamander now. I mean, I've, uh, also said that, uh, I used to be a freshwater engineer in technology development, but now I'm an saltwater engineer working, swimming in the oceans of public policy and whatnot. So the engineering identity evolves and so does the meaning of the work that we do, even if they're rooted in common principles and so forth. CO is also, uh, exact same pattern, you know, from technology to, writing even in my case. here, each stage looks separate, but they follow an arc. Again, going back to Chris's point, and I think we need to trust this continuum, and I think in this continuum emerges in the, in the truest sense of complex adaptive systems, meaning emerges. It's not fixed. And, uh, meaningful work therefore allows identities and professionals to evolve accordingly. So what seems like a rupture, like an abrupt discontinuity to different species at once? Jarringly is actually continuity. So how do we, how do we remember that? it's definitely not possible to appreciate the fact, maybe in the twenties, but. I think as educators, we might have something to do with it. I mean, rely on the time tested, design practices of mother Nature that allows us to create two seemingly different systems that are just one.

3

So guru would you say then if you were mentoring a young engineer and they said to you, I think I'm growing out of engineering, you might say to them. No, I think you're just rowing in your understanding of what engineering is and what it means to you.

4

That is profound. That's that is exactly it, because there. Engineering as a kind of a, a multipurpose degree. A lot of people get their degree of to kind of, I don't know, for boost their analytical things or improve their earnings and whatever it is. Time after time it's been shown that engineering, you know, helps economy and, uh, so people go into Wall Street, people go into media arts, entertainment design. So it is pretty versatile, uh, that way. So, One of my mentor always says, once an engineer, always an engineer, even if you don't do engineering kind of thing. So I think, Chris, what you have said is the, is is the most important point that we need to aggressively articulate. I think you need to understand how you are growing with the profession that's also growing with you. Yeah.

1

So, I would say in each domain of your work, it's fair to say you're both fairly self-reflective, but also reflective. About the particular professions within which you find yourselves. Uh, could you talk about an example of, failure or a moment of reconsideration in your own trajectory, uh, that's helped you come to the kind of thinking you're sharing now?

4

Well, I, I, I can volunteer first here. I mean, I almost failed my control theory exam. It was really tough and, uh. it's, it's one of those situations, it's a three-part exam where you have the, like a 15 point question that led into a 30 part question that led into the bigger question. The trick that my professor played was the answer to question one was an input to the second question. That led to the third question. So if you've got the first step wrong, you're done, basically. So after I proceeded and I'm like two thirds of the way, and then I realized something is not clicking, and I specifically remember that it was a plot, that I had to put it on a log log scale and something was off. So where did I go wrong? Second question or the first question. And what logical flaw led to it? Uh, it was, uh, complicated here, even though it was a very linear test. It tested your understanding of non-linearity, how to systems behave on very different scales. that eventually led me to be, you know, become a better student, beyond the classroom. And of course, um, when I was taking the GRE exam, I almost failed a verbal section. So I kind of over years that nudged me toward, Communication and writing of complex concepts and so forth. So these two are, I think, distinct drivers in my motivation as I've reflected on it in recent years.

3

Great. Thank you. Chris. Maybe I would talk about the somewhat slow learning curve at that in terms of sort of realizing truly that I am a writer that I love writing. I had a blast writing undeclared. I hope that carries over and other people have fun too, but I certainly did, and that wasn't always true. I was in my head about how to do philosophy, right? I was writing for external due to external pressures like tenure and promotion, and it just took me a long time to give myself permission to develop my own style to embrace. The form of the essay, which I think is very different than the kind of voiceless disembodied research report that dominates, academic journals. and you know, I also had to give up this certain kind of idea in my, in my super ego, if you will, from philosophy that a good philosophical texts moves all readers from assumptions. They could not challenge to conclusions. They must accept. Through Inde indefeasible arguments and it's baloney. but it took me a long time to throw out that old baloney and try to move people with my writing and, uh, to be more like a dramatist of ideas and try to stage the questions, in a provocative way and explore answers, but in a way that owns the contingency of my responses. So it's not so much a clear case of failure except it's just that it took me. A couple of decades to actually realize I love writing and now I do it, for me, takes a while.

1

So Chris, in that couple of decades process, were, was there any definitive moment or did it really just evolve over time for you?

3

No, it was, it was one of those, salamander kind of moments that Guru was talking about where. Um, you could certainly see elements of, I mean, I think, I think my first book, the Good Life of Teaching has some voice and I don't think it's completely impersonal and dry, but I was still writing for the sort of tenure committee in my head, you know, um, also for the real one. but, so I think it was more of a gradual thing where, I would force myself to stay in the chair a certain number of hours, but not ne necessarily notice I don't actually wanna get up.

2

Mm-hmm. I

3

wish I didn't have a meeting or a thousand emails right now, because I love trying to figure this out and trying to find the words that will really make it compelling. So I wish there was a, I've been reading lately about epiphanies, and I think that's a really cool concept. For me, it was a little bit, it was more gradual. And then with undeclared, it just suddenly became clear in, in hindsight. I don't really care what the official way to do this is. I'm gonna find out what I think is the best way to make these ideas come alive, and I'm gonna stick to it

1

as I think about this in each of the way you, both of you talk about your work. There's an extraordinary kind of confidence in the ways that you do it, which I just think is, is just really hopeful and striking. I wanted to just pivot briefly to. a term that gurus use project verification. So how do we think of the challenges of work between fragmentation and continuity? Um, you talked about the thousand emails in your day, the kinds of little things that are disruptive that have to be done, but don't feel super satisfying. how should we think about that phenomenon in work? As we're trying to find meaningful work,

The Role of Projects in Engineering

4

uh, in the engineering, everything has become a project. If it's not, it'll become one. I mean, whether it is NOS Arc or the Newark International Airport, everything has to be a project. and there are serious economic, um, you know, elements associated with it. I mean, one fifth of the global economic activity happens through projects in China. One half. GDP is project based in advanced economies. I think it's a third or so. So we have become, I think this is, this is the problem statement here. We have become so project focused, which is good for efficiency, accountability, closure, initiation, negotiations and whatnot. and engineers, whether they like it or not, they're also good at navigating these multitude of processes. Again, international standards, coordination and everything. uh, especially when you're talking about mega projects, which are a billion dollars or more, that involve 10,000 or more professionals, people have gained a lot of experience. And how do you manage and effectively deliver on them? is something, uh, that we don't talk, uh, much. It's only seen in practice here. There are many design heuristics that we have to comply with and everything. Uh, and then if you look at a standard systems engineering diagram or something, you'll just completely get lost in this maze of, uh, these color coded block diagrams, wirings and whatnot. One has to lead to another. so the risk there is one, can it, it lose the overall side of the system. That's, uh. Even if that is not the case, even if you have the complete understanding, whether you're for building an advanced aircraft or something like that, but how is that aircraft situated in the broader context of airspace and society that is funding it, is, sometimes sidelined here. And I think this goes back to the point that we are touching on there is this fragmentation part of it, that, uh, that might potentially. Imp from understanding the true purpose, of the project here. So where one project ends and where other begins, and I've been in circumstances myself, where I've worked on like projects with different things and they have overlaps. We have all done that. so how do properly reflect. on this. and, um, and how do you even eventually to zoom back and ask this question? I mean, is what I did, was that even meaningful or would that call it meaningful work? So that's, that kind of assessment is just simply declining or, is disincentivized, right now here. So I think, um. Projects have value, or the objectification has value here, but I think we're risking the loss of the broader question, uh, about why we do circumstances of, things the way we do it. I don't have, I don't know where we are going with this is also a sincere question that I have.

1

Great. Chris.

3

Maybe I'll just add that the university too struggles with, specialization, hyper-specialization, and even though we are the one of the sites in society that is entrusted to be able to see the big picture and reflect on things, we're often not that great at talking about the big picture of our own enterprise. what is a university for? What is college for? What does it mean to be an educated person? I would love to see institutions that. Put those questions at their center so that there's a community of learning devoted to all the spec specific questions, but also to the question, what does it truly mean to be educated?

1

Great. I wanna open it up for at least a couple of questions here. Uh, the first one is for Chris. can you expand a little bit more on the idea of internal and external goods? I think you mentioned earlier how institutions have cannibalized vocations. I'd love to talk a little bit you to talk a little bit more about that.

3

Yeah, so this is one of the many powerful ideas, in Alistair McIntyre's after virtue, in chapter 14 where he lays out his conception of a practice. He admits that no practice has survived any length of time unsupported by institutions. He's not imagining that practices float free in the air. He also admits that when things are going well, there's a healthy symbiosis, uh, between the practice as such and the institution, um, that supports it. But what's cool about his account is the way in which he shows that we can also have a situation in which an institution kind of lets a practice die or even kills it off, but continues to use the language of the practice as if the animating goods are. Learning and formation in the case of a college or healing in the case of doctoring and nursing and, justice in the case of law, and so on and so forth. and the language continues, but it turns out that it's really, we've begun to focus on external goods. External goods are, um, risks. They are, you know, limited in scope. If one person gets more of them, somebody else gets less. That's not true of internal goods. He says. When somebody achieves one of the goods internal to a practice, everybody rejoices. Now listen, if you're a baseball player and the other team, they're, you know, hits a 500 foot home run, you're not happy that you just went down to zero. Everyone marbles at the fact that somebody just hit that ball 500 feet, that inc. That perfect swing exit velocity of 112 miles per hour. Perfect launch angle. I'm trying to channel gurus field here, the engineering of baseball. and so there's a way in which internal goods are non-rival risk in a way in which external goods are internal goods Also take apprenticeship to appreciate at first when you join a practice, you don't detect them. Because what it means to apprentice to a practice is to learn to evolve in your, perceptions, in your values, to be able to truly appreciate the goods that animate the practice and not just, uh, the external one. So, maybe you go into teaching'cause you think it's kind of cool to stride around and give your lecture and write things on the board and af over time you realize like, okay, that's superficial. the good has to do with seeing somebody. You're helping them come to an insight that's changing their life or something like that.

1

So, uh, it sounds a bit like guru's metaphor of the arranged marriage to a certain extent. You come to realize in your partner all the good things. so we have a question from a fellow writer in, uh, the magazine, Dan Graf here at the Institute for Social Concerns, uh, who says, I've really enjoyed this fruitful conversation. This goes to either or both of you. How do you probe further these questions about meaning, value, and vocation at the workplace? Given the power differentials between employers and most of their workers, an engineer or philosopher might experience the power differential, way more equitably and positively than the line cook, the clerical worker or the Uber driver. Do these ideas apply to all workplace scenarios and should they,

3

I have a one-liner guru and then I'm gonna hope, hopefully you're gonna come into the rescue here. My one-liner is just, it's not a joke, it's just that one of the goods we distribute in society is meaningful work and it's a brutal competitive process and some people get stuck with work that's incredibly chopped up. Heteronomous, other people are calling the shots, no room for creative control, and that is a deep form of inequality who gets access to meaningful work. All right, your turn guru.

4

Thanks for the deep question. I'm thinking about, uh, what, uh, Frederick, uh, HAI called it as a religion of engineers and, uh, kind of relates to what Chris was talking about, this internal good or internal goodness of something that, that. Immediate pleasure of doing something about it. Engineers love, producing quick fixes, and they are, rewarded, remunerated, promoted, recognized, whatever. I mean, I think there's something of value there in producing. A quick fix, a technical fix, uh, to achieve that thing. Now, that also produces a social order, a kind of an understanding among engineers. You belong to this club. Yeah. You're an engineer, you're well, you're a real engineer. That kind of, the conversation happens that people are constantly gauging, okay, where can we deploy? And, and this is also, uh, visible in, um. Large scale teams, large, where people, maybe more on the abstract side of engineering versus the extremely hyper specialized type of engineers. So the, they're always teething problems. Uh, there. So I think there's this instantaneity of, uh, this kind of this. Satisfaction that comes with problem solving. And I think, uh, and I, I've said this openly too. I mean, the moment you conclude with problem solving that the real trouble begins, you have to really get to the other, uh, ways of engaging with, problem set. So even within engineering, there's this hierarchy or kind of an order of, recognition or granting merit. it's. That I think we are, uh, confronting. But if you go beyond engineering too, I think there are, a lot of differentials that we have to, encounter. And other, way to think about this is like we are also obsessed with the innovation. And I've written, on this over the past few years, disruption has become more darling. Yet, if you look at what truly enables innovation, maintenance, um, and if you go to Google Engram and see how it is trending, it is practically vanishing from our vocabulary. So the very thing that leads to the new is being neglected. so I think the, if you even look at the awards and the honors that we give out to engineers, it's always for the new and the novel and the nifty and the greatest impact. And, uh, the invisible systems that support, those, are neglected. So there's this inherent politics of recognition that, um, uh, the person who is asked this question is getting to, in engineering. I don't, I don't think we're doing a good job of, uh, even confronting this, openly. Uh, and I think naturally it spreads, broadly as well. So I'm just reflecting on the question rather than responding to it. I hope that's okay.

1

Okay, great. Thank you. the next question, there's a sentiment out there, that sometimes referred to as working for the weekend or the idea that work provides us just an instrumental economic good, but that the meaning and wellbeing of life. Are derived from the activities outside of work. If someone lives by this value system and is content with it, is there something wrong with that? Or at least should one be striving for something more?

3

I like Dewey on this point. Dewey defines a vocation as a meaningful, continuous purpose of activity. He doesn't think we only have one. In fact, he has a powerful argument for the impossibility of having only one vocation. He doesn't think that the set of paid activities and the set of vocational activities, is, fully overlapping. So we may have a paid activity that's non-vocational, and we have many vocational activities that are unpaid. So the person who's working for the weekend, I'm imagining if we fill in that case study, we have somebody who, you know what, um, what they do from nine to five, Monday to Friday. That is for them, basically a paycheck. Okay. But then they have three or four other activities in their lives that are these meaningful vocational pursuits where the aims matter and where those aims. Trying to realize those aims, make them bump into cool aspects of the, of the world. Discover aspects, the of themselves, and continue to grow, whether that's gardening or learning the cello or community organizing or what have you.

1

Great. Thank you. I think

4

Chris answered it very effectively for both of us, so thank you.

1

Okay, good. a next one. Failure has been a thread, or a theme throughout this conversation, and I'm struck by the fact that failure looks different when you're 18 or 19. How do you imagine inviting young people into these questions and insights that seem to be connected to a distinct perspective? So when you're 18 or 19, failure seems pretty apocalyptic.

Balancing Work and Personal Fulfillment

4

Well, uh, so interestingly, I mean, at least in my line of work, um, failure is integrated into even in the curriculum early on. So, for example, back then we used to have workshops and um, you know, engineering design forces and so forth. And we had a course on, um, metrology learning how to measure. That was like six months. If you, uh, even a, there's a, a specialized discourse on how to use a ary helper, that kind of thing. And so it's, uh, it's uh, you are basically put into this ring knowing, or, expected to learn all the different ways a system will catastrophically fail. So at least in some areas of engineering, I think this is, uh, integrated into it, and now you are then taught, or maybe you're given projects, uh, to think about how not to make those happen. Whatever you did it on paper, how do we avoid it? So this kind of, these experiential or case study based approaches is, uh, integrated into engineering and, uh, or at least a good engineering courses, that we can for granted. So. I don't think it is too far in a concept, for, engineers who come through, but I think we fail when we don't zoom out from that. I mean, okay, you know, how to create a fix and then we move on and, uh, come up with a different patch. But I think reflecting on those failures is, uh, it's a fruitful exercise that not all engineers are capable of. Um, still.

1

Great. Chris, do you have

3

any thoughts? Uh, I think the questioner makes a great point that until you've had multiple failures, you've, you've survived. Each one is gonna loom larger, but I think not all 18 year olds are created equal. And we're creating a, a generation with such a high stakes process now, around college that, um, we're really exacerbating that problem. So, yeah, it, it helps to have more life experience and realize you can fail and get back up. And it would've been nice if we could have had, say, a high school curriculum where there's room to fall down and get back up and not this feeling that one, one B in a class might be the GPA difference. That means you don't get into the schools you really want to get into and so on and so forth. So for me, the question puts us in mind is how do we cure this current arms race? Uh, which I think is really. Mis at, its at its core, even though it's the education system we're talking about.

1

Yeah. Great. one final question. I would love to know, one book, not your own, that you would recommend to the audience that speaks to these issues.

4

This is interesting. I'm just gonna, this book that's right next to me, it's. Shattered Lands five partitions in the making of modern Asia, Sam Rimple. And it talks about, uh, essentially failure modes, but historically applied. So I've been reading, uh, I've just started reading it, so Great. Thank you.

3

I'm really into this, um, psychoanalytic essayist named Adam Phillips. He's been described mm-hmm. As a modern Emerson, or he writes these essays. Influenced by his psychoanalytic practice and his interest in Freud and Winnekot and others. But they're just amazing essays exploring the sort of ethics of everyday life. what are we doing? Why, what do we want? so I've been, they're, they're, I'm not bragging by saying listing three titles'cause they're all really short. But the three I've been looking at lately are, um, a book called On Getting Better. One called on Wanting to Change and one which has a very intriguing, title and I'm only about 10 pages in, called On Giving Up.

1

Great. Well, thank you. Well,

3

on that note,

4

we should give up.

1

Yes. With that, I think we're gonna call the conversation. I just wanna thank you so much, for both writing essays for the magazine, but also joining today. This was a whole lot of fun. For folks who were interested in a copy of the magazine, please reach out. We're happy to send you one. thanks to everybody who joined us, and please join us again next time on September 22nd. For a conversation about his new book on character with retired general Stanley McChrystal. So thank you both. This was great fun, um, and really appreciate you joining.

3

Thank you.