Ep.68 In conversation with Dr Mike Cook: building confidence in a changing landscape

Maria Rampa: Hi I’m Maria Rampa and welcome to this special episode of Engineering Reimagined where we speak to one of the world’s most influential structural engineers.

Dr Mike Cook has contributed to numerous landmark projects globally, including the Tsim Sha Tsui Cultural Centre in Hong Kong, the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court at The British Museum in London and the Hauptbahnhof – Dresden’s Main Railway Station.

In 2019 he instigated the UK Structural Engineers Declaration of Climate and Biodiversity Emergency, after which he was named the Institution of Structural Engineers 2020 Gold Medallist in recognition of his infectious enthusiasm for structural engineering and his leadership in response to the challenges of climate change.

In today’s episode, we’re fortunate to hear from Mike and Aurecon’s Chief Engineering, Eminence and Innovation Officer Tanya de Hoog. Tanya is also the 2024 President of the Institution of Structural Engineers and interviewed Mike for a special IStructE webinar series featuring celebrated engineers talking about their careers, passions and inspirations.

In this conversation Tanya and Mike discuss the importance of collaboration, finding the confidence to speak up early in your career and how it’s vital to maintain the human element of engineering, particularly in the face of the growing adoption of AI.

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Tanya de Hoog: I'm absolutely delighted and privileged to be joined by Mike Cook. I've known Mike for a couple of years in person, but for many, many years by reputation. As many of you will know, he's an advocate for sustainable design, and his work is influenced by nature, emphasising resource efficiency and beauty. So really happy to have you here, Mike, and look forward to hearing a little bit about your background.

Mike Cook: I want to give you a whistle stop tour of the things, that inspired me in my career, the people that inspired me, and the messages that I'd like to throw out there for people, particularly those just starting their career, or looking for a change, As a teenager, we didn't have the internet. It didn't exist. We had libraries. We still do, fortunately. But this library became my inspiration for finding out more about the world, going there every Saturday. It was effectively like switching on Google. And one of the things that really excited me was the Sydney Opera House that was coming close to completion, and there was a lot of talk with the suspension bridges, the Severn Bridge, had just been opened. Lots of exciting things happening in the world of engineering, which started to get me asking more and more questions about who does this sort of stuff. I thought engineering might have been quite interesting, but it was totally, absorbing fascinating. Fry had written books, was doing research around the commonality between how nature built and how we should build. And it was all very much about minimal materials, because in nature the life uses its materials that are available to the greatest possible efficiency. And so I started to be inspired by nature and then picking that up when I went around, and seeing natural forms in the architecture, in the bridges, in the buildings that were at Cambridge where I was studying. And so I began to realise, buildings aren't just for their own sake I suppose, that they are ultimately for making better lives. And I suppose that came quite early to me. It wasn't something they taught me at university at all. So I also say here it's good to jump, or at least, recognise and allow yourself to be pushed into the deep end.

The collaborations that you can form when you're engineering are absolute gold dust, collaborating with the right people, not just good engineers who can become your mentors, but also architects and very good clients. And so some of these very early projects that I was fortunate enough to be put in charge of, they had brilliant, clients who were passionate about doing things differently.

Wonderful architects who knew or had the confidence to do that. And I was supporting that and bringing the technical ideas in. If you're working with people who are going to push you and say, no, but I don't want to do anything that anybody's done before. Fantastic. Jump at that opportunity. Always be looking for not doing the same thing project by project, so you learn. Well, looking back, I realised was so important was this, creating a reason, a purpose, and what I call an agenda. And I think Fry Otto, in the natural world, bringing natural forms and solving our engineering challenges by thinking about nature and how nature would do, it seemed to have become a bit of an agenda. And when you're in a meeting, don't sort of sit back and wait until somebody wants you to have a thought, sit forward. That's the way I put it to people, with some ideas of you want to achieve and you will make a difference. I have to mention that it was only 30th of May 2019 that I finally really woke up to the issues of the climate emergency. We must and can do a lot to reduce our carbon footprint. We can cut the carbon in our designs. We can build less, persuade clients that do they really need the building to be that big, or maybe even do they really need a new building? And we can reuse old buildings.

As engineers, your personal footprint is just one person. But if you can persuade a client to halve the size of a building, that will have at times 100 times a thousand impact. And even beyond that, if you can start persuading people to think differently about design and what matters about the built environment, and even start to think about the Nomic equations, why do we value so much GDP? You know, countries, why don't we value the quality more strongly? So this idea of shifting to a new way of thinking, a new paradigm, if you like, starts to bring in a different quality to people's lives in the built environment. And it means that you're setting new priorities into what you're trying to achieve with your projects. Way past a little bit of structural efficiency or making absolutely sure that the people's safety is at the forefront of your mind.

People's long-term security in an environment that will continue to support them and their families and their families, families, in the future. So we have to start looking much wider, further forward for the context of our projects, it's not just about the now, it's about the future. And of course, it's difficult for, you know, a very young, engineer to necessarily have that much influence. But as you grow and you have a stronger voice, you can start to talk to your client more intelligently about, are they using the right parameters for that project outcomes? And I think for the future, if we want our projects to have a long life and be respected in the long-term future, we have to expect, the standards of future generations will be much, much higher. And they will look back on us with dismay if we failed to recognise the needs of the future generations.

Tanya de Hoog: You spoke about having the confidence to speak. And I think this is a really interesting concept because often as engineers, we don't like risk. And so we like to make sure we know everything. Speaking for myself at least, and I think, many engineers I’ve worked with, we like to know that we're very confident about what we've done before we speak up. As we're moving into this rapidly evolving future where the engineer is pivotal in keeping people safe, and protecting society and the environment, we need more people to have a voice and perhaps be a little bit less humble, but at the same time, be confident. How did your confidence evolve? Was it the diverse projects and people you worked with? Did that come with experience? What kind of advice would you give people in that sense?

Mike Cook: I was the shyest, least confident person you could imagine. At least that's what I thought I was when I was cycling to the library when I was 15 or something. And those books were my safety net. I wasn't football playing, rugby player sort of guy. But I found just a few people who I seemed to resonate with, and I was able to build on that. I mean, you can't expect, when you haven't got the experience. It can be a bit dangerous to be overconfident. So it's okay for it to grow gradually. I think, the basic knowledge an engineer has is very important. You can't underplay the fact that we must understand the basics of how materials behave and respond to stresses and strains. And that's what people look to us for when we're in a team. I was interested in more than that. And I realised that if I talked about more than that to clients, architects and so on, they were very happy to listen too. Don't let yourself say, I’m only the structural engineer. Therefore I can only talk about bending moments and choice of steel or concrete kind of thing. Join in all of the conversations, in a modest way to start, but then say, well, why don't we turn the building round? Why isn't the building shorter rather than high? And why haven't you got better shading on the south side and just be part of the design, be part of the co-creation. It's not my job to say these things, but give, give ideas and that when it's then taken right, it's taken on board and people say yeah, yeah great idea. Then your confidence builds. It's almost like learning to swim or something. You've got to get your toe in the water and you realise that's okay. And then you go up to your waist and you're still alive. And, you just got to keep testing, testing, testing so long as you're still excited and interested and, and not stupid, you know, you know your basics. You'll find your way in, just step by step. I think that's what happened for me.

Tanya de Hoog: Those basics, I think, are really important as well. I believe those technical, those foundational basics are essential now, as they always have been and will be in the future. Is that sort of what you're saying in terms of you build off those basics and that's the work that you have to do in the beginning.

Mike Cook: It's your foundation. But it's not the whole thing.

Tanya de Hoog: It’s not everything

Mike Cook: Yes

Tanya de Hoog: It’s just the starting point.

Mike Cook: I must add something, it sounds a bit corny to say, you know, but I've always found myself working with excellent engineers. So, choosing who you work with, when you're in the position of recruiting, recruiting carefully, giving people some room for themselves to grow as well, not stifling them. I've worked with some wonderful engineers, younger than me, who understood some of the basics and some of the new technologies or even knew how to build better models than I could, physical models. So, working together, you could create something whole. I could have done none of the projects that I've done without fabulous engineers around me. You have to take some responsibility for that yourself, whether you decide that you're in the wrong firm because none of that exists or you're not working properly with those people. But don't underestimate the importance of the team.

Tanya de Hoog: That human element and the people aspect of engineering comes through quite strongly in your story in terms of your career, but also your perspective on what are some of the most powerful aspects of how we actually deliver our projects. That's really interesting in this moment where we're very caught up in the change into a digital world, which is rapidly evolving and the impact it's having on engineering. I personally think that that human aspect is even more important. The ability to develop trust and a culture of respect in order to work in the most powerful way. What do you think about people that say that engineering practice, as we know it, is not going to exist in the same way because digital tools, including AI, will take over a large portion of what we currently do.

Mike Cook: We have to be prepared for advances in technology, increasingly rapid ones. I'm very confident in a way that we will adapt. Trying to look into the future as to how we'll adapt. It feels more and more important that, that engineers even at college that we help engineers become whole people, we help them acquire the attributes that they will need to be robust in the face of change it feels to me, less and less necessary to do the hard graft that we used to have to do. I was filling in sheets of paper for days and days on end in order to put it into a computer to do a relatively simple, linear analysis of that building. None of that's necessary. It hasn't been necessary for decades. But that did in those days. So what a waste of time. What an uncreative thing to have done in in my early years of a career. So much of that will not have to waste our time with. We can replace it with much more important communication skills, co-creation skills, idea generating, communicating what we want to do with the communities that are going to be influenced by it, affected by it and getting there and their contributions in, and building that into the responses that we build. We'll look back and think, oh, did we ever do anything of any value when we were so blinkered and wasted so much time on scratching out drawings because we didn't even have digital drawings, it was all done with ink on plastic. It's potentially very, very exciting. I think the boundaries of structural engineering versus civil infrastructure versus electrical versus mechanical, they might start to blur a bit too, because the need for that level of focus, you know, I think it's quite possible to imagine qualities of a really great engineer could spread across a wider field of work. Maybe people could be doing buildings and vehicles and tunnels as well as bridges as well as tall buildings, it may be rather less necessary to focus tightly, which could be quite beneficial. We could get some quite creative thinking, able to work across a broader spectrum of infrastructure projects.

Tanya de Hoog: Knowing that the climate emergency is upon us, knowing that engineers have this pivotal role in society and that you are giving people permission, I guess, to have an agenda to step up, to have a voice and have that confidence. Where do you think engineering education needs to go, or is it okay as it is in order to create the engineers of the future? And leverage all of this potential that we have?

Mike Cook: I do think we undervalue technology and engineering capabilities in our young school members. Primary school. Secondary school. There have been attempts at engineering, higher levels at school, but they've not really embedded. For me, translating science and maths into real change, engineering, is a fantastic way of exciting young people in science and maths, showing them the practical, life saving, life enhancing opportunities, of translating science and maths into people's lives is so important. So I think we need to respect the qualities of engineering thinking and outcomes at a much earlier age. We have to loosen our tie on all the kind of traditional, you must do all these things in maths, in science, in art, in literature. And I suppose in a way help young people see the outcomes of education, the outcomes of what they're learning. Not just passing the exam is the only outcome that matter. It's actually understanding the world.

Tanya de Hoog: The impact and being inspired by what's possible through engineering.

Mike Cook: Yes. And then the same is true then of universities. There's a lot of good stuff happening more than ever. But there's still that connection between what you're learning and how you're learning it at university with how it really becomes valuable in the real world. Making that link isn't always happening. I think it happens more strongly in the architectural world. But they can lose sight of the science too quickly. So I think broader education. And it might be more possible with AI and some of the drudgery work of engineering being automated gives more space for develop the character or the attributes of the person. And I think ultimately, build the excitement, the enthusiasm, the passion to ensure that people move into careers where that excitement and passion can turn into real stuff.

Tanya de Hoog: How do you feel about the workplace and surrounding environment and whether it plays a major role in creativity for structural engineers? To add to that, I'm interested to know what you think about, surrounding ourselves by different people in an engineering environment and how that impacts creativity and innovation as well. So drawing it back to people and planet in the everyday environment.

Mike Cook: [It's not just the physical environment, is it? It's the mental environment of people around you. Well, on the physical, there's a lot that we can put up with if we're with the right people and have the right level of excitement. You know, we could do it in a shed or we could do it in a luxury hotel, or we could do at home, I suspect. So I wouldn't get so excited about that. But I am passionate, personally, about the size of the table. And it absolutely drives me completely mad when you have a design meeting where we're supposed to solve some design problem, and you'd sit in such a big table that nobody can touch each other. There's no way you're going to share an idea on the table. So, I've certainly been known to say right table in half. Let's move to a different room. So you need to be able to get up and pin things on the wall if you can't use your table. So, I think the physicality that make sure you're co-creating, make sure you're sharing the drawings, the diagrams, the doodles and not all hiding behind computers as well has always been very important for me I work with the empirical college students, teaching something called creative design. And we work in teams of eight, and nowadays they tend to use their laptops. And I was really, really worried. But I must say the shared documents on the laptop, people facing each other around a table can be quite productive because you're all seeing the same thing. But the physical environment needs to make sure you can share. You can share ideas, share what each of you is thinking, through diagrams, in terms of people. Bring in other disciplines. And it was absolutely fantastic to be able to sit with all the all the colours of the rainbow and. Hey, can I just kind of see for ten minutes? I'll buy the coffee. And to say, what on earth is this all about? I've been told this. Is that true? And so you'd learn a huge amount beyond your discipline. And I think being in an environment where you can do that is very, very helpful. And if it's not something you can do within the confines of your own office, perhaps to make the most use of when you're in a team environment where other professionals have come together and sort of say, can I have half an hour of your time after the meeting because I want to know more about this. So I think trying to make sure you have conversations with as broad a diversity people as you can is good. And sometimes an office environment doesn't allow that, and you may need to make a bit more effort.

Tanya de Hoog: To create that space for collaboration. So I'm going to finish with, if you were starting out as a graduate in today's industry, what would you have done differently?

Mike Cook: It's quite hard to predict, isn't it? But for someone who's now at that door. See a little bit of a picture as to what you want to be able to be involved in in ten years’ time for some people, they might want to become much more knowledgeable in a very tight space and maybe move into academia and do research. Others broaden it out substantially and maybe become planners or something, so they can impact on decision making rather on bigger scale. So try to find a passion, coming to talks with various engineers, listening to them and just trying to say, well, how do how does that resonate with me? Am I like that? Could I do that sort of thing? It's quite possible for you to say, no, that's not me. But if we can help you find yourself by saying, I don't want to be like that, then that's fine. It's about finding a kind of path, because I think if you don't find something of a path, people to follow, their ideas to follow, a kind of, I want to be someone who can design the next Sydney Opera House. You'll be a bit rudderless. And so you won’t know to say yes to things or no to things?

Tanya de Hoog: What comes across to me more than anything is the people that you've worked with, the people that inspired you, the impact of your work. So it's been incredibly inspiring to hear from you. And I hope that everyone that's listening today feels equally inspired, but is also able to take something away with them into their everyday working. And do one thing in your professional lives, to make an impact towards people and planet, the hope there is not necessarily to have huge impact at scale over just one year, but really to just create that awareness of how powerful engineering is in the world and how privileged we are to be engineers. And, with that comes our responsibility to recognise that and to go out into the world and make that impact. Again, Mike, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you and hope to see you very soon.

Mike Cook: Thank you very much, Tanya. It's been great fun.

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Maria Rampa: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Engineering Reimagined.

I’m sure you’ll agree Mike had some excellent tips for new engineers looking to find their feet and their voice in our industry.

If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe on Apple or Spotify and don’t forget to follow Aurecon on your favourite social media platform to stay up to date and join the conversation.

Until next time, thanks for listening.