Ep.70 2024 wrap up: Navigating transitions in leadership, renewable energy and AI

Maria Rampa: Hi I’m Maria Rampa and welcome to the season 6 finale of Engineering Reimagined.

To be human is to live in a state of constant transition. In politics, the economy, environment, technology and even personally our lives are in a constant state of change and evolution.

For our final episode for this season we’re taking a look back at some of the conversations from this year's podcast that focus on transition and our ability as humans to adapt to an ever-changing landscape.

No matter what industry you work in chances are you started at an entry level position, relying on the support and guidance from mentors and leaders to develop your own unique career path.

From Episode 60: Navigating your career from grad to c-Suite, Consultant, Environment & Planning, Lucia Fernandez was joined by Aurecon’s Chief Operating Officer Louise Adams and Senior Mechanical Engineer Luke Morcom.

Together they discussed tips for navigating the ups and downs of their careers and what they’ve learned about developing leadership skills along the way.

EPISODE 60: NAVIGATING YOUR CAREER FROM GRAD TO C-SUITE

Lucia Fernandez: Luke, what are your tips for moving beyond the graduate stage and improving your leadership skills?

Luke Morcom: The leadership process does start quite early. One of my biggest learnings was around maximising communication with a broad group of people. Being able to experience lots of different communication methods and working with lots of different people has been one of the best ways for me to understand how to progress my leadership skills. I'm still meeting new people and still learning about how different people manage different clients, different projects, different opportunities, and how we can use those learnings to better lead on future projects and better lead the team for us to achieve good engineering design solutions.

Lucia Fernandez: So even if the word leader is not within our job title, what are some of the ways that we can still be a leader within our current roles?

Louise Adams: Look, I think there's opportunities for anybody to be a leader. One of the really critical opportunities to either lead a little part of a project or lead part of a relationship with a client, look through the lens of, well, how do I use and enhance my leadership skills, whilst also enhancing the skills of being a consultant and working with clients and solving problems and using my skills. I think sometimes the other thing we can underestimate, particularly early on in our career, is that you usually have already built up leadership skills, even prior to graduating, you might have played a leadership role in your school, you might have done it at uni, you might have had a leadership role in a sporting team. The base fundamentals of leadership really remain the same. And it is a lifelong journey. It's not just about learning how to be a leader, going from one job title and then suddenly you've got leader in your job title. That also doesn't mean the journey of development stops there. Even for our most senior executives, always opportunities to get better, always opportunities to work out how to communicate, work out how do I lead this particular person versus this person? How do I lead through this challenge versus that challenge? I think it is the mindset shift that you have to take, is that every single day in your professional career will be an opportunity to learn about leadership and to demonstrate it. And I think the most important thing for people that are early in their career is not to get obsessed with the need to have leader in your title. Look for opportunities in the delivery of our projects, in working with clients, in the day to day of what you do. Look for opportunities to hone your leadership skills whilst doing your day job.

Lucia Fernandez: Luke, what challenges or barriers have you faced in your career journey so far and what have you done to overcome them?

Luke Morcom: The biggest challenge was something that a lot of businesses and workers have faced the last few years was the transition rapidly to a ‘work from home’ during the Covid times. Being very early in my career, when you're in the office working with a diverse range of people in a hot desk environment, you get to engage with people from different teams, understand how the business operates, understand what different people do. And moving to the working from home environment, it really pushed me to be quite driven to seek out those engagements myself through a digital means. So, while it was quite a big challenge, it did force me to reach out to people. But now back in the office, being at a hot desk, sit next to people from different capabilities, different disciplines, it's been really, really valuable to be able to sit down and discuss with different people about their experiences and projects. So that's been a really, really good experience.

Lucia Fernandez: And it really makes you appreciate that time that you have in the office a lot more and I feel like now everybody's turning around and just having a conversation with whoever's next to them. What about you, Louise?

Louise Adams: I've had a number of challenges along the way, whether they are difficult projects that perhaps aren't going so well. If you have a good project, you feel this real sense of achievement. Sometimes when you have a difficult project, it can undermine that sense, and it feels like a bit of a slog and you've got to push yourself through. I've also had other challenges where potentially what I was hoping for in terms of a next opportunity didn't come through. If I look back on all of the challenges that I've had, when you reflect back on that challenge, when you're in it, you kind of seem to really tough and really hard and you sit there and go when’s this going to get a bit easier. When you reflect back on it, the reason it gets easier is because you actually get better and you learn the skills of how to deal with that challenge better. And so the next time you come up across the next challenge, which might actually be a bigger challenge, you've just learned skills of how to cope with that. So again, it comes down to this lifelong learning thing of, just every opportunity you have, every experience you have, lean into it and find a way, whether it's enjoyable or not so enjoyable, find a way to learn from it and to reflect on yourself and reflect on others and become better. Become a better engineer, become a better leader, become a better advisor. Become better at managing clients, become a better negotiator. Whatever skill you're picking up. In the end, when you look back on that challenge, you're going to say, I was better for it.

Lucia Fernandez: One of the challenges I faced when I just started my first role here at Aurecon was that I had this idea that I had to seem like I knew everything. Or I had to pretend like I knew everything. And it's a really tricky mindset to be in, when you feel like you have to know the answer to everything. But I think the quality that employers look for when they look for grads and interns is not someone that knows everything, because then they wouldn't be hiring a grad, right? They want someone who has the capacity to say, I don't understand what you're saying because when you do that, that accelerates the process of your learning, and you learn so much faster and you rely on your team and you get a better job done. So once I started to understand that I could ask for help and ask a lot more questions, I started to learn a lot faster, and that really helped. And after having conversations with a lot of grads, I found that they go through the same thing. So maybe it's something that we have to get that pressure off our shoulders and just start working and talking to people.

Louise Adams: You're right. But I think really interestingly that that same philosophy applies the whole way through your career, because when you think about senior leadership. You also don't want senior leaders that think they know everything because then they're quite closed off to that idea of, well, what's everybody's view here? And I think a core part of modern leadership is actually moving away from that idea that we have to have all the answers, because in this complex world, with the challenges that our clients are bringing us, we rarely do. And if we think we do, we shut ourselves off from that diverse mindset and that diverse thinking that we know gives us better solutions.

Maria Rampa: The Paris Agreement marks a commitment to reduce carbon emissions globally by the year 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

Many economies are transitioning away from fossil fuels and adopting renewable energy to help reach these targets under challenging circumstances.

In Episode 63: Economics of the Energy Transition, Tony Wood, Energy and Climate Change Program Director at the Grattan Institute, and Paul Gleeson, Aurecon’s Managing Director, Energy – Australia, discuss the challenges and opportunities of the energy transition for Australia and beyond.

EPISODE 63: ECONOMICS OF THE ENERGY TRANSITION

Tony Wood: The first thing is that there is no part of our economy that isn't going to be affected in some way by changing climate or by the responses to the changing climate. Things that have been in place like our gas industry. We've had a gas industry in this country for almost 200 years. We're going to just shut it down basically in the next 20 or 30 years. We're going to turn the electricity sector on its head. Transport is going to change fundamentally. Major industry, which is one of the more difficult to decarbonise sectors have got some challenges ahead, but they're up for it. They see the opportunities and they see the potential, but there are some significant challenges. I think the reality is, it's proving to be much harder than those who would like to have thought otherwise. But also there is no choice. And the way forward is becoming more clear. At the same time as the things that were too optimistic have become also increasingly clear. Some of them, as Paul said, are not basically about technical issues. They're mostly about social issues and environmental issues.

The developed world needs to be at net zero by 2045. We're probably heading towards something at least 30, 35 if not 40 per cent emissions reduction by 2030. The electricity sector has significantly reduced emissions. The challenge is that we've done the easy bits. Things like agriculture and transport are difficult and Australia might, in the next little while have some sort of emission standards, unlike vehicles.

We went from 10 per cent renewables in Australia for the first ten years of this century. And then we started to make some progress. Because we had the renewable energy target, it got us to 35 per cent renewable energy by the middle of 2023. So we've gone from 10 to 35 in about 20 years. The problem is we want to go from 35 to 82 in the next six years. That sounds a little bit more difficult. Just two comments about gas. The first thing about gas is that even though it's sort of arithmetically obvious, the consequences are quite significant that people use gas very differently across the country. What it means is, when you think about if you want to start to decarbonize, you wouldn't do the same thing across the country. The emissions from the coal-fired power stations occur at the generator. The emissions when we use gas occur in our homes and we are the ones that are going to have to change. It's possible, right. Most people who use gas today would be financially better off if they were using electricity even after paying for new appliances. It'll be cheaper, it'll be cleaner for the environment and be better for their health.

The gas industry is arguing that we should be putting renewable gas through our gas network. And there are pilots in Australia doing just that. The problem is that what is this renewable gas we talk about, some people would say it should be biomethane. Well, it's expensive. There's not much of it. And you'd be better off using it for something else like aviation fuel, which is really hard.

Hydrogen is the great hope. Problem is, the best you could hope for on any current numbers suggest that the cost of hydrogen converted to energy, is it might get somewhere close to parity with electricity by 2040. Part of the reason is because the biggest proportion of the cost of hydrogen is the renewable energy that goes into making it. So, if the renewable energy gets cheaper, hydrogen gets cheaper but so does electricity. So why convert it to hydrogen in the first place? Now there are some other places where that's not true, where hydrogen is a very sensible thing to use. We do think that we're going to have to revisit the idea of some sort of policy to reduce emissions and increase renewables in the electricity sector if we seriously want to get to the 82 per cent. Remember that the government legislated a 43 per cent emissions reduction target. The way it proposed to achieve that was the safeguard mechanism and also the renewable energy target.

So the safeguard mechanism is a perfectly fine emissions trading scheme. That's what it is. It's what's called a baseline and credit scheme. So instead of paying for every ton of emissions you put in the air you're always given a baseline which reduces over time, and you've got to meet that baseline, or you've got to pay and people who are above their baseline have to pay, and those who are below can get credits for doing it. That's the way that one works. The problem with baseline systems, you've got to work out the baselines and so you spend ten years arguing about what your baseline should be and not actually doing anything about it.

So, renewable energy target is a different sort of carbon mechanism, but it was never intended to be a carbon price. It was always intended to be industry policy because we thought when it was introduced it would be the thing that would give the renewables a boost so they could get up and running in Australia and then the carbon price would take over. But when you look around, when you got to that point, there was no carbon price. So, the renewable energy target was left standing as the only mechanism in place for carbon emissions reduction. So, what we're going to see in the next year is the Climate Change Authority is going to recommend to the government, not only what our target should be for 2035, but also they're going to be talking about sector pathways.

The targets by themselves are important, but not sufficient. And so what we don't have, is the policy to reduce emissions in the electricity sector. We do think the reliability issue has to be addressed. And that's the second point. And transmission is really hard.

We are going to need plans with degasification. There are no constraints on emissions from gas at the moment, even though gas is responsible for 20 per cent of our emissions.

Heavy industry – There is the safeguard mechanism in place, but I think there's going to need to be more done in that area and that's where maybe hydrogen will play a role.

Transport – The first step is to put some sensible standards which tighten over the next 10 or 15 years to reduce emissions from light vehicles. Heavy vehicles is more difficult. Whether or not hydrogen-based fuel cell electric trucks is the right answer, nobody's really sure yet. A lot of people are doing trials. That's probably what we have to keep doing.

Agriculture – There’s a lot of R&D going into the on-farm stuff like tractors and the use of manure and so on. Obviously, the biggest source of emissions in agriculture is burping cows and sheep basically. There are some things you can do about it. There's a seaweed additive that you can feed to cows. I know some people who are working on genetics with livestock and they reckon that can reduce the emissions from cows and sheep by 50 per cent through genetic breeding.

And then the world of offsets. Offsets is a big deal. When you hear a company say, we're committed to net zero by 2050, we're going to reduce our own emissions and offset the rest. Be very careful. It's a dangerous term. It's full of claims and false claims, but there's reality to it. The problem is that the demand for offsets may very well quickly outstrip the supply.

Could you design a system in which you had infungibility across those economic sectors? Ideally, if you have sector-based policies, what you should be doing is thinking about how they could transition to be economy wide carbon pricing.

Paul Gleeson: Just a question related to what we touched on and you did as well around the challenges being less about the technical and maybe slightly less about the economics now and very much being in the regions. What's the community reception towards new transmission lines, wind farms, solar farms? Do you see any possibility for a change in either approvals processes or even policy? Or will the new climate authority play a role in this, do you think? Or are we going to have to keep going on the very slow, tortuous path that we are at the moment?

Tony Wood: Basically the problem at the moment is with the price of renewables is that we don't have any space to put them anymore. There's no transmission line. The cost of finance wasn't the major impediment to transmission. It was the fact that all the regulatory processes get in the way. And then you've got all the community pushback. So putting more money into it isn't going to help.

Maria Rampa: Artificial Intelligence is one the fastest developing technologies the world has ever seen.

While early adopters across many industries are employing AI to increase workflow and reliability, the accuracy of responses and transparency of data are key issues.

From Episode 65: Transforming the Unknown into an Asset - Andriy Mulyar Founder and Chief Technology Officer, at Nomic and Dave Mackenzie Managing Principal, Digital at Aurecon explored the AI boom and how adopting AI can empower workers by augmenting their existing capabilities.

EPISODE 65: AI:TRANSFORMING THE UNKNOWN INTO AN ASSET

Andriy Mulyar: AI really came into the spotlight in November of 22 with the release of ChatGPT for OpenAI. But these models and the systems, the engineering going into them have existed for almost a decade. The technology that drives them. And it's a combination of two factors. Number one, the modeling. So, the techniques to be able to go in and produce models over type of data that have these kind of capabilities that you see in ChatGPT two decades ago just didn't even exist. The computation wasn't there. The resources, the GPUs, that sort of like gold that powers these systems didn't exist. And most importantly, the data, the data that is instilled into these models, that these models compress into the entity that you interact with didn't exist either. The core driver behind the quality and the capabilities of these AI systems that you work and interact with is the data that goes into them. It used to be the case that you train an AI model on hundreds of thousands of examples, maybe even millions. Nowadays you train AI models on all of human history recorded into the internet, and these models compress that information into a format that's queryable with like human language. And what's really crazy about this is that this compression function oftentimes, is a black box. What information does the model contain? What biases does that model contain? What can that model do and what can it not do? It's really hard to probe these things, and it's really hard to transition from a cool gimmick or something that, you know, might seem like it has a lot of value to something that actually translates to real value in the world because of that.

Dave Mackenzie: Certainly something I'm sure many organisations would have encountered this where you have Joe in the corner, he's been in the organisation for 30 years, knows everything about a given topic and is time poor. So in terms of how to engage with that SME and get information on them can be quite difficult. One of the things that's exciting for me is actually, how can we give someone like Joe the tools to sort of own data in their domain, so that we can in a way, democratise access to Joe. Nomic has your Atlas platform. I was wondering if you could talk to how Atlas actually does that idea that you don't need a data scientist, you need an SME who can own and manage their own information.

Andriy Mulyar: One of the key components to any sort of RAG system, the thing that drives that personalisation and de-hallucination of models is this thing called embeddings. Embeddings are basically a mechanism of representing data for computers that allows computers to interact with data semantically between each other, it allows computers to talk to each other with meaning, not just about text. What we do at Nomic, and especially our Atlas product, is we allow the everyday human to interact with that semantic object that is an embedding. So that example that you had of this really experienced subject matter expert you might have in an organisation, unlocking what they're able to do really is a process of understanding, relative to the data that they're working with, what are the kinds of operations they do with the data that complete their job. Being able to empower anyone in an organisation, not just a machine learning expert or a machine learning engineer, or even somebody who can program, with the ability to interact with high dimensional data sets like the ones that go into and out of generative AI models, is the core of what our product is.

Dave Mackenzie: I often work with grads or I'm talking to young people entering our organisation and also people that are in our organisation now, and I think with generative AI that they see it as a sophisticated automation, and I think of it as a way to amplify what we do. But there is also an element of fear around what does that mean for how I work now and how will I work into the future? And I was just wondering if you had any views on the kinds of skills that people should be considering, as they come into technical fields in light of generative AI?

Andriy Mulyar: First, I want to give an analogy for this kind of similar discourse that was happening actually in the field of radiology, back in 2016, 2017, there was all this talk from these AI experts around, you know, there will be no radiologists in five years. And if you're doing med school right now, you should stop studying radiology, because this is a very high paid profession. It takes a lot of years to become an expert in. And the whole thing was, AI was going to automate this. Turns out they're still radiologists. What actually happened is the radiologists that didn't adopt AI were beat out by the radiologists that adopted AI. There's still radiologists. The ones that didn’t adopt AI are still there, the ones who did adopt AI are still there, but the ones that did are much further ahead in terms of their efficiency, in terms of quality, quality of life, being able to enjoy their jobs because they're able to augment themselves and be able to be more effective in the parts where the job that they actually need to be effective, this is the exact analogy you should use when you're thinking about what happens in like a post ChatGPT world where everyone has access to these sort of chat bots that can serve as little sidekicks. You should think about these things as augmentations to your workflow. You shouldn't think of these things as threats. If you do, you will lose because there will be other people who are, maybe less educated than you or maybe have bigger roadblocks to achieving the same kind of things you can, who embrace the technology and are augmented past you because of it. So it's really the kind of thing where, if you're an expert, you know you should be using this because it's gonna make you more of an expert. And if you think this is a technology that's blocking you, you should really rethink how you think about your technology.

Maria Rampa: That’s it for Season 6 of Engineering Reimagined. We hope you learnt at least one new thing each time you listened.

If you’d like to hear more from any of the conversations we featured today, full episodes are available on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

We’ll be back next year with a brand new season full of thought provoking conversations.

Until then have a safe and happy holiday and thanks for listening.