Ep.72 John Hilton on 50 years of engineering and building eminence

Maria Rampa: Hi, I’m Maria Rampa and welcome to our special Engineering Reimagined series on ‘Engineering change’ in which we talk to engineers who are changing our world.

Throughout history, engineers have been leaders in inventing and creating some of society’s most groundbreaking developments. From the Egyptian pyramids to the steam engine and modern wind turbines, our world is constantly evolving due to the feats of engineers.

In this episode, Aurecon’s Chief Engineering, Eminence and Innovation Officer, Tanya de Hoog, interviews John Hilton, Aurecon’s Design Director and Capability Leader, Engineering. John recently celebrated 50 years as an engineer and in 2018 was celebrated as one of the nation’s 30 most innovative engineers. He has designed some of the world’s most recognisable bridges including: the Wēiti River Bridge in New Zealand, the Meydan VIP Bridge in Dubai, the TKO-LTT Interchange in Hong Kong and the Seaford Rail viaduct in the Onkaparinga Valley in South Australia.

Tanya discusses with John the project he’s most proud of, how technology has changed over his 50 years in the industry and the seven personal traits they believe make an eminent engineer. Tanya and John talk about the joy and pride that comes from seeing a project come to life and the importance of engineering judgment — how being a master of and having pride in your craft allows you to make calls that others trust and follow. Get ready for a conversation about resilience, authenticity, and the power of engineering to change the world around us. Let’s get started!

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Tanya de Hoog: John, welcome and thank you. It's a huge privilege to be here with you. Even before I took on this role of Chief Engineer, your name was brought up by so many people in terms of the person that I needed to meet as eminent in the field of bridges. You celebrated 50 years last month as an engineer. But that feeling of eminence doesn't just come from longevity necessarily. What is it that has driven your career and kept you so excited about the profession throughout this period of five decades?

John Hilton: I think the overriding factor that enables me to get up every morning and look forward to coming to work is passion. I have a great passion for what I do. But passion also means that I want to get it right. I want to do the right thing for my client. I want to produce an output that is exactly what it should be. And that of course means that I have a great feeling of pride in what I do. And if I put that all together, that gives me a great incentive to keep at it, keep coming to work, keep working with some wonderful people. I guess that's the other thing that sits with passion is the people that you work with. And I have learned so much from people in the industry. I feel I've helped a number of people along the way and their success is their success. I might've contributed in some way, but their success is what they've earned. But they've helped me.

Tanya de Hoog: I'd love to dig into a little bit more about you and who you are as a person and how some of that drives passion for engineering but also informs the outcomes of your bridge engineering. Tell us a little bit about when you were younger and your childhood, what were some of the things that, looking back on that time, influenced who you are as an engineer?

John Hilton: So, one incident sticks out particularly in my mind. In my early teens, we had an old alarm clock and it wasn't working. And in those days, you could take the back off an alarm clock and you could see how it works. And my dad gave it to me because I was always interested in looking at things and how things worked. And he said, see if you can fix this. It doesn't matter if you can’t but just have a go at it. And so I did, and I got it going. And he then had a spark for me. And he said, now that you've done that, why don't you consider taking it all to pieces and putting it all back together again? Now that's a major task to do, particularly, I think I must have been about 12 or 14. My dad had given me a challenge and I wanted to make it work. And so I sketched, before I took it apart. I sketched where everything had to go, so where it would go back again. And looking back, I think that was John Hilton's first engineering sketches.

Tanya de Hoog: I was just thinking that. We hear that a lot, right, about engineers. If you ask many engineers about their experiences when they were young, I've heard a lot of engineers talk about Lego or taking something apart and putting it back together. So that idea of creativity and curiosity, we know is something that draws a lot of people into engineering either deliberately or by chance. You described always wanting to get it right and do a little bit better. Where do you think that comes from? Was that training or was that also something that was kind of innate in you?

John Hilton: I think it was innate in me, I think it's partly hereditary. Maybe even fully hereditary. But doing a task and making sure it's done exactly how it should be with the right output is incredibly important to me. And I know in my career, sometimes I've been a pain for people because of that. But at the end of the day, when I'm finished and I go home, I'm in bed, lying at night before I go to sleep, I want to look back on the day as something I'm really proud of. And I think that's what is perhaps driving this approach I have of making sure I get it right.

Tanya de Hoog: Which is incredibly motivating, that feeling where you can look back, and that feeling of progress and contribution. And I always find it interesting to understand those moments of joy and pride in our projects. So, I'd love to hear from you some of the insights into perhaps a favourite project or favourite moment that stick out in your career as highlights.

John Hilton: A project I'm most proud of, even though I've spent almost 50 years doing bridges, is not a bridge; it's the Sydney Harbour Tunnel. I joined Aurecon 38 years ago to work on the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, and there was a particular section of the tunnel underneath the Opera House Forecourt that required the forecourt to be underpinned and there was a lot of complexity with the connection to the sunken immersed tube units and the connection to the driven tunnel and all had to be done underground. It was incredibly complex. The construction sequencing was very difficult to determine. And I was given a significant role on that component of the tunnel. And I had no idea how to go about it. I'd come to Aurecon designing some fairly simple, small to medium span bridges, and suddenly I had this very complex work to be done. But what I did have was two or three subject matter experts who just knew it. This was in the infancy of tunnelling in Australia. This is in the late 80s, early 90s, and we had three people who just were so good at what they did and gave me a lot of confidence and enabled us to produce a design that worked, and worked really well. It also showed me the importance and the value of engineering judgement. But often, we had to make decisions based on engineering judgement. Whatever modelling we did, we never could get it exact and precise. So at the end of the day, someone had to make a call. And I saw the value of a subject matter expert making that call. And that was a real eye-opener for me. But if you know your subject really well, you can make a call and others will listen.

John Hilton: The bridges I had designed up until that point were very mathematical, and you could work out the stresses pretty accurately. You could size the members very accurately. You could come up with a solution that was very much a step-by-step, and you get the answer. This was different. Ground doesn't have properties that you can define exactly, and there's information in the ground material that you're just never aware of and at the end of the day you need to make some real judgements. And if you've got the knowledge and you make those judgements, that's incredibly powerful.

Tanya de Hoog: A couple of things strike me about that example. The first is you're an eminent bridge engineer, and here you are talking about a tunnel as one of the projects that sticks out in your memory the most. And that's something I love about engineering that I don't know that we celebrate enough, which is the possibilities and the agility in taking skills and transferring them into different applications. The other thing that came to me was courage. And I think it's one of the traits when I've talked to a lot of globally eminent engineers. Tell us a little bit more about your perspective on the relationship between courage, competency, and confidence. Because you mentioned confidence as well, and I think confidence and courage, align very nicely. But I have a view on competence being the foundation of all of those things. What's your view on that?

John Hilton: So look, to be a successful engineer, you need to have courage, and you need to have competence. Competence gives you the means to make a decision. We have many, many people in the industry who are competent. In order to make that decision often requires courage. And I say to young people today that a means to further your career is when you're sitting in a room or in a meeting and you know the answer because you have looked at it and you have analysed it and there are people sitting around the table talking about different possibilities and you know the answer, you know the truth, speak up. Sometimes they don't speak up because they feel that there are others more senior in the room, but they know the truth. They've analysed it. They know it better than anyone. If you know the truth, always speak up.

Tanya de Hoog: One of the things that you talk about there and knowing the truth is, in my view, having done the work. And we know that successful people in all walks of life have done the work, and they've done it repeatedly, and they've done their time. Is that something that you think has served you in your career, or is it doing the work and something else?

John Hilton: I think the work gives you the platform. You need to do the work. You need to work hard, I say to young people, to have the platform in order to move further in your career. It's very difficult, certainly it would have been for me, to be in a position where I'm leading people and making decisions, if I didn't in myself feel I had a very firm foundation of technical competence in order to do that. There are people that can advance rapidly up the chain, without having that platform, but I think they're very few and far between.

Tanya de Hoog: I actually started my career as a bridge engineer, and it was interesting to a degree. What was a pivotal moment for me, is when we supported a charity, Bridges to Prosperity, and the power in their organisation was creating very, very simple bridges that allowed people in underserved communities to access healthcare or education or to sell fresh produce or the things that we take for granted. And that power in engineering is something that serves me every day to think I can make a difference. Tell us a little bit about that passion and excitement, not just on the technical side, but on the bigger picture of engineering.

John Hilton: So engineering, certainly the engineering that I do and have done for virtually all my career, associated with design; is a very creative process. Design, you're starting with a blank sheet of paper almost, a few parameters start to come in. You never know that your final result until it all evolves. You need people to help you to do that. So you need a strong team. You need a strong feeling of collaboration. And the test of that collaboration often is when something goes wrong. And inevitably things go wrong. And it's a big project, inevitably things will happen and with all the best intent in the world, there's a situation where people need to come in and sort it out. That's the time when you see the true collaborators are the people that will not step away from the problem, that will come in and look to sort it. That's something I find right through my career if there's a problem, I'm keen to get in there and get involved in it. And if I'm working with a group of people and we're sorting on through something that's really quite difficult, but we get it sorted after a few days and we've trusted one another and we thought of different ideas, and it's all worked out. You come out of the relationship with those people very differently. Because you have had to trust them implicitly, and they've had to trust you implicitly. You've proved that you can trust one another, and you can move forward to the next project after a crisis.

Tanya de Hoog: That trust. The public, whether they do it consciously or not, they trust us and our abilities to keep them safe and to protect our communities and the environment. And what's coming to me in what you're sharing there is that starts with trust in the team. And the bigger picture of eminence isn't just the person at the very top of the triangle, it's the support and the trust of a much deeper system and team behind them. The other thing that came to me as you were talking there, or character trait is resilience. And that's an interesting one as well for a couple of reasons. I've seen that as one of the common traits in eminent people is resilience, that it's not just a linear path to the top. There's ups and downs. Do you think resilience is one of those key things that has helped you in your progression?

John Hilton: Definitely. Resilience has helped me. Sometimes things have happened and they haven't happened the way I wanted them to happen. Sometimes it may not be my fault. Sometimes it has been my fault. And so your career can, inevitably go up, and I know of no one whose career has gone straight up. So having resilience, the ability to get back up off the canvas and keep going is absolutely key to success.

Tanya de Hoog: Do you think we talk about that enough, the kind of ups and downs of a career or the ups and downs of a project? I certainly think back on my career, I learned about resilience the hard way when something didn't go right and I took that in the beginning as failure because nobody had taught me that ups and downs were normal and they were part of the process.

John Hilton: Failure is underrated. People learn very little from success. So lessons learned are incredibly important. We're very good as a profession in sharing our successes. We're not so good at sharing our failures.

Tanya de Hoog: So earlier you talked about that pivotal moment for you in terms of learning about engineering judgement. People, I think, are getting very excited about the use of AI and automation in design and construction, more so in design. Tell us a little bit about your perspective. You've seen and talked in the past about the way you might have approached bridge design at the beginning of your career versus what's available to you now. How does engineering judgement come into that and what do you think is possible for the future of design?

John Hilton: Early in my career, so we're talking 40, 50 years ago, the designs I did, whether it was on bridges or the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, I had a handheld calculator. I had a 0.7 clutch pencil, a scale rule and a set square. And that's how I pretty much designed almost everything. That meant I didn't have the knowledge of how the actual stresses were in a structure that's available today in very sophisticated models. I didn't have that knowledge, so I had to make a lot more judgments at the time. And I think looking back on my career, they've stood up pretty well. When I look at the tools available today and the sophisticated models from a structural analysis point of view, we can model with complexity almost anything, and we can get a very accurate result. But I say that from a modelling point of view, modelling is a leveller in the industry. Judgement remains a differentiator.

Tanya de Hoog: And so in this moment where we're looking to do things faster, quicker, in ways that use machines in a way that engineering hasn't in the past, how do we develop judgement? Is it just about time and experience? Is it a different way of learning? Is it a combination of things?

John Hilton: I think it's a combination. You've got to have the knowledge. You've got to have the courage. If you look at AI and the way in which AI is progressing in the industry, we can produce things much quicker now with AI. We can enhance the quality to a lesser extent, but AI, properly used, can enhance the quality. But in my view, AI gives us the mule train, if we've been walking. It gives us the EV, if we've had a mule train. AI doesn't have a conscience, doesn't have a heart. If it had a heart or a conscience, it would be a pretty cold-blooded heart. An example is the way in which AI would treat safety. You need human judgement to always be in charge of AI.

Tanya de Hoog: You've touched on people that had really influenced your career from a mentoring perspective or from a sort of knowledge sharing perspective. Tell us about some of those key moments where people have really influenced your career.

John Hilton: So, I've had several people in my life who have made a step change in my career. And they've come in almost like a periphery. And they've come in at a certain point and they've said, John, I think you can do X, Y, and Z. And X, Y, and Z is something I would not have thought myself capable of doing. And inevitably, my first thought is, now I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing now. I can do this pretty well, and why put myself up into a difficult situation? But then I thought about it, and these people have been knowledgeable people. These people have been smarter than I. These people have had more experience than I. And I think if these people can see that I can do something, then I shouldn't dismiss it. So I think this is a message for young people, that in your professional life, people will say to you, why don't you try something else? Why don't you think about doing X, Y or Z? Don't dismiss it just because you haven't thought about it.

Tanya de Hoog: So a couple of those traits that I've also seen in people that are really passionate about what they do and at the top of their careers is openness. Openness to thought, thinking differently. And also not being afraid of a challenge. So not just looking at the problem in front of them but really embracing the opportunity, embracing the privilege to be in the position to solve some of these problems. Is that one of the motivators for you?

John Hilton: Very much so. If I'm given a design brief for a bridge in a certain location, people can look at that brief and see and say, what have I done in the past that I can move across and mould into what's required now? It's almost a little bit like shoehorning something in, or you can say, let's start with a blank sheet of paper. What does the client really want? What are the parameters here? Forget about what I've done in the past. Look at what's really needed here and frame the solution around that. That's the real value in engineering.

Tanya de Hoog: I find engineering in this moment really interesting because we have evolving materials, particularly higher strength, some lower carbon. We have some new and fun tools to play with and AI and different forms of automation. We have the age of the engineer where we know that we need more engineers to solve complex challenges and address growth. It's an incredibly exciting and turbulent time. What's your view on the opportunities for the future and how that might evolve with this complex mix of things coming into our profession?

John Hilton: So very complex mix of things coming into our profession. Sustainability is a strong overlay in that, as you say, new materials, new opportunities. This is all about change and change brings opportunity. This is a really exciting time to be an engineer in the world today.

Tanya de Hoog: We talked about the common traits in people that are eminent. And there seems to be around seven traits of eminence. Passion, curiosity, exploration, excellence, courage, creativity, and resilience. What's missing from that list?

John Hilton: So I would add authenticity.

Tanya de Hoog: Oh, I like it.

John Hilton: So people are looking for engineers, the authenticity cuts through the maze. People are looking for the truth. The truth can be what they want to hear or it can be something else, but they need to know the truth on a certain situation. If you can advise with the authenticity, that gives you credibility. That is very powerful.

Tanya de Hoog: This is almost related to trust.

John Hilton: It creates trust. People will trust you, even though it might be exactly what they're after, they'll trust what you're going to say.

Tanya de Hoog: So for me, eminence is almost looking for the next, being the explorer, doing things that are just a little bit different but in a purposeful way. What do you think makes you eminent?

John Hilton: What has made me eminent has been the people that have supported me and the teams I've had around me is what has made me what I am today and I owe an enormous gratitude to them and the companies I've worked for, particularly Aurecon. And I'm a bridge engineer that enjoys what I do and I think where I've ended up in the profession is just where I've sort of washed up on the shore.

Tanya de Hoog: When I ask that question of people that are eminent, it's really interesting to hear how humble they are. But that they don't necessarily stop to see the profound impact that they're having on the world. How might we help people balance that important recognition of the team behind the eminent person, but celebrate the importance of engineering in the world?

John Hilton: This, I believe, is now the age of the engineer when you look at the problems in the world today. Science can give us the tools. Engineers are the ones that have the knowledge that can decipher what needs to be done and can make the right decisions to get the world to a better place than it is at the present time.

Tanya de Hoog: Wonderful. Well, John, this has been such a great conversation. And I know I've had many insights that I didn't have before. So thank you and look forward to the next conversation.

John Hilton: Thank you very much, Tanya.

Maria Rampa: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Engineering Reimagined. It’s a fantastic discussion about the importance of courage and confidence and, just as vital, how competence is the foundation of everything.

From the thrill of starting with a blank sheet of paper and creating something out of nothing, to the exciting and sometimes turbulent world of new technologies and evolving materials, engineering is transforming right before our eyes. Engineers are not just solving complex problems - they are making human judgement the key differentiator in this new era of AI and automation.

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Until next time, thanks for listening.