Patrick Allen (Paddy) Lowe is a British Motor Racing Engineer and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is well known for developing Active Suspension for the Williams Formula 1 race car which helped them claim the championship in the 1990s. Today the Mercedes team is a leader, dominating the F1 Hybrid era, thanks to his contribution when the hybrid racing era started.
Formula-1 Racing (F1) is a multi-billion dollar endeavor where Bleeding Edge Technologies are developed and experimented with. Today's Formula 1 cars contain the most advanced engines in any vehicle on the planet, far more sophisticated than the conventional engine. The teams use the insight gained from their R&D in F1 to push the technology of the everyday road car further, Mercedes being the first to accomplish this with their soon-to-be-released Project One.
Given the investment and business behind the R&D in F1 cars, the expectation and pressure to develop and deliver solutions are enormous. It is a cutthroat environment where teams are always pushing their limits. When teams fall behind in terms of results, the emotions run very high, and frequent change in personnel is common.
A few years ago, Williams Racing was on a downtrend with little results to show for leading to an unstable environment in which people were leaving regularly. Problems were aplenty. Williams Racing brought Lowe as a Chief Technical Officer to turn their fortune around. Under Lowe, Williams Racing seemed to be a different beast altogether and had developed a superior car.
When Lowe is interviewed about, what was the one thing he says to his team which may have contributed to this result, he quoted as below,
"In Engineering, you are always walking into problems. You solve one, you get another.
I am an Engineer, so problems are objectives.
These are not emotional things. Emotions do not get you from A to B.
They should be seen as Objectives and you work to achieve them".
Once he was able to inculcate this attitude change to his team, the stability of the team improved resulting in higher performance.
In Engineering, when things do not go our way, problems often affect us emotionally. Once we attach emotions to a problem, we are more often than not looking for ways to not talk about it, rather than resolving it. Its human tendency to walk the other way, to preserve peace. But in Engineering this attitude does not deliver.
As Engineers, we are expected to embrace problems and mentally address them as challenges and objectives. Not to be troubled. Not to be worried. When a problem is encountered, we seek methods to overcome them.
Communicate without hesitation and take help if necessary. Do everything to move forward, but not a step, the other way. This is how one shall engineer for life.
P.S. While Williams Racing may not have won a championship under Lowe, but the F1 world knew that this was a car far ahead of its predecessors in terms of technology.