Reframing our Thinking Using the Beginner’s Mind

Central San
Justin Waples

Engineers are the champions of sustainable solutions. Many solutions will require a strategic change in organizations. To successfully implement organizational change will challenge professionals to further enhance their soft skills and become change leaders for their organizations, and the communities they serve.

Strategic implementation success demands the process itself needs to be actively managed. Competency in strategy implementation is rare. Implementation of new strategic initiatives within organizations usually fail; and people that are successful in this field are in strong demand. To ensure we rise to the challenges that confront our industry, this skill deficit must be challenged. We need to ensure the success rate of strategy implementation is high as the consequence of implementation failure are more significant than ever before.

We must also approach each new project and challenge by holding in our thoughts the perspective of the “beginner’s mind”: to reframe our thinking, to be truly open and unbiased, to have capacity for understanding the whole, and the interconnection between our infrastructure, ourselves and the larger world.

—Poster presented at ISI’s third annual Virtual Conference (November 16 – 17, 2022)