What do you do if you want to leverage the failures of others to boost your career as a structural engineer?

Learning from past failures of others is an essential art of growth in Structural Engineering where the safety and reliability of structures are very crucial. This will enhance your expertise by avoiding similar mistakes and gain insights that will develop your artificial intelligence and critical thinking skills. One way to learn from others is to collaborate with other professionals such as architects, civil engineers, managers, etc in the construction sectors. This will help you gain different perspective and give you boldness to participate in open discussion in any area of civil engineering.

Ethically, you focus on learning from the mistakes of others, striving for excellence in your work, and building your reputation through integrity and competence rather than seeking personal gain from others' failures.

I found the second statement discomforting. I strongly believe that a design team doesn't have to wait for design failure before arresting errors in designs. When a design is completed, it is important to have squad check, interdisciplinary reviews and technical assurance review carried out on these design to ensure robustness and forestall structural failure at all execution stage. Design process that lead to issuance of Approved for Construction drawings must be rigorous enough to capture fundamental errors that could lead to structural failure and jeopardise public safety. All errors observed during this review stage has to critically evaluated and corrective measures put in place to avoid similar recurrence.

It is the responsibility of structural engineers to capitalize on previous structural failures that have been thoroughly investigated and documented. Consider the "Hyatt Regency walkway collapse" that occurred in 1981 and left numerous people injured in addition to 114 fatalities! Design modifications to the walkway's steel hanging rods caused the collapse. On a macro level this modification didn't seem like a big deal, but on a micro level, it caused the load path to be rearranged, which eventually exceeded the steel rods' capacity and brought about an unavoidable catastrophe!

It's important to focus on personal growth and learning from the mistakes of others rather than leveraging their failures for personal gain. As a structural engineer, I strive to maintain integrity and professionalism by continuously improving my skills and contributing positively to projects, rather than capitalizing on the missteps of others.

Lesson learnt workshop is a workshop to document all critical learnings on a project. These learnings are documented for a purpose of knowledge sharing and improvement on subsequent projects. It is important to ensure that for all projects, a lesson learnt workshop is conducted then these lessons gathered on a project would be instrumental to ensure similar pitfalls are avoided on other projects to be embarked upon.

It is very important not to work in silos in a design team. Collaboration fosters different perspectives on a design and ensure that design deliverables are top-notch before issuance for execution / construction purpose. It is best to allow for time in design schedule for collaboration across the team (all disciplines, project team & stakeholders must be included) and sessions like Joint Design Reviews, Model Reviews, Constructability Reviews (in the nearest future, I expect Deconstructability workshop to be a things because of the new requirement to guarantee Carbon footprint reduction on every design project), Squad checks and Interdisciplinary Checks are designed for ensuring effective collaboration on project.

It is essential to have a mechanism in place to ensure that all critical lessons learnt are transfered as knowledge and opportunities to improve to subsequent projects. This indicate implementation of changes to guard against similar errors.