Applied Minds: How Engineers Think by Guru Madhavan

Author:Guru Madhavan [Madhavan, Guru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-08-02T22:00:00+00:00

LISTENING IS A fine art. “We go in and try to fix peoples’ lives as an engineer. We know how a manufacturing system works, but we have no idea what’s going on in their personal lives,” Koon said. As an elected official, people came to him seeking help on personal matters—anywhere from having a speeding ticket nullified to changing a specific clause of the divorce law to asking help for a child with disabilities. “I mean, it’s just that sort of thing that your ears aren’t used to.”

Koon is an exemplary listener. With age, he has also developed hearing loss that forces him to pay extra attention. But he honed his listening skills years before he first ran for the assembly seat, when he spearheaded a different community effort. He called it the Rochester Challenge Against Violence.

There were seventy homicides in the Rochester area in 1993. Jennie was the sixty-ninth victim. The Rochester Challenge was unlike anything Koon had done in his life. For others it was community organizing, but for Koon it was an exercise in root-cause analysis. He led hundreds of volunteers in programs to identify sources of violence, to help predict and derail potentially violent behavior.

Taking time off from his day job, Koon came across scores of people marred by conflict. “A woman opened her purse and gave us a butcher knife. She was going to kill her husband after he was asleep,” Koon said. He also told me about a ten-year-old boy who was afraid he was going to die. It turned out that the kid was trying to sell snub-nosed .22 revolvers for $25 a pop, and 9-millimeter guns for $110 each on the street. “We got him out of his home. His mom was a drug addict and he was the one supporting her habit.”

For Koon, these experiences were revelatory.

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