ABSTRACT
Good engineers realise that knowledge is distributed in the minds of different people; it is not necessary to know everything; in fact, it is impossible. Knowing how to find someone to ask and how to get them to help is essential. Most of the working knowledge needed by engineers lies in the minds of the people who work in the engineering enterprise. Vital knowledge lies with many non-engineers, including end-users. Accessing that knowledge effectively is the key to success in engineering. The strongest evidence for this hypothesis—that knowledge is distributed among people in an engineering enterprise—came from observations by young engineers that they spend most of their time in social interactions with other people in the same enterprise. While many engineers see social interactions as a non-technical aspect of their work, in reality, these social interactions involve highly technical discussions.
