Very much agree. I’ve spent my career making recommendations on how to actually make improvements in processes, and it has mostly fallen on deaf ears. I have a liberal arts undergrad degree and an engineering MS. I consider myself a creative problem solver. What I have seen is that creativity is rarely valued in engineering environments. “We’ve always done it this way”. Inefficiency and hidden costs build up over time and management then “sees” the problem but — given how delicate things suddenly seem to be — they become even more risk averse and refuse to approve any bold solutions. I’m exhausted trying to fight that fight.
Going to be lots of problems needing to be solved and not very many problem solvers in the near future