300: Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton

https://youtu.be/avv30Z0wD9Q Josh Tarbutton, Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication, is on a mission to restore the dignity of engineers and unleash their creative potential through intentional culture and agile structure. We explore Josh’s journey from soldier and professor to engineering leader, and his Engagement Success Framework, which includes: Scoping/Visioning, Customer Communication, Resourcing, and Solution. Josh explains how this structured process allows Bravo Team to align deeply with client goals, unlock team creativity, and deliver complex, high-impact innovations with confidence. We also discuss how “grooming” a project helps avoid costly misalignments, how AI and Agile methods are transforming the engineering workflow, and why design for sustainability and accessibility will define the next frontier of innovation. --- Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Josh Tarbutton, former professor, soldier, and currently the Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication. Josh, welcome to the show. Steve, glad to be here, thank you. Well, I'm excited to have this conversation because your kind of firm has not been represented on the show for the last 300 episodes. So, we're definitely gonna have some new insights and the new perspectives. We've never had an engineering consulting firm, I believe. And you also have a very inspiring “Why” of why you're doing this. So let's start with this. And would you share your personal “Why” and how you are manifesting it in Bravo Team? Yes. So why Bravo Team or why do this? So I think there's the truth that if you want to create new things, you got to imagine them and put yourself in a position to create.Share on X And I think as engineers, we have that unique opportunity and in many of our careers to be the tip of the spear for creativity in our organizations. And, for me personally, seeing how soldiers are trained in the army, seeing how engineers are matriculated in academia and seeing the career paths that they end up with, I really feel like there's a little bit of a mismatch in the market between what the engineer is really capable of and what they're actually able to produce in an organization. And I would say that to the extent that there’s a blockage between the creative capacity of the engineer and the value that they could deliver, I feel like I kind of want to help that. And so what is that? Well, part of it has to do with like just the dignity of the engineer and how we understand the value contribution. And so part of my “Why” is I actually believe that if we actually have intentional conversations and we change some of the ways that we do things that we can get, we can allow people to be much more creative and we can have bigger budgets because we're reducing waste in other areas and really make a dramatic impact into the way that we do design work. Okay, so that is fascinating. And you mentioned the dignity of engineering. So, what is happening with the dignity of engineering? Why it needs to be restored? So fundamentally, dignity is, I think, mostly just about respect. And I think, sometimes, when two people are having a conversation, our assumptions that we bring into the conversation can really take away from what the other person is saying. And I think that happens a lot in engineering, where the engineer is doing their best to try to communicate what needs to be communicated. And yet, there's a little bit that's lost in translation. So, then the engineer comes across as being a resistive or adding some restriction or creating problems or trying to slow things down. When in reality, I'd say almost all the time, these individuals are trying to help and reduce risk and increase the customer experienc...