If you could, can you elaborate on what you mean by
to separate the art and the artist
I can try again, but the latter part of that post was my first attempt, so this may be a bit of repeat. Hopefully with more clarity?
I choose the words in part due to the forum we're in and that phrase having been used recently in the thread, but also in part because the art in the engineering is the major pain point here. Those cases that your students have a hard time understanding that they exist before they actually encounter one (that's fully okay, by the way, good engineering school needs to make sure a reasonable amount of such cases are encountered in school).
That's where creators get attached to their creations. Which can become a problem if the discussion and development then gets hampered by defensiveness, hurt feelings, stubbornness and such things. Maybe how much these things can slow down a team of engineers is highly related to how bad engineers generally are at dealing with such discussions... but I think even the most emotinally intelligent people would agree that it would be better to avoid such situations.
A more general wording, which I touched on in my last paragraph, is to keep the profession separate from the person. This is a large part of what it means to be professional. In a good team people can criticize each others work and outright put it in the list of what not to do without criticizing those who did that work and their ability. Such feedback then does not put people down, it actually builds them up, as everyone learns together and takes responsibility together as a team.
When everyone on the team can do this, openly and objectively discuss and evaluate and criticize the work being done and the approach that is used - and, crucially, change course as needed - this is when an engineering team works well and most easily finds the best solutions.
I'm not entirely sure whether I should add "in my experience" or "in my opinion" to this. I don't think so? From what I understand about engineering and people, from what I've learned from courses and anecdotes and experience, this is universally true for teams of engineers. Can ring very true for teams of professionals in other professions as well but obviously I cannot state something like "universally true" outside of my own area of expertise.
Also, I might be wrong. But I'd be surprised and skeptical.
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