I was recently fortunate enough to be able to get out of the office and spend a couple of days in sunny Brisbane at the Engineering Leadership Conference, hosted by Centre of Engineering Leadership and Management and Young Engineers Australia.I managed to meet some really interesting people, and it provided a great opportunity to step back and reflect on where ideas* is at. However I was underwhelmed by some of the content and the level of innovation within the industry.Predominately a large proportion of the leadership content was around organising large teams to implement large scale infrastructure. A diifficult problem but one based on organisation rather than innovation. Then there was a stream of content which had leadership titles but which were almost solely technical based.What was disappointing was that I never heard anyone speak who was taking a fundamentally different approach, reinventing business models or organisational structures. Resulting in an almost complete lack of ‘whoa’ moments. If you make a comparison to the software industry where you have large established firms (Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google) co-existing with a lot of innovative startups, engineering appears to be incredibly conservative and risk adverse.Is this a result of the industry structure or are individuals simply risk adverse? Does engineering rely much more heavily on personal networks, hard earned tacit knowledge and requires significant capital investment which limits the ability for young engineers to startup their own companies and have a go? Or do young engineers simply earn too much in established structures to take a more entrepreneurial path?My conference highlights were (apologies to all the speakers I didn’t manage to sit in on);James Trevelyn, University of WA – Why Engineers Resist Leadership and Professional Skills DevelopmentA really interesting discussion which contrasted what engineers believe they do against what they really do.Gregory Bayne, TLC – The Four Dimensions of Sustainable InfluenceThis appealed as it touched on my personal ‘narrative intelligence’ weakness.Andrew Tanner, Chromasun – Solar CoolingAlthough not about leadership per se, a great talk from a young Australian engineer playing a key technical role in a Silicon Valley based startup technology company.