Problems, effects, and causes

problems, effects, and causes. An illustration of London's Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament partially submerged by rising waters. The caption reads "Everybody talks about the climate, but nobody does anything about it."We spend a lot of time talking about problems, effects, and causes.

But, sadly, we talk mainly about the effects of problems rather than focus on their causes.

If you ask people what are the most pressing problems in the world today they’ll mention things like the climate emergency, multiple wars, and (well, certainly in 2020) pandemics. We all want someone to “solve” these problems. But when we talk about such problems in this way, we are focusing on effects not causes.

The climate emergency

“Everybody talks about the weather climate, but nobody does anything about it.”

We talk incessantly about the effects of the unusual weather we’ve been having the last few years and decades.

But global warming creating a climate emergency has causes. And we know what they are. The massive generation of greenhouse gases generated over the last 200 years by the burning of fossil fuels. It’s time to stop focusing on the effects of human activity and focus on the causes, and what we have to do to change them.

Wars

problems, effects, and causes. An illustration from the back of a person standing alone in a street that stretches away to the horizon. They are facing an inferno in front of them and surrounded by devastated buildingsSimilarly, we read every day about the multiple horrific wars raging around our planet. Sometimes, they’ve been going on so long, they’ve become part of our mental wallpaper.

These wars are not the outcome of a chance event we can only wring our hands at. They are the creations of corrupt and/or mentally ill human beings (e.g. Putin, Netanyahu) driven by their internal demons to wreak havoc on the world. Or the culmination of decades of mistrust and abuse by one culture against another (e.g., Israel versus Hamas).

We rightly wring our hands over the devastating effects of wars, and try not to think about their causes.

Pandemics

And while pandemics are not directly caused by human actions, their severity and duration are. In the 6 year of the COVID pandemic, the virus continues to kill thousands every week and inflict severe long-term illnesses on millions. And we already know the causes, and methods (e.g., 1, 2) to mitigate this suffering. Yet there’s no question that we could do a much better job in reducing the loss of life and its quality.

Effects versus causes

Human beings respond in these ways for complicated reasons.

Extricating ourselves from these messes is very difficult.

But as long as we concentrate on problems that we define as effects, instead of exploring, understanding, and acting on the causes, we will continue to live in a world that contains far more misery than there needs to be.

The rise of the generalist

specialist or generalist: illustration of a quote by Dr. William J. Mayo " A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less." Photo attribution: Flickr user environmental_illness_networkAre you a specialist or a generalist?

“We used to be defined by what we knew. But today, knowing too much can be a liability.”
Peter Evans-Greenwood, How much do we need to know?

Once upon a time, I enjoyed a lucrative career as an independent IT consultant. For 20+ years, I turned down more work than I accepted. And I never advertised; all business came via word-of-mouth, from CEO to CEO.

There was plenty of competition, and yet most of my competitors struggled for work.

Want to know one of my secrets?

I was a generalist

My clients wanted their problems solved. There were three key reasons why they needed help:

  • My clients did not know what their problems were. (Yes, this sounds strange, stay with me.)
  • Their problems were complex, crossing traditional expertise boundaries.
  • They thought their problems were technical issues, but there was invariably a critical people component.

When I started IT consulting, I thought companies would hire me because I had specialized technical skills they did not possess. Over time, I slowly realized that what made me valuable and useful to my clients were my abilities to:

  • Uncover their real problems;
  • Understand the entirety of what they needed to solve their actual problems;
  • Diplomatically explore, explain, and convince clients of what they needed to do;
  • Successfully work with them to devise and implement effective solutions; and
  • Help them take ownership of the ongoing management of relevant issues so the problems didn’t reoccur.

The advantages of being a generalist

Today’s hard problems straddle traditional specialties. Being a generalist in the realm of consulting means being willing and able to see and act on a bigger picture than clients typically initially present. For example, no one ever hired me to solve “people problems”, but I can’t recall a consulting assignment where human issues weren’t an important factor. Some examples:

  • A ten-year-old silent war between two department heads that had never been addressed;
  • The internal IT staffer who was crippling company growth because he knew far less than he claimed;
  • A CEO who hired a golf buddy to recommend that an appropriate and functional information system be replaced;
  • The operations manager who routinely made decisions without the authority to do so.

My successful IT consulting career combined adequate technical knowledge, business managerial experience (from five years managing a solar manufacturing company), good problem-solving abilities, continuous acquisition of people skills, creativity, and a win-win mindset that focused on serving my clients rather than maximizing my income at their expense. During two decades of work, I saw many independent IT specialists who were, despite possessing technical knowledge superior to mine, unable to maintain a viable business.

I’m still a generalist

I’m still a consultant today, but in a different field—meeting design. And I’m still a generalist, because good meeting design requires knowledge and skills in many different areas: production, andragogy (how adults learn), facilitation, and people skills, to name a few.

We are living in a world where the commodification of products and skills leads more and more quickly to a race to the bottom—” Who can make/do this for the least amount of money/time?” (For example, accountancy, once seen as a secure well-paying profession, is increasingly outsourced and automated.) As a result, the advantages of the generalist mount because relatively few people have the required skill set to solve problems that cross traditional specialties, and it’s easier to thrive in a field with, say, ten competitors as opposed to ten thousand.

To summarize, here’s an apt quote from Peter Evans-Greenwood’s excellent article:

We’re moving from working in the system that is a business, to working on the system. The consequence of this is that its becoming more important to have the general capabilities and breadth of experience that enable us to develop and improve the system in novel directions, than it is to have deep, highly entailed experience in working within the current system. There will always be a need for narrowly focused expertise in highly technical areas, but in the majority of cases the generalist now has an advantage over the specialist.

Are you a specialist or a generalist? How’s that working out for you?

Photo attribution: Flickr user environmental_illness_network

What we can learn from the man who had no problems

photograph of a candy wrapper, torn at the corner, with the name "no" in large pink letters. A sticker has been added that says "problem". Photo credit: Flick user themaxsons
During a conference session I was facilitating recently, I met a man—I’ll call him Paul—who had no problems. Since the session was described as an opportunity to get answers from a small group of your peers to problems you were having in your professional life, I found Paul’s attendance surprising. “If you have no problems, why are you here?” was my first question. “I just came to help.” was Paul’s reply.

The group of peers at his table questioned Paul further. Paul apparently had no problems at work at all. His boss loved his performance. Paul felt happy and fulfilled at his job. Even one of my favorite questions in circumstances like these—So Paul, if you had a problem, what would it be? (It’s surprising how often this works!)—elicited a short silence followed by a further protestation of problemlessness. Just to see how far we could go, I asked Paul if he had a problem with any aspect of his life. “Well,” Paul admitted, “I’m no longer married.” I allowed that this problem was outside the scope of our session, and we moved on to the next participant.

Of course, as my mentor Jerry Weinberg wrote long agoThere’s always a problem. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps Paul’s biggest problem was that he was in denial about his problems.

Whatever the reason, Paul missed a great chance to work on some important aspects of his professional life. It’s rare to be offered such an opportunity, but, as we can see from Paul’s example, it’s still possible to turn it down.

Don’t.

Photo credit: Flick user themaxsons