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Let’s stop just admiring problems

I want to highlight why a range of ideas is always preferable to single approaches and how chosen careers do indeed foster different thinking patterns. One of our readers really liked Tuesday’s column on vessels and physics. This fellow has indirect ties to the Navy (his dad served on the frigid North Atlantic run during World War II, a feat of endurance) and is not a national security nerd as so many of my friends. Instead he is an engineer from the private sector.

He liked that I raised questions about ‘our society [is] moving faster than our technology development’ leading to ever greater capital needed. I certainly believe this is a much longer term challenge than too many in the security field want to accept as deeply ingrained. It is easy to blame one administration or another but this has been going on far too long for that canard. The diagnosis phase, however gives political scientists ample ammunition to spend tetra bytes of electrons writing articles to identify and explain problems without solving them. Similarly, historians study how things got us to the problem but again without stressing the conversation about how to fix things. As a former Marine colleague used to love saying, ‘We do love admiring the problem. Now what?’.

I know we need study all dimensions of problems, much as a MRI looks at the body in multiple slides to get a full image before we sort out the optimal answers. The reader’s but follow on to me asking what he thinks we should do response was what I absolutely loved.

He actually answered me. He gave me four discrete but manageable steps (paraphrasing: know what we have tried by tapping into the folks who worked in a particular technical change, integrate it into graduate engineering curriculum so it is natural, develop the concept so it goes into government contracts and acquisitions, and laud those who evidence long term success in achieving the desired outcome—a prerequisite to starting any technology change and investment mandate, and take long enough to appreciate/ laud the desired outcomes that shifts are creating while understanding why you confront failures) which are a start. He mentioned education but did not say we had to overall all education premises before we could do anything else, a tendency we see too often. He noted straightforward and basic but practical, as the military would say ‘actionable’, steps. As he concluded I answering me, ‘At least it’s a start’.

You probably think that the most obvious thing in the world but, having been an academic for too much of my life, I can assure you that most people really run from offering actionable solutions. Academics, in particular, exquisite explain a problem but too often fail to offer a solution beyond the diagnosis.

I am describing those of us who have the luxury of studying a problem from every single angle but rarely have a clue what it would take to FIX that problem. We are not always skilled at using our analysis to go beyond what we observe as insufficient or wrong.

Worse, in an era of more specialization and high levels of personal attack, many academics disdain including solutions to achieve anything, preferring not to have a ‘bias’ in a political or polarized era. Or, perhaps because we academics are accustomed to being ‘sages from stages’, we don’t have the confidence to advocate for specific paths for fear they will fail, adversely affecting our credibility.

Engineers are problem-solvers in their culture. They take a range of data from various sources to analyse possibilities to achieve a solution to a problem. But they focus on the solution stage rather than the identification part. Where political scientists and engineers meet is developing solutions which are feasible (physically, financially and politically). Engineers consider all sorts of tolerances for a best case, a lesser case, a tolerable response, or failing to meet the desired outcome through actionable solutions. This trial and error means that sometimes their solutions often initially fail but the engineer rarely lets that risk of possible, if not probable, failure deter in trying steps to address a problem. They recalibrate things to find solutions

Thank goodness we have an array of thinkers from broad backgrounds across society. Groupthink, the tendency to advocate position aligned with a group’s consensus view, has proven harmful for centuries as because it fails to identify dangers with the pervasive view and its effects can be catastrophic. It is especially pervasive I human group interactions, such as government or the military. I suppose there is a form of groupthink that exists in engineering but wedding engineers to those who best understand the history and the political dimensions of any challenge allows us to leverage multiple strengths instead of a single finely-tuned analytical approach.

We have lots of problems crying out for solutions but we remain paralysed by their daunting scope. None is generally easy to fix or someone would have done that decades ago but, as our reader noted, it is a start—that we desperately need. I fear we start far less often on solving things for fear of resistance in one form or another yet the delay often makes the problems worse rather than ever better. Lawyers, often brought in to slow proceedings, are keenly analytical but too often seem to focus on preventing any actions rather than finding solutions for fear they answer will have complications. Our society’s traditional superpower was utilizing, without inhibition, all views and approaches in the process of analysis to address societal questions. Today we lag woefully on so many specifics topics but perhaps taking individual actions to share our analytical skills across various career fields, even in small projects as a start, can rekindle our national ethos. Isn’t it worth a try rather than accusing the other side (whomever on whatever issue) of malevolent intent?

Reactions? Rebuttals? Concerns? I welcome each and every one. Thank you for reading Actions Create Consequences today, especially if you are new to the columns or a staid subscriber.

Next to last Waikiki sunrise but a pretty one.

Be well and be safe. FIN