Recently I was on a transatlantic flight when, for the first time, I heard that most clichéd announcement: "Is there a doctor on board?"
Having initially trained as a medic I toyed with the idea of responding before mercifully deciding I would definitely fail the Hippocratic Oath if I raised my hand.
However, I think it just as likely that a highly trained medical professional - a consultant in neuropsychology for example - would be stumped by an emergency in an area that they had long since stopped studying. Has the Western focus, perhaps even obsession, with specialisation led us down a blind-alley that detrimentally effects our public services?
And has the urging of HR directors and public paymasters to become technical experts in a particular area an out-dated - and therefore dangerous - phenomenon for society as a whole?
The world is being re-wired
Although we are beset by complexity at every turn, public managers are still being groomed to become experts (hedgehogs in Isaiah Berlin's celebrated analogy) rather than generalists (the foxes that know many things). The latter have been consistently demoted and demotivated, lacking as they do advanced degrees and lettered memberships. But the world is being re-wired - with each tweet and trade agreement - in the form of a giant, globalised neural network.
The old analogue and linear thinking that served the colonial Empire's administrators so well in its conquer of a quarter of the world simple fails to cope in a complex net of social relationships, vested interests and conflicting needs.
Teams within their hushed silos may carry on becoming better and better at their linear tasks; but the service user - slap bang in the middle a noisy and confusing global village as they are - is left in disarray, attempting to join up services that come at them from disparate departments, in distinct languages and tones, with differing values and models of change.
Out-dated Victorian sensibility
I was told at school not to 'spread myself too thin', and at all costs to avoid the perils of being a Jack of all trade and master of none. Well I refute that out-dated Victorian sensibility and call for my colleagues in the social space to celebrate those committed to becoming masters of all trades - the cross-pollinators and mutli-disciplinary thinkers, the mavericks who spot the connections and see possibilities that others do not.
In these especially challenging times we need brilliant technicians, and managers that have enough technical knowledge to converse with them. But we also need leaders at all levels who are deeply talented at thinking digitally.
With a new government now in power there is an opportunity to usher in a fresh and contemporary way of doing business from the Cabinet on down. With it being such a uniquely collaborative effort - full of wildly different political views and beliefs about the human being - it might just have the requisite variety to succeed, in such a profoundly varied land, better than any of its predecessors.
Nick Jankel is chief executive of wecreate
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
