Our era favours specialists. Knowledge has never been so deep nor so divided. I sometimes have to defend my habit as a generalist, someone who moves across dozens of organisations, hosting conversations about many different subject areas – law, social justice, business organisation, planning, education. A facilitator has no country, often operating without a base in a specific subject discipline.
Yet there are times I get to hear frank and fearless feedback about the most important challenges facing many organisations. It is surprising how ready people are to tell the truth to a distinterested outsider. They talk about fear of change, toxic leaders, short termism. It is remarkable how common are the themes:
• huge discrepancies between what is meant to be and what actually is
• extraordinary assumptions about what ‘other people’ think and do, particular about ‘our people’
Miscommunication and misunderstanding are normal. People underestimate how easy it is to misunderstand, we assume our own communications are simple and effective, ‘transparent’.
Most people are, also, not ‘system thinkers’. They don’t look for systematic patterns of behaviour and consequences across ‘silos’ inside and outside their organisation. They mistake good intentions for reality.
These common problems, very important, sometimes deadly, are not specialist disciplines. They are amenable to exploration and conversation.
This is where the generalists comes into their own. Almost everywhere, almost all the time.