Lateral Thinking

Ed, Chris, Dean

Welcome! If this is where you entered this adventure, you may want to go back to the first post and start from there. This one will be a little uncharacteristic.

I’d like to shake up my format a bit this week. My practice is to describe people with competencies that I think add up to a kind of meta-competence, “big-C Competence.” (Someone feel free to name that better). This week instead I’ll describe people who are amazing, and who certainly are competent at some (even many) things, but who don’t fit the archetype I’m showing in this series. Partly I’m doing this because another friend said they felt as if I must not think much of them because they don’t match that Competence framework. They just aren’t this particular form of human. They are an awesome different form of human.

I’m spending this time and energy (and have for decades) analyzing and describing these folks and what makes them special, because I think we miss it. I think that we very often entirely miss these Competent people in everyday life. We take them for granted. We don’t see the work they do that seems easy but isn’t. That’s my impression. Whereas we have a number of OTHER archetypes that we all recognize, respect, honor, and (more or less) know how to fit into our lives, workplaces, organizations, and stories. So today I’d like to describe three friends in the same way I usually do, but these are folks aligned better with different archetypes.

Last week I described Keith, who has a whole lot of the skills in the bundle I’m telling you about. This week I’d like to tell you about the other three guys who made up a set of four in college. The other three are awesome in their own right. (Actually two of them could play Competent on TV if they had to. The third, no way.) Today isn’t “see what skills these guys don’t have,” it’s “see how cool these other archetypes can be.” It’s not “the opposite of Competent is incompetent” because while there are incompetent people in the world, plenty of them, there are also amazing people. Lots and lots of amazing people of all sorts.

I probably don’t actually have to convince you of that, you’ll “get” these guys, you’ll understand why they’re wonderful. These are people you already know how to relate to and what characters they are in movies. You know what our society owes to people like them.

When I, or my close college friends refer to “the guys,” we mean Keith, Chris, Ed, and Dean. When I met them they were an inseparable unit. Roommates in the dorm I lived in my first year at the UW, but all upperclassfolk by then.

I’ll start with Chris. I dated him briefly my first year of college. Chris was an Amiga guy then. If you’re an IT person, you’ll relate to the “here’s a nickel, buy yourself a real OS” systems administrator Chris has always been. Chris makes computers work. He’s super good at that. He’s advanced over the years through server architectures. Now “servers” are in someone else’s data center that we like to refer to as “the Cloud.” He’s gone from being the one essential person who can “make it work” to leading teams of people who make large critical infrastructure work. He’s authoritative, and a bit authoritarian because being a sysadmin requires that. He can set boundaries. He can predict problems and automate them away. He takes very personally anything going wrong with systems he’s responsible for. You do not want to be the one who made anything go wrong with systems he’s responsible for.

Continuing in the “you know exactly who this is” theme, he’s a Dwarf (Tolkein, not Disney). Grumpy, loyal, not afraid of a hard day’s physical labor. He hunts (in fact our first “date” was him asking if I wanted to walk over with him to pick up a hunting license. He assured me that where we were going was “close, easy walking distance.” It was not “close.” It wasn’t close at all.) While all of these four guys ended up in IT, three of them did more liberal arts degrees. Chris’ was History. If anyone tells you that degrees like History, Philosophy, or Music are not good “in the real world” these three guys will prove the contrary. They’re poster children for liberal arts education. Renaissance people. Gainfully and thoroughly employed through all of their adult life so far.

So it’s important to understand that while I wouldn’t characterize Chris as “big-C Competent” that doesn’t make him “incompetent.” He’s the farthest thing from incompetent. He’s highly competent with a different (while overlapping) set of skills that make him something else. And that something else just isn’t my focus. Because everyone has seen Chris in movies about computers (or related “complex thing that has to keep operating.”) Scotty on original Trek with a little more feral intimidation to him. Or any show or movie where there’s a character who gets sent off to make the deus ex machina work. The Engineer. Kaylee, (or maybe Wash) on Firefly. Mad Max. A bit of MacGyver. Good at a lot of things, gifted at some. But you know Chris, he shows up in our shared cultural experience.

There’s no one on original Trek, or Firefly, who is big-C Competent. I find it hard to point to characters who are and tend to have to stretch my definitions to find them at all. It’s hard to write good stories around people who just do things well and solve problems before you know they exist. Which is why I’m describing those people, rather than describing an Engineer or Tolkien Dwarf. You’ve read about those people already.

So on to Ed. Ed helped me get my first IT job. If Chris is a Dwarf, Ed is an Elf. Ed is the Creative. Ideas, go to Ed. Need a Bard for some reason (??) here he is in the flesh. Still a musician at heart. Another IT professional proving the Liberal Arts theory, Ed has a Music degree and performs regularly to this day (surely one of the finest Euphonium players out there.)

Tending more to jack-of-all-trades, Ed makes a good one-person band with IT skills. Ed brought to that group some social skills the others were less…conventional…at. Always with a self-deprecating joke (he’d be the first to make the Bard comment). Ed knows how things work and can help you with process. He’s fluent in process.

In college that meant knowing who to go to for things, or how to accomplish things. Ed told me how to go about getting into higher-level classes as a Freshman by gaming the system, and who to ask to help me game it. Ed, for reasons I can’t fathom, knew the administrative hierarchy at the University, and used that for others’ benefit.

I actually learned a lot from Ed about how to coordinate people. The motivating force of these four guys was Ed. I don’t think they had a “leader” per se, but if food was to be had before Pop’s (dining hall) closed it would be because Ed repeated often enough “we should go get some food.” And Ed actually knew what time it was, unlike the others quite often.

So obviously, some overlapping skills there that show up in the Competence bundle as well. But Ed too is equally awesome, but different. It’s a little harder to pigeonhole Ed into characters. Galadriel comes to mind. Dumbledore maybe. Obi-wan in the original movies. Wizard for sure, and Bard, but Ed’s got a bit of Hero about him as well, though it’s hard to play out epic Hero as a husband, father, and IT guy these days.

Finally, Dean. I promised in an earlier article to talk more about him. Dean is a genius of the old-school variety. Finished his math and comp sci degree in four years. Not too hard since he started his college math classes at near graduate level. Dean came from Oak Ridge, where his Dad worked at the National Lab. Dean was always destined to be a programmer, from childhood he learned and played and progressed in that direction.

Child savant. Adult savant. He’s the one you want for the Most Difficult Problems. He’s the smartest man I’ve ever met. He’s all about “recreational math” which is, somehow, a thing. He does puzzles (lateral thinking, math of all kinds, mechanical puzzles, puzzle contests, geolocation, crosswords and sudoku are the easy stuff he’ll just fly through to relax.) This is all in his free time, when he’s not designing and coding solutions for the hard problems at work. On our Trivia team for the Great Midwest Trivia Contest, he’s one of our most successful searchers and he does best with the hardest questions.

Like Chris and Ed, Dean will be familiar to you. You know what to do with the off-the-charts genius. The quiet solver of impossible-seeming problems. Dean is Monk, Wesley Crusher (or Commander Data), he’s the quintessential Ravenclaw if Ravenclaws had been written well. As an archetype he’s “The Fool,” which is actually his nickname. One who delves into ideas with abandon and comes up with unexpected solutions. If Dean could think that deeply, and also have the rest of the Competence bundle of skills, we could just stop making more humans, he’d have won the species. Dean is a specialist, and Competence requires different things.

Dean, by the way, is the love of my life. A hallmark of our marriage is that we cover very different ground. When we became a committed couple and consolidated our music collection, though both of us had extensive CD and tape collections independently, we had precisely two albums in common. (Carmina Burana and one Eurythmics album. Make of that what you will.)

I’m the quick-thinker who makes decisions easily and keeps tabs on every single thing about our family life, obligations, and planning. Dean is the one who figures out the complicated stuff. He repairs what I would otherwise replace. He measures many times and implements perfectly. If the DIY sources won’t solve a problem, he’ll just design a solution. He solves the hard things. My life is outstanding because I have a Dean available. He has more than three foods in the kitchen, has seen doctors more than never, and has someone to write cover letters when he applies for jobs. Two of me would be a misery, two of him would be a sitcom. Together we live a beautiful life.

It should be obvious to you that these three are among the people I most respect. I see their value as individuals and the value of their well-described (if not here, then in thousands of years of stories) “types.”  It’s true that workplaces often fail to value people of all sorts, fail to apply their strengths properly, fail to put them in positions to succeed. I posit that this happens less with the Chris’ the Eds, the Deans than it does with the Keiths of the world.

When I watch people who are or approach big-C Competence, I often see them misunderstood. I see them in positions of far less responsibility than they could handle. I see them given tasks when they should be given projects. I see them frustrated out of their jobs. I see those things less (not never, just less) with people who align with well-understood types.

The world is messy, and I’m open to challenge on this point. But it is one reason I’m devoting a lifetime of my observations to these articles. I’ve had frustrated friends who are amazingly capable, but underestimated. (It happened again just this week with a supremely Competent colleague in fact, leaving their position for preventable reasons.) Modern-day Cassandras who see problems long before they happen but can’t get traction to prevent them. People who see the whole problem and could solve it but for the folks who actually get leadership positions being obstacles. I’d like to put these descriptions out there and make Competence better known.

I’m not writing to suggest that Competent folks are the end-all/be-all. Other folks, who may not have the same strengths but who do have other strengths are not “lesser.” Anything large requires combinations of people. The whole point of “diversity and inclusion” (aside from basic fairness) is to get many skills, perspectives, and knowledge to the table so they can be combined to make huge success. When Ed, Chris, Keith, and Dean were together, it was reasonable to assume that any goal they picked they would accomplish.

At the time, those goals were weird and seemingly nonsensical, but boy howdy would they accomplish those weird goals. It might require a week with no sleep and all of the fruit and electrical wire they could get their hands on...but it would happen. If you, for some reason, needed a remarkably effective and fully-functional lighthouse in the window of a dormitory...these were your guys. Need to grind a mainframe to a halt? Not that fond of working electrical outlets but very fond of electrolysis using nontraditional solvents? They could make all of that happen. They were essentially the real-life but not at all less outrageous form of the movie Real Genius.

So pardon this aside from describing Competence, and I trust you’ll agree that while “incompetence” is one opposite of Competence, a better view of equally awesome people is “just different.”

Join us next time as we get back on the track of Competence.