Sustainability Communication Business Writing
Look Timewalkers! The Rise of the ‘Generalist Specialist’ in the Sustainable Business Realm
There’s an old and repeated story about an elephant and six blind elderly men that is still current and new. It says something like this:
A long long time ago six old men lived in a village. Each was born blind. The men were curious about elephants. They were told that elephants could trample forests, carry huge burdens, and frighten young and old with their loud trumpet calls. One day the blind men reached a palace to see an elephant. They stepped forward to touch the creature.
The first blind man reached out and touched the side of the huge animal. “An elephant is smooth and solid like a wall!” he declared. “It must be very powerful.”
The second blind man put his hand on the elephant’s limber trunk. “An elephant is like a giant snake,” he announced.
The third blind man felt the elephant’s pointed tusk. “I was right,” he decided. “This creature is as sharp and deadly as a spear.”
The fourth blind man touched one of the elephant’s four legs. “What we have here,” he said, “is an extremely large cow.”
The fifth blind man felt the elephant’s giant ear. “I believe an elephant is like a huge fan or maybe a magic carpet that can fly over mountains and treetops,” he said.
The sixth blind man gave a tug on the elephant’s coarse tail. “Why, this is nothing more than a piece of old rope. Dangerous, indeed,” he scoffed.
Multiple interpretations surfaced from this story: spiritual, sociological, biological, organizational, and so on. Oversimplifying and merging some of them it goes this way:
The first blind man is the one who perceives the immensity, the problems the impediment. The walls protect, yes, but they also separate. Walls are also a sign of strength. And a continuous vertical brick or stone structure that encloses or divides an area of land.
The second blind man reveals the symbol of cunning, stealth, surprise, and swift attack. It is also the sign of health. But a snake is a long limbless reptile which has no eyelids, a short tail, and jaws that are capable of considerable extension.
The third blind man exemplifies the word. Amongst all things, these can cut and wound like a spear. We can defend or attack, suffer or rejoice. That’s the power of words, a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others.
The fourth blind man feels the usual, the common, the normality, the comfort, the abundance, and the fertility: a cow, but a large one. They are also a sign of an offering or sacrifice to obtain a greater good. And defined as a fully grown female animal of a domesticated breed of ox.
The fifth blind man discovers magic (the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces) which symbolizes creativity, fantasy, innovation. A magic carpet with a supernatural quality. Magic can also be illusory and deceptive.
The sixth blind man appreciates nothing but a rope (a length of strong cord made by twisting together strands of natural fibers). This is disbelief, the impossibility of something being more than imagined. It is the perception of the one who is being lived without expectations or luminosities. The rope of a hanged man or the one that takes us out of the embroiled sea.
One possible analysis of the story is that its author wants to avoid us a partial or binary perception of reality. Either because of what we find in it, according to the time and place in which we are (the fortuitous place where each elder was facing the elephant), or because of our qualities, talents, and unique dispositions to ‘see and interpret’ the reality (each old man interpreted what they appreciated from an attitude, knowledge, symbol prior to the arrival of the elephant).
There is, as almost always in almost everything, a third way, a new way of analyzing this fable from yet a different perspective and altitude. To do this, we paused the story for a second and rewind time to when the first Apes (Hominoidea) appeared 20.4 million years ago. Now I jump 14.1 million years later in the evolutionary organization chart to when the Homini, ancestors of Australopithecus and Homo materialize, we modern men. In this process of millions of years there were species of Homini that disappeared. Why? Long story short: because they couldn’t knew how to adapt to reality. Those of us who were left were fit and here we are celebrating 200,000 years of existence as a species (or more, there’s no consensus).
There is a traditional ecological dichotomy that tries to explain how those of us who are here, arrived. It says that it was through a general adaptation or through a specialist adaptation, but as Patrick Roberts and Brian Stewart in Defining the ‘generalist specialist’ niche for Pleistocene Homo sapiens (2018) point out, “this dichotomy is not adequate to understand human evolution and social behavior.”
Ecological literature simplifies into dichotomies. Will it be an occupational hazard to simplify the tangled? Well, if those who have been researching and writing for a long time do it, how will the newcomers sociological and/or management literature not do it? Also in the world of work there is this division. Some examples of this pendulum analysis can be seen here, here, in here Depth-First Versus Breadth-First Thinkers — Which Kind Are You? by Jim Mason and here Why Generalists Thrive in Business by Ysabeau
That is why it’s interesting to evolve from the unique perception of the part that we see of the elephant in the room into a cooperative (symbiotic?) way, merging diversity. See it in parts, but whole. Whole! To fathom reality. But in order to do this we need height. We are going to ascend step by step to prove this point. This is the first of several articles.
It’s very good to be a specialist in elephant leg (or large cows in this case) but knowing the rest of the elephant and other animals is much better.
[Paraphrasing César Elvira González (2020)]
Ecological literature lists the 5+1 unique and distinctive characteristics that we have as Homo Sapiens that brought us here, which are worth listing and explaining, one by one. Little by little, but not today. This will explain how we can see a part and the whole and also why a ‘Generalist Specialist’ may possibly be the fittest performer for a sustainability role:
- Symbolism
- Complex communications: language
- Social networking
- Technological sophistication
- New cognitive capacities
- Adaptive plasticity: Fitness
