On Competence

When one starts their career, they are unsure of things they say, tend to listen rather than share input and opinions. Just recently, I have had the honor to meet some people from the world´s undebatable number 1 consultancy. We were talking about one of the global crises humanity is currently facing. I thought to myself: I care about this issue, but these guys are the best in the world in their capacity, they are the most competent to lead the trend of research / action.
So I stayed put. Until I started listening deeper and realized, that these guys have the numbers right no doubt, but they have the passion missing. And without deeply caring for a topic, you cannot see the big picture and its nuances . Without doing so, no comprehensive and effective action is possible.
They may have been the most competent in "hardware" - the facts, but lagged behind in contextualizing, understanding the subtleness of certain approaches and issues.
Bottom line, we need to join efforts if we want to stand a chance in fixing the system. But will we join efforts? I wish we did, but for some reasons our history does not seem to suggest that we will. Nevertheless, let´s not extrapolate history but build a new future! With competence on the hardware and software alike :-)