So far, here are the top 4 things that Star Trek has taught me about development:
4. Technology is the engine by which humanity brings to life its most beautiful dreams and its most terrible nightmares
(to paraphrase another bit of science-fiction on the big screen that I'm a fan of...).
It's a theme throughout all the iterations of Star Trek. Technology is everywhere, and it gives humanity (and humanoid variants) tremendous power, but with tremendous responsibilities.
In the future, (aka Star Trek) hunger is all but eradicated (yay replicators!), transport to and from your starship is instant, and all but the zaniest interstellar diseases are no problem.
But... most of the zaniest interstellar diseases are man-made, and many of the tragedies of the Star Trek universe are man (or species similar enough to human to make the lesson transferrable) made. From Bajoran to the Borg, Star Trek continually comes back to the beauty and the horror that technology puts at our fingertips - both in its existence and in the disparity of access to it.
Technologies (appropriate, integrated into more diverse approaches, and otherwise) are viewed as one of the tools we can use to solve the tragedies of the world in which we live. And being able to "beam me up" would definitely make my life easier as well as solve one of the more ubiquitous challenges faced in development - namely, getting people and supplies from Point A to Point B.
On the other hand, technologies are also a fundamental part of the many, many, many problems we're now trying to address - climate change, war, drug-resistant TB and malaria, and the widening gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds are all at least partly because of a technology (or several) developed by humankind.
3. Scotty's School of Managing Expectations is where it's at
This one is from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Relics. Don't ask how Scotty and La Forge manage to be in the same room in the same century: it's better if you just accept it and enjoy the wisdom of this little gem.
Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Look, Mr. Scott, I'd love to explain everything to you. But the captain wants this spectrographic analysis done by 1300 hours.
Scotty: [thinks about it some time] You mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
La Forge: Yeah. Well, I told the captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
Scotty: How long would it really take?
La Forge: [annoyed] An hour!
Scotty: [looks unbelieving] Oh. You didn't tell him how long it would REALLY take, did you?
La Forge: Of course I did.
Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.
He goes on to explain that, if something will take an hour, you should say that it will take at least two, be really dramatic about how impossible it will be to get it done in an hour, and then deliver it in the 60 minutes alotted, thus guaranteeing that everyone is really impressed with whatever you did instead of accepting it as part of the job you're supposed to do without any fuss.
That's quite possibly the best fundraising advice I've ever heard. I think it also applies to job performance in general... though only if no one else understands what it is you do well enough to hold you accountable. Which is, in a nutshell, the development sector (how long do you think it actually takes to "document lessons learned regarding the implementation of CLTS in the pilot phase, hmmm?).
[Random aside: The CLTS website I linked to there is new! This excites me, and has delayed the publication of this post, as I stopped editing things to spend some time exploring the new site.]
2. If we can dream it, we can "make it so."
Just before I left Canada for Malawi, I was watching the Discovery Channel in the middle of the night and stumbled across a little special called "How William Shatner Changed the World."
While I'm not sure that everything cool invented since Star Trek first aired can actually be attributed to all inventors since then being Trekkies, I like the idea that a fictional universe helped unlock the potential in humankind to dream. I also like the vision of a better world (and strange, new worlds) that Gene Roddenberry gave us a glimpse of in the original Star Trek and in spin-offs since. The power of the human imagination in both cases showed us all that we can boldly go where no man has gone before - a lesson we can and should take especially seriously when we're trying to improve the world we have.
1. The most effective people and the least effective projects in development have one thing in common: a Kirk Complex.
There's a certain exchange in The Wrath of Khan that sums up what I mean when I say "the Kirk Complex." The exchange is regarding Kirk's impossible success on a simulation in Starfleet Academy (the Kobayashi Maru scenario):
McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.
Saavik: How?
Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.
Saavik: What?
David Marcus: He cheated.
Kirk: I changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose.
Saavik: Then you never faced that situation... faced death.
Kirk: I don't believe in the no-win scenario.
In people, this complex is a strength: it is lateral thinking and perserverance and mental agility and ironclad determination, even in the face of impossible odds (in the case of both Kirk and some of the most urgent development work, of death itself). Attributes that, in my limited experience, are critical to success in development work.
In projects, however, it is stubborn fanaticism in the worst sense: clinging to optimism, even when the signs of failure are obvious and crying out to be seen and responded to; perhaps by a person willing to try something else, even something unorthodox, to deliver a success instead of another doomed silver bullet.
The jury's still out for me on what that means for development organizations, which are comprised of both people and projects (and the relationships between).
Anyway, thus concludes our lesson. Live long and prosper.
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