Analysis | The State Department needs true generalists to succeed
And yet, it struggles to retain them
This piece is part one in a miniseries on the importance of generalists to the mission of the U.S. State Department — and how the department’s leadership can work to retain them.
It is part of ISD’s series, “A better diplomacy,” which highlights innovators and their big ideas for how to make diplomacy more effective, resilient, and adaptive in the twenty-first century.
“I was hoping to feel like someone would care — but no one reached out to me. All I got was an online survey,” a former colleague explained to me recently on his departure from the diplomatic service. Another friend who left the State Department for a large tech company within the last 12 months told me separately, “You join early, spend time away from family, get below market pay, and then finally make Deputy Assistant Secretary — and then you take orders from the Iowa campaign field director at the National Security Council.” She also lamented, “an 18-year-old lance corporal has more responsibility than we do.” My former colleagues worked in different parts of the State Department and had diverse roles, and yet they shared a common frustration: they wanted to grow as professionals and were driven by deep curiosity to continuously learn new skills, but found their organization no longer met those needs.
Undergirding these disappointments is the broken promise of the original value proposition behind a career in diplomacy–that is, no two days are the same, and no two missions are alike. It takes a true generalist to navigate the complexity that pervades 21st century international affairs, which is why generalists were considered the right people for the job. This is precisely the thesis statement behind David Epstein’s book, Range. The subtitle of his work: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, gives away its conclusion. Supported by rigorous research, Epstein argues that true generalists are a net benefit to their organizations and to society. That’s why I spoke to him earlier this year to examine his work’s applicability to America’s oldest cabinet agency.
Generalists versus specialists
Epstein argues that, in most domains (that is, those not defined by rigid rules, like chess), generalists make significant contributions to their organizations, often outcompeting their narrowly specialized colleagues. While Epstein’s book makes a persuasive and evidenced-based argument on how generalists are often the key to unlocking organizational potential, I asked him if these broader lessons could apply to bureaucracies such as the State Department. Could the winding career trajectory of a generalist truly be an asset in the unusual field of international diplomacy?
“Zigzagging benefits the people around you, not just your own career,” Epstein told me. For example, “Nobel laureates tend to progress slowly in their early years, in large part because they’re multi-disciplinary.” In his book, he quotes the British biologist and Nobel winner Oliver Smithies, who urged, “Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser. Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.” As Epstein explains, these zigzaggers and generalists bounce between seemingly unrelated domains. Smithies himself crossed from chemistry to genomics, winning his Nobel prize at the age of 82. In contrast, whether we can claim most U.S. diplomats, or indeed, most foreign affairs staffers at the State Department are generalists, is an open question.
Think like a jack-of-all-trades
Similarly, Epstein writes, engineer Claude Shannon, often referred to as the “father of the digital age,” owes the invention of digital architecture to a compulsory philosophy course he took while at the University of Michigan. Shannon discovered the works of English logician George Boole, who used 1s and 0s to code true or false statements and showed logic problems could be solved like mathematical equations. Recognizing the possibility of encoding complex ideas using Boole’s system, Shannon applied the idea while at a summer internship at AT&T’s Bell Labs. Epstein, quoting Shannon, writes, “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time.”
Epstein cites scholarly work that further supports these case studies — individuals who combine multiple domains and broad experience go on to file more patents, or create new works of fiction, or publish more valuable scientific papers. Key to this success is “deep analogical thinking,” which Epstein describes as, “the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface […] a powerful tool for solving wicked problems.” And to truly deploy deep analogical thinking, one needs to either have a team whose members have diverse backgrounds and experience, or, even better, a single individual who embodies a variety of experience in different domains. Teams with one member who has a varied background out-innovate those that simply rely on individual experts thrown together, according to research. An amusing lesson drawn from Epstein’s research: the insult “jack of all trades but master of none” was first known to be levied against an Elizabethan playwright named William Shakespeare. “I love that the term was first applied to Shakespeare of all people,” Epstein told me.
Lessons for government?
Yet, as convincing as the argument for a broad professional background may be for innovation in the private sector, one must ask: does any of this apply to centuries-old bureaucracies? Can lessons gleaned from for-profit corporations be applied to the public sector? Epstein certainly thinks so. “I’ve looked at these issues at the Pentagon,” he told me, “And I’ve been learning about some of the [U.S.] Army’s retentions issues.” He notes this in some detail in his book that the candidates the Army invested the most in, West Point graduates and full-scholarship ROTC students, had some of the worst retention rates (this contrasted with the least-costly entrants, those that went through officer candidate school, usually in their late 20s).
Epstein writes, “As hardworking and talented scholarship recipients blossomed into young professionals, they tended to realize that they had a lot of career options outside the military […] eventually, they decided to go try something else.” The solution to this retention problem was to increase “match quality” — that is, the fit between an officer’s career ambitions and their actual specialization. “Fit looks like grit,” Epstein said, evoking the concept popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth in which “grit” is a person’s willingness to persevere in the pursuit of a goal even in the face of obstacles. The Army’s solution was to allow officers a larger sampling period, letting new recruits look at five different career tracks. Over 90 percent of officers changed their initial preferences after hands-on experience in the field, Epstein explained. This drastically improved match quality while also broadening professional networks and giving officers a wider view of the organization.
Generalists in name only?
If we were to take as an assumption that generalists are a net benefit to the State Department, would we consider diplomats and State Department staff to rank among Epstein’s paragons? It seems unlikely. Unlike their military counterparts, diplomats rarely spend much time in formal education or working for other parts of the government after entering the service, let alone working in the private sector. This is a weakness both the current Secretary of State and Congress have acknowledged, as I have previously written. Indeed, simply repeating the same narrow set of job functions in different countries does not automatically create a generalist, especially when the bureaucracy at the State Department pushes diplomats to increasingly specialize over time, requiring them to pick geographic and functional areas to focus on.
Rather than allowing foreign service members to vary their career paths, the system instead encourages them pick a narrower set of topics and stick with them. As Epstein shows in his book, experience alone in the same domain does not improve performance. Meanwhile, a narrow emphasis on government as the single conduit for global change leaves a considerable blind-spot for most public sector workers — when few have had meaningful experiences in the private sector, it leaves them unable to understand how business factors into policy. Far from irrelevant, many of today’s most pressing problems — climate change, suppression of human rights, or global security — require a sizable and critical role for private enterprise. Yet for most at the State Department, a narrow focus on finding government solutions to problems places them at a disadvantage when trying to look at the same problem from another angle. It is precisely this narrow specialization in the dark arts of managing the bureaucracy that drives away many career diplomats at around the decade anniversary.
Beyond bureaucracy
“I felt like I hadn’t learned anything in so long,” one FSO with over a decade under her belt told me.
When I asked another diplomat who left for a startup on the West Coast what he felt was missing at the State Department, he said, “Investing in giving people real new skills, tech skills, anything new — I didn’t feel like I was getting up-skilled.” Giving employees at the State Department options to expand their professional competencies is popular among lawmakers and the cabinet agency’s current leadership. Yet, when designing the details of these programs, one can see a bias towards funneling diplomats into the same government-centric education program, rather than publicly available programs at leading universities. Adding more formal education by fellow government employees or administered by the military only leads to specialization. Absent are incentives to branch into other domains, meaning any diverse experience needs to be acquired outside the State Department — the subject of Part Two of this series.
Zed Tarar is a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service and is currently serving in London. He is a contributing writer for The Diplomatic Pouch.
Disclaimer: While Zed Tarar is a career U.S. diplomat, the views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or the U.S. government.
Read more from The Diplomatic Pouch’s “A Better Diplomacy” series:
