It is interesting how our professional environments, combined with the general evolution and sometimes revolution of what happens around us, can expand our outlook and understanding. A long time ago, I was fundamentally an Engineer with a capital E, educated to perceive, understand, and manipulate technology as a critical aide to people, organizations, and countries. In our days of research into mobile telephony at Southampton University, we were inspired by our research group leader Professor Raymond Steele to see our work as liberating people from fixed lines and killing distance so that time, location and space were eliminated as barriers to human interaction. Communication anytime, anywhere, anything, anyhow. This was the mid to late eighties

Fast-forward to the mid-nineties, when mobile phones started to really invade this beautiful and complex continent of Africa. This is when many of us around the continent, as pioneer regulators, were given the responsibility and managed liberty by our respective governments to ensure faster penetration of telephony because, through that, we could be the saviours of our continent: with easy communication, development would accelerate, pulling everyone out of poverty. I can now laugh at my naivety at the time.

I started learning, through the often-hard lessons of life, that the seemingly complex mathematics, chemistry, and physics used in engineering were the easy stuff: the hard stuff was dealing with people. Likewise, I could design circuits and tune them to work properly. Not only that, but I could figure how a circuit I had never seen worked. I could predict how any circuit would respond to any input. All this was impossible when it came to the people: I could see, but I was blind.

Engineers talk to people about technology because that is their thing, but no one is genuinely interested. People want to know the qualitative “why” of a given car, not how it works or how it is made. Business owners had to appreciate that technology was not the sole realm of engineers, and that computerizing inefficiency only accelerated failure.

I must understand people. I started adventuring into management and leadership, including formal training. Likewise, I started exploring sociology and psychology. Furthermore, I dived into effective communication skills (and I must applaud the Carnegies Corporation of New York as well as IDRC Canada, DFID, USAID, and many others, who took an interest in us as upcoming regulators – and I do not question their motives – and invested in us through training and other opportunities to improve our public communications as well as lobbying and advocacy skills to make an impact on development).

This really drove me to change my approach to interacting as a lecturer with the students of engineering at my alma mater, Makerere University – shifting from the talking head to being part of the learning circle. The results I had seen in the bigger national and regional contexts (more about this in latter blogs) persuaded me to get allies (yes, you need allies before pushing for major change) from among the Faculty of Technology staff to successfully push for the introduction of sociology and communication skills as part of the engineering curriculum. I started telling third and final year students that while what they were learning as engineering students was important as far as developing their critical and analytical skills was concerned, they would probably need only 10% or so of the actual knowledge they had acquired and would have to find the rest in real life or taking courses within what is dubbed the Arts area.

The big lesson for me as I continue to evolve (I could have said grow up, but then growing in years is not what I am talking about) – the big lesson is that knowledge and learning should not be compartmentalized. Encouraging collaboration and partnerships across disciplines allows for a more holistic understanding and a greater capacity for innovation in any undertaking.