I had the great privilege of presenting a plenary address at the once-every-four-years, World Engineers Convention last month in Prague. The Seventh one. The theme this time around was the 17 UNESCO Strategic Development Goals. The opening address included a specially recorded video message from (gulp) the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. I hadn’t realised the event was so prestigious. That aside, the thrust of Guterres’ message seemed to be that UNESCO was failing on all seventeen of the Goals, that things were getting worse rather than better, and, please, engineers of the world, could you try a little bit harder.

It couldn’t have made for a better lead in to my plenary later in the day. The thrust of which was how the Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity pointed towards the likelihood that the Law of Unintended Consequences was likely to kick in and conspire to ensure that all seventeen of the Strategic Development goals would not be met. Good intentions is not enough. Good intentions – of which there was probably a hundred nation’s worth of amongst the conference attendees – plus inadequate knowledge always serve to deliver the precise opposite of the intended outcomes.

The heart of the problem is this. Forgive me if I’m starting to sound like a broken record. The reason the Law Of Unintended Consequences comes into play is because when people focus on the achievement of multiple targets they almost always ignore the inevitable relationships between those targets. Take any of the individual targets and sooner or later, it will conflict with with any – and eventually ‘all’ of the others.

If there are different teams working to achieve each of the individual goals, they never see these conflicts. All they get to see is the frustration when all of their hard work results in going backwards.

In theory, it is only the leaders responsible for coordinating the collective work that get to see the ‘between’ part of the story. Except, in nearly every case, they’ve never been told to look at it. And, even if they had, and then began to see the conflicts, they have no idea what to do with them. Other than compromise, of course, which is where the rot sets in.

I suspect UNESCO is too far down the slippery trade-off slope to be able to salvage any positive outcomes from the SDGs. The simple choice right now, seems to be to either decide which sixteen are going to be sacrificed in order to have a chance of succeeding with one. Or to start teaching people how to look for and solve contradictions. Starting, most likely with Antonio Guterres. Who might then learn that the worst thing he could possibly tell people to do in the future would be ‘work harder’. Please, don’t work harder. Teach people how to work smarter. Teach them that good intentions are toxic if they aren’t complemented by sufficient cross-disciplinary wisdom. It’s not rocket science. Just not accepting trade-offs.

The World Engineer’s Convention was a great social event. Especially the eye-popping 120Euro per head President’s Dinner. As is usually the case when people haven’t met up for four years, there’s lots to catch up on. Alas, when a thousand delegates are in ‘transmit’ mode rather than ‘receive’, things rapidly descend into noise. Signal gets lost. Which, I guess, is my way of saying I don’t think I’ll be heading to the Eighth World Engineer’s Convention in four years time. Unless someone manages to get the UN Secretary General to attend one of our workshops next year. Or maybe, at a pinch, the WEC President.