How Engineer-Diplomats Act

What It Takes to Solve the Problems of an Unpredictable Future

TL;DR: From Flash games to frugal science and ethical tech, today’s real problem-solvers aren’t just coders or scientists. They’re Engineer-Diplomats—people who think broadly, act ethically, and adapt fast to complexity.

Image Created with help from ChatGPT

You probably don’t recognize his name, but Krzysztof Jamroz has quietly made an outsized impact on millions of people. He lives in a house paid for by a video game he created. Not a big-budget console title or a viral mobile app, but a small, weird little game he built in his free time because he liked playing with physics. Jamroz didn’t set out to become an internet sensation; he just wanted to play with the laws of physics on his computer. Yet by the time the dust settled, over 100 million people ended up playing his quirky creation. What began as a casual experiment in his off-hours became a worldwide phenomenon—and set the stage for Jamroz’s evolution into something far more multi-faceted: a creative problem-solver for the future.

Back in the mid-2000s, if you wanted to play games online, you’d open a website and fire up a Flash game in your browser. This was the golden era of Flash, the playground for indie developers and creative nerds like Jamroz. By day, he worked a normal tech job; by night, he tinkered in his apartment, teaching himself to simulate gravity and collisions using a physics library called Box2D. He had no grand startup plan or business pitch, just curiosity. “I had no big plan. I just wanted to see if I could make a bridge wobble the right way, or a crate fall like it should,” Jamroz recalls. Piece by piece, that tinkering led to Cargo Bridge, a simple Flash puzzle game about building bridges strong enough to carry tiny cartoon workers (and occasionally an elephant) across a gap. Jamroz uploaded it to a free game portal, expecting only a trickle of players.

Something strange happened: people loved it. Cargo Bridge took off across dozens of gaming sites, shared eagerly by students and office workers alike. Jamroz hadn’t polished it for months or marketed it at all, yet users kept coming. The game was challenging but charming—part engineering simulation, part cartoon fun—and it struck a nerve. The success even translated into real money through ad revenue and licensing. The true payoff, however, wasn’t the income. It was the lesson that curiosity and creativity can open unexpected doors.

Beyond One-Hit: How to Become an M-Shaped Engineer

Jamroz’s career didn’t stop at Flash game developer. In fact, the very platform that enabled his game soon became obsolete, replaced by HTML5 and newer technologies. Jamroz had to reinvent his skill set to stay relevant. Early on, deep expertise in a single niche was enough. “When I began my career as a game developer, deep expertise in a single domain was all that was needed. I focused on mastering ActionScript,” he writes. But the software field was evolving rapidly. As he puts it, “being a software engineer today means doing a lot more than just writing code”.

Jamroz argues that the most successful tech careers evolve from T-shaped to π-shaped to M-shaped skills. He explains: “Success starts with being a T-shaped engineer—deep in one area, broad in others. Next, become π-shaped, mastering two specialties. Finally, evolve into an M-shaped professional, blending expertise across multiple fields with business and leadership skills”. In short, an M-shaped engineer grows from a domain specialist into a versatile, multi-skilled problem-solver.

Image Created with help from ChatGPT

Equally important is the skill of learning by doing. In a fast-moving field, the ability to rethink and relearn is crucial. As Adam Grant emphasizes in Think Again: the creative problem-solvers use their knowledge like scientists, not as preachers or prosecutors or politicians. They favor humility over pride and curiosity over conviction, treating their opinions as hypotheses to test and willing to update them when new evidence arises. Jamroz’s willingness to go from being a Flash expert back to a novice in new areas shows that kind of humility and curiosity. It’s the mindset that turns a software engineer into a lifelong learner and problem-solver.

Jamroz’s journey is the modern parable of an Engineer-Diplomat—someone who blends technical depth, human awareness, and collaborative influence. But he is not alone. Look around today, and you’ll find a growing cohort of innovators and problem-solvers who started with a problem and narrow interests that became something more. Together, they are reshaping what it means to solve problems.

Meet Manu Prakash. If Jamroz built virtual bridges for play, Manu Prakash built bridges for public health. A scientist-engineer at Stanford, Prakash reimagined the lab bench itself.

While on a field visit in India, Prakash watched as expensive microscopes collected dust in rural clinics. They were too fragile, too costly, too hard to repair. So, he asked a simple question: What if a microscope could cost less than a cup of tea?

The result was the Foldscope—a $1 origami microscope, foldable from a single sheet of paper with a lens. It didn’t just work; it showed how science can serve society. Today, Foldscopes have reached over 2 million users in over 160 countries. It is part of the frugal science movement, which aims to make cheap and credible scientific tools for use in the developing world.

Like Jamroz, Prakash began with scientific play. But he expanded the scope. He combined technical brilliance with deep sensitivity to context–economic, social, institutional, and political. He didn’t just make and ship tools; he built networks of educators, policymakers, and health workers to embed those tools for daily use in the real world. In doing so, he became more than a scientist. He became a translator between science and society, a critical trait of an Engineer-Diplomat.

Navigating Uncertainty and Ambiguity: Engineer-Diplomats for an Emergent Future

We live in a world shaped not by certainty, but by emergence. In complex systems—social, technological, or environmental—the future does not unfold predictably. It emerges through the interaction of countless variables: ideas, constraints, human decisions, and unanticipated consequences. The problems we now face are rarely mechanical puzzles with fixed solutions. They are dynamic and interdependent. Solving them demands a mindset not rooted in control, but in adaptability and awareness. This is why a new kind of professional must emerge—not from a job description, but from the complexity itself. Enter the Engineer-Diplomat.

The Engineer-Diplomat is not merely reacting to change. They are prepared to engage with emergence: To learn, adapt, negotiate, and lead in ways that respond to unfolding contexts. They are addressing a new and emerging need.

The tech world that Jamroz has navigated 20 years ago is no longer the same. Today, the buzz is about Artificial Intelligence automating parts of programming itself. Tools like GitHub Copilot and GPT-4 can generate code on the fly – leading some to wonder if human engineers will soon be out of a job.

To stay relevant, future engineers need to focus on skills AI cannot replicate: complex reasoning, managing fact-value dichotomy, clarifying ambiguous requirements, and leading under uncertainty. AIs can generate code but cannot define what problems to resolve and why or respond to real-world ambiguity where values and facts collide.

Consider Mike Lazaridis, the founder of BlackBerry. In the early 2000s, BlackBerry redefined mobile communication. Presidents, CEOs, celebrities—everyone was hooked. Recall, when President Obama arrived at the White House, he refused to relinquish his BlackBerry to the Secret Service. Lazaridis himself was a brilliant engineer, building record players from Lego as a child.

But as Adam Grant recounts in Think Again, BlackBerry’s leadership fell into a trap: thinking too narrowly. They continue to think email as the killer app and keyboard-based devices as irreplaceable. Even as the iPhone rose and touchscreen became dominant, Lazaridis and team clung to their original success formula.

By failing to adapt, they lost their edge. In 2009, BlackBerry owned nearly half the U.S. market. By 2014, it had dropped below 1%.

Those who ignore emergence may become like the Lamplighter in The Little Prince—dutiful, skilled, yet increasingly irrelevant. The Lamplighter continues to light and extinguish lamps every minute, unaware that his planet is rotating faster and faster. He is admirable, but obsolete. The lesson is clear: doing your job well is not enough if the job no longer fits the world. To remain valuable, engineers must stop simply lighting lamps and start asking why there is darkness, who needs light, and what kind of illumination the future demands. The Engineer-Diplomat is the one who continue to asks those questions as they evolve and adapt to their changing and interconnected world.

The lesson: technical brilliance isn't enough. To stay relevant, engineers must constantly adapt to context, not just content. They must listen to signals outside their domain, anticipate social shifts, look for emergent patterns, and be willing to pivot—exactly what Prakash and Jamroz did.

Emergence of the Engineer-Diplomat

The Engineer-Diplomat is a new genre of persona: someone who blends scientific methods, humanistic understanding, and diplomatic skills. Becoming this kind of a problem solver means expanding beyond the traditional engineer’s comfort zone. It’s no longer enough to be the coding wizard in the corner; the future belongs to those who can bridge technical knowledge with human context. This archetype doesn’t have a standard name yet in most companies, but here we’ll call it the Engineer-Diplomat. This new professional combines the mindset of a scientist, the heart of a humanist, and the tools of a decision-maker. In other words, this is the M-shaped innovator taken to the next level: technically proficient, emotionally intelligent, and persuasive all at once.

Let’s unpack that definition. The mindset of a scientist means approaching problems with curiosity and humility – testing hypotheses, analyzing data, and being willing to rethink assumptions. The heart of a humanist brings empathy and ethical consideration – understanding user needs, team dynamics, and the broader impact of technology on society. And the tools of a decision-maker imply strong skills in communication, influence, and collaboration – being able to cut across disciplinary lines, rally stakeholders around an idea, or find a negotiated solution in a heated conversation. An Engineer-Diplomat might be the person who can debug a complex system in the morning, then by afternoon explain its significance to an executive in plain language, and by evening mentor a colleague through a tough career decision. This is the kind of well-rounded creative problem-solver that the future demands.

From hardware to health, we’ve seen how engineering curiosity and innovation evolve. But what about when the problem isn’t physical, but ethical? That’s where Tristan Harris steps in. At first glance, he doesn’t seem like an engineer. But he trained in computer science and worked as a design ethicist at Google. His job? Making technology more persuasive. Until he had a moment of reckoning.

Harris began to question the business model that treated user attention as fuel. He saw how algorithmic design exploited human psychology to keep people scrolling. This wasn't a bug; it was the business model.

He left Google to found the Center for Humane Technology, and later co-produced The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary viewed by over 100 million people. Like Jamroz, Harris started with tools and curiosity but turned it into a call for ethical design. Harris challenged his own profession, asked uncomfortable questions, and spoke truth to platforms.

If Prakash added the scientific conscience, Harris embodied the humanist compass. A reminder that engineers must care not just about how something works, but how it affects society.

As we stand on the cusp of an AI-assisted future, the role of the human engineer is shifting. The boring parts of coding are being automated, freeing up engineers to focus on higher-level challenges. This is a golden opportunity to redefine what it means to be an engineer. Tomorrow’s engineer is not just a code monkey, nor even just an architect of systems, but an architect of ideas and alliances. They combine coding with coaching, algorithms with empathy, and debugging with negotiating. In essence, they are Engineer-Diplomats.

And this isn’t a distant ideal. It’s already happening. We see it in people like Krzysztof Jamroz, who expanded his identity from software developer to innovator and team leader. We see it in any technologist who steps out of their silo to solve a customer’s problem or to mentor a colleague. These individuals realize that the hardest problems aren’t purely technical; they’re human-technical. They require speaking multiple languages – programming, yes, but also the language of business and the language of people. By cultivating that blend of skills, today’s curious developer becomes tomorrow’s indispensable problem-solver.

The emergence of the Engineer-Diplomat is the future of creative problem-solving. It tells us that even as artificial intelligence grows more capable, human ingenuity and empathy become more important, not less. The engineer who can rethink, challenge old assumptions, learn new tools, and bring others along on the journey will always be in demand. Such engineers don’t fear the future. They shape it. They explore every tool to amplify their impact, while doing what only humans can do: imagine a future, recognize the constraints of the context, and prioritize humanistic values.

Aspiring Engineer-Diplomats, take note.

The challenge ahead is to build yourself in multiple dimensions. Cultivate your T-shaped technical depth, then grow into π-shaped and M-shaped forms by embracing breadth, leadership, and perspective. Read broadly. Try unfamiliar roles. Ask better questions. Listen deeply. Think again. And stay humble enough to be wrong. Treat your ideas like hypotheses. Ready to evolve and ready to be replaced.

If you do that, you will not just survive technological change, you will shape it. You will become the bridge between the world of bits and the world of people. You will not merely solve problems; you will help create the conditions from which better futures can emerge.

In a world defined by uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, this is more than a skillset. It is a mindset. And it is the mindset that helps us avoid becoming like the Lamplighter in The Little Prince: dutiful and sincere, but tragically out of sync with the world they serve. Let us not just light lamps. Let us ask why, for whom, and what next.

Have you seen glimpses of this Engineer-Diplomat mindset in yourself or others? I invite you to share your story. Whether you built a tool, mediated a conflict, reframed a problem, or navigated across boundaries, please share your experience. Let us build this future together.