There is a particular stubbornness to the people raised in the 1960s and 1970s. That stubbornness is not a caricature. It is a set of habits developed under the pressure of fewer safety nets and more immediate consequences. In this piece I try to name those habits and argue they matter now more than ever. The phrase What People Raised in the 1960s and 1970s Know About Real World Problem Solving appears here not as nostalgia but as a claim. It is a claim about practice not memory.
Practicality before theory
They learned to fix things that had no manual. Boilers failed in the middle of the night. Cars sputtered on long drives. An appliance stopped working and there was no same day delivery. The method that emerged was simple in description and complicated in detail. Assess. Improvise. Test. Repeat. People raised in that era developed a tolerance for small failure that our times treat as unacceptable. In my experience that tolerance led to better mental models of how messy systems behave.
Not cleverness but iterative competence
This generation rarely believed that cleverness alone would save the day. It was not enough to have an idea. You had to try it out in a kitchen or a garage or on a wet field. The knowledge they accumulated was scaffolded by repeated stumbles. That pattern looks unsophisticated until you notice the low error cost they accepted. They learned to survive errors rather than to avoid them at all cost.
Resourcefulness as a daily discipline
Resourcefulness is often spoken of as a personality trait. That confuses habit and virtue. For many people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s resourcefulness was a learned routine. It involved inventorying what was immediately available and imagining plausible combinations. This is not romantic scavenging. It is a disciplined survey of constraints followed by deliberate use of suboptimal materials because time and money demanded it.
My mother used to repair a torn sofa arm with a piece of curtain fabric and a glue that smelled of chemicals I could taste. It looked awful at first and held for years. There is a lesson in that ugly fix. The goal was not perfection. The goal was continuation. When systems are continuously useful rather than continuously perfect they often survive until a better option arrives.
Expert voice
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Donald A Norman director of the Design Lab University of California San Diego.
Norman is often quoted by product people but his line applies to the do it yourself ethos I am describing. If a solution fails to work in the real world it does not matter how pretty the idea was on paper.
Decision speed and moral calculus
Faster decisions do not equal better decisions. But in low resource situations speed prevented cascade failure. People raised in that time learned to weigh outcomes in a blunt way. Will this ruin the day. Will this harm the household budget. Will people get cold. Those are not abstract utilitarian calculations. They are practical questions anchored to lived consequences. The moral calculus is not absent. It is compressed.
I do not mean to suggest these tactics scale to every problem. A rushed decision in systemic policy is destructive. But the micro habits of asking what will break next and then shoring that up before elegant plans are ready are underused by managers who prefer pristine models over messy maintenance.
Communication without perfect tools
They were raised before endless asynchronous messaging. To coordinate they relied on one another in direct ways. A phone call often landed at a particular hour. People learned to speak concisely because interruptions were expensive. This tightened their ability to signal urgency and to escalate problems without flooding everyone with noise.
We often mistake today s tools for superior communication. They are not. We have volume. They had signal. What people from the 1960s and 1970s knew was how to collapse a long problem into a short actionable sentence that prompted a concrete follow up.
Learning by doing and the invisible curriculum
There was an invisible curriculum taught by parents and neighbours that official schooling rarely covered. How to patch a roof temporarily. How to keep food edible a little longer. How to milk together a community ride to the hospital. Those lessons are practical heuristics more than they are formal knowledge. Critics call them quaint. I call them a compressed apprenticeship in contingency management.
And yes some of that curriculum belonged to a world that excluded and harmed many people. None of this is a blanket endorsement of the past. The point is narrower. Some problem solving habits born in those conditions are undervalued today and transferable to modern complexity.
On limits
Not everything they learned is relevant. Systems are larger and interdependent in new ways. A clever jury rig on a local sewage pump cannot substitute for systems thinking in a city s infrastructure. Yet the small scale habits of quick assessment and patching buy time in a crisis in ways that planners too often ignore.
Why this matters now
We live in a world of fast innovation and brittle infrastructure. That combination makes practical improvisation valuable. People raised in the 1960s and 1970s had to build muscle memory for keeping things functioning without waiting for perfect replacements. That muscle matters in hospitals affected by supply chain disruptions. That muscle matters in remote communities. It matters in startups that cannot afford polished processes before product market fit. It matters when bureaucratic slowness meets urgent human need.
My position is simple and not entirely comfortable. We have become wealthy in tools and poor in habits. There are ways to harvest the competence of older cohorts without romanticising scarcity. It begins with admitting that the world rewards polish and penalises the messy competence that keeps things running.
How to borrow these habits without repeating old harms
Start by valuing outcomes over optics. Reward quick iterations. Teach acceptable failure in low risk contexts. Preserve standards where they are necessary and bend them where they are not. Let competence be messy sometimes. That is not a laissez faire call. It is a management choice that substitutes a readiness to act for an insistence on ceremonial approval.
I am partial to this method because I grew up watching it work. My qualm is sincere. If we import only the cute parts the habit dies. You cannot harvest resilience as a brand. It requires social tolerance for small failure and a willingness to invest later in durable fixes.
Closing thought that refuses closure
There is a civic question here. Can societies keep the virtues of hands on problem solving while reducing the social conditions that made those virtues necessary in the first place. The answer is not obvious. It might be a policy question. It might be an educational one. Or perhaps it is an attitude shift that starts in small teams. I will not pretend to have solved that tension. I only want to insist that we stop treating practical competence as something quaint and start treating it as a complementary skill to our high tech abilities.
Summary table
| Key Idea | What It Looks Like | Why It Still Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Iterative competence | Try small fixes test adjust | Reduces cost of large failures |
| Resourcefulness | Use available materials creatively | Buys time under scarcity |
| Compressed decision calculus | Fast practical judgments | Prevents cascade breakdowns |
| Direct communication | Concise escalations and signals | Preserves attention and reduces noise |
| Invisible curriculum | Household and community apprenticeships | Teaches contingency management |
FAQ
What exactly is meant by practical competence from the 1960s and 1970s
Practical competence describes habits formed by facing everyday failures with limited external support. It includes rapid troubleshooting improvisation and the acceptance that temporary fixes are sometimes the rational choice. It is a pattern of behavior rather than a single skill and it emerged because of the social and economic context of that era.
Can these habits be taught to younger generations
Yes but not by replication of scarcity. Teach hands on tasks within safe boundaries. Create exercises where error is low cost and iteration is encouraged. Pair younger learners with mentors for short apprenticeship cycles and emphasise outcomes over presentation. Institutional incentives must also change so small failures are not career enders.
Are these habits compatible with modern systems thinking
They are complementary if applied carefully. Small scale improvisation can buy time for systemic remedies. However improvisation should not become a substitute for necessary system upgrades. The smart blend uses patching strategically while planning for durable solutions.
Do these ideas excuse poor maintenance or cutting corners
No. The argument defends the practice of temporary fixes in urgent circumstances. It does not argue for permanent corner cutting. The ethic here values keeping people safe and systems functional while committing to durable repair when resources allow.
How should organisations shift to use these advantages
Organisations should create low risk labs for rapid iteration. They should reward employees who prevent small failures from becoming large ones and avoid over penalising imperfect early work. Adopt metrics that capture continuity of service not only aesthetic completion. Leadership must learn to tolerate visible mess for a season in exchange for operational resilience.
What are the social downsides to romanticising this past
Romanticising obscures the inequalities and exclusions of the era. Many communities bore the burden of scarcity disproportionately. The value is in selective extraction of useful methods without repeating structural injustices. The goal is to adapt the useful habits while eliminating the conditions that forced people to adopt them.
