Carrying a specialist’s gut in a generalist’s world
As recently as 2008, Malcolm Gladwell advised us to follow the 10000-hour rule. This article is not about whether 10000 hours are enough to become an expert. This is also not about learning hacks to cut down on the hours without compromising on the desired proficiency. I’ve little idea about either thing. My interest is more fundamental: How desirable is expert-level specialization in a specific skill today?
I argue that narrow specialization, of the kind developed over 10000 hours of practice and that comes at the cost of generalist skills, undermines our ability to be flexible and travel across domains in business today.
Gut feel
Intuition is a residue of practice. It is a skill that is honed over tens or hundreds of experiences and allows us to jump to the conclusion without the burdensome intervening steps. It is also what we call gut feel, though that is much abused today. The secret to intuitive skill is pattern matching. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman compares this to how a good reader may be able to read the opening stanza of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky with “perfect rhythm and intonation” even when seeing the words for the first time.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Now insert a few French or Spanish words and it may throw the reader off. A strong factor for accuracy in intuitive predictions is predictability in the environment. The more predictable the environment, the easier to get predictions right. Firefighters and emergency workers play this out every day and are immediately informed whether they made the right decision or not. They use that feedback to hone their instincts for the next iteration. But in business, the line between cause and outcome is not a straight one. It is not always possible to separate signal from noise. What exactly did we do right? And where did we mess up? VCs and business leaders allocating capital in a digital economy ask themselves these questions all the time.
How do we beat the ‘changing rooms’ trap?
It is easy to make the right decisions if we’re the smartest person in a room. In the industrial economy, it was possible, and very advisable, to gun for expertise. There were few rooms and one could imagine being a specialist in every room they were in. In business, today, the room we find ourselves in keeps changing. Business owners may find themselves in the analytics room one hour, the M&A room the next, and the engineering room the one after. Even as we do so, there are more rooms emerging into view all the time, and many more we know little about. So what can we do when we find ourselves in a new room?
Improve range: Range is breadth. Breadth allows us to be adaptable as the terrain we operate in changes year on year. With range, there’s no dedicated period of learning followed by a period of application. Both happen in a continuous cycle — ideas picked up from one domain are put to use in another, and seamlessly back and forth. Learning the first principles helps. Restaurants may vary by cuisine and chef but if you understand that they work on the same basic economic formula it simplifies matters. More on this later.
Know what you don’t know: Tom Watson Sr., founder of IBM, said: “I’m smart in spots — but I stay around those spots.” Not being aware of our circle of competence in a changing business environment may lead to false confidence. We may pit ourselves against more better skilled competitors in areas of their expertise. By that logic the more successful leaders in stable business environments will have a harder time coping with erosion in intuitive accuracy in new spaces or in an evolving market. Best to check the ego out at the boardroom door. A humbling thought.
Mix intuition with analysis: How do business leaders stay relevant? By marrying intuition with analysis. Analysis is nothing but doing the work needed to have an opinion. But it is hard to put in this effort when your brain is pitching you hard to go one way. When bankrolling a new project, the charm of gut feel may be seductive but looking for product/market fit first offers better chances of success over time. So: make a habit of looking for disconfirming evidence. Ask what would be a good argument against [insert preferred decision]. Mixing intuition with analysis is thinking both fast (automatic, heuristic) AND slow (deliberate, considered). We’re wired to think fast, especially in high-stakes situations. We need new automatic behaviors to slow down the decision-making process.
Learn slow: This is about how best to improve range. David Epstein’s Range sheds light on an international study that explored the difference in impact between teaching maths with “using procedures” questions and “making connections” questions. Learning by procedure meant applying something just learned in the exact same context, while connections pointed students to a broader context. The more the teachers pushed students toward making connections, the better the students’ performance over a longer term. But that was rare. Students consistently tried to turn conceptual problems they had to first understand into procedural problems they could simply execute within the duration of a class. Procedures imply high fidelity. They do not travel well. Concepts on the other hand operate one level higher and can be applied broadly. Learning conceptually means learning slowly because concepts are associative, not direct like procedures are. Once we understand a core concept, its area of applicability expands. But that takes time. How often have we been commended for learning slowly?
Having a razor-sharp intuition may be good for the ego but it is necessary to acknowledge that we cannot always be there. If we are learning slow, have built automatic behaviors for thinking intuitively and deliberately, and love what the word eclectic means, we can begin to understand what a botanist sees in the garden or what a musician hears in the studio. And that’s a great start. We don’t need to be the smartest in every room.
