Joydeep Dey

7 Reasons Why The Future Belongs To Generalists Drawing on examples from medicine to academia to sport, in this article, we explore how breadth and range are far more powerful than specialized expertise. The experts often judge their own fields more narrowly than open-minded, intellectually curious amateurs do. In our complex and cut-throat world, there’s a lot of pressure to get a head start and specialize early. Many successful people (such as Tiger Woods) start to focus on one path early in life. And many of us have been brought up to understand that deep expertise only will lead to enhanced credibility, rapid advancement and escalating incomes. But if we delve a little deeper, then it becomes clear that it’s generalists, not specialists, who are primed to excel. Generalists may take a little longer to find their path in life, but they are more creative, can make connections between diverse fields that specialists cannot. This makes them more innovative and, ultimately, more impactful. That is why taking a wide-ranging approach to life will pay off in the long run. Let’s find out how this works. Starting early and specializing is fashionable, but has dubious merit Successful sporting legends like Tiger Woods embody a now popular idea that the key to success in life is to specialize, get a head start and practice intensively. This trend toward specialization doesn’t only show up in the sports world. In fact, it’s also true of academia, our complex financial system and medicine. Oncologists, for example, now rarely focus on cancer alone – rather, they specialize in cancer of a particular organ. But is specializing really the way to go? The answer is, no. In many walks of life, building up experience in just one field doesn’t help performance. In a 2009 paper, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein explored the connection between experience and performance. Klein shows that experience counts immensely in certain fields (such as, golf or firefighting) whereas in other areas (army recruitment, for example) experience counted for nothing. Their research concluded that there was a complete disconnect between experience and performance. Some fields of life resemble golf or firefighting. While not necessarily easy, they offer recurring patterns or simple rules that govern decision-making. But there are many more fields of life, like army recruitment or management consulting that are much more nebulous and require the creativity and flexibility that generalization offers. Experimentation is as reliable a route to expertise as early specialization As a young boy, Roger Federer dabbled in squash, skiing, wrestling, skateboarding, basketball, tennis and badminton. Later, he gave credit to this range of sports experience for helping his handeye coordination and athleticism. Roger Federer’s winding path to tennis success points to the fact that sampling, rather than specialization, can often be the best route to eventual success. And plenty of evidence across multiple disciplines supports this. This is true even in an area like music, where plenty of outstanding musicians do specialize young. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, for instance, started playing music at a very young age. But what many people don’t know is that Ma first tried violin and piano, and only moved to the cello because he didn’t like the first two. Yo-Yo Ma isn’t alone in this. In a study of students at a British boarding school, music psychologist John Sloboda found that every one of the students who attended structured music lessons early in their development was categorized by the school as “average,” while not one was “exceptional.” In contrast, those children identified as exceptional were those who had tried out three instruments. So, if we haven’t yet found our calling, we must experiment. Vincent van Gogh is an inspiration. He tried everything from working in bookstores to teaching and art dealing to preaching before finding his calling as an artist who changed painting forever. A narrow focus is unhelpful, and a remedy for this is to think outside the box In some environments, dealing with specialists is desirable. If we need an operation, we probably want a doctor who specializes in the procedure and has done it many times before. However, as we benefit from more reflection and thinking, this narrow focus can be unhelpful. For example, cardiologists use stents – metal tubes that hold blood vessels open – to treat chest pain so often that they often do so reflexively, even in situations that may be dangerous or inappropriate. This explains a 2015 study by Dr. Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School. The study found that patients with cardiac arrest or heart failure were actually less likely to die if they were admitted to hospital while top cardiologists were away. Other fields also point to the benefits of looking at problems with an outside view, rather than the inside view dictated by our own particular specialty. As further psychological research has repeatedly shown, the more details we consider about something, the more extreme our judgments become. In one example, students rated a university higher when told that only certain science departments, rather than all science departments, were ranked in the national top ten. A breadth of experience and interest drives innovation Andy Ouderkirk, an inventor at the multinational company 3M, was named Innovator of the Year in 2013 and has been named on 170 patents, a proxy for creative success. He became fascinated with what generates successful and inventive teams, so he started to do some research. He found that the inventors who were most likely to succeed within 3M and win the company’s Carlton Award (which recognized innovation) were not specialists. They were polymaths - people with one area of depth, but a great deal of expertise in other areas as well. These polymaths tended to have many patents in their area of focus, but also repeatedly took expertise gathered in one area and applied it to another. A study of prestigious scientists led by Robert Root Bernstein, a Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, confirm Ouderkirk’s findings. Comparing Nobel prize-winning scientists to other scientists, the figures show that Nobel laureates are a full 22 times more likely to be an amateur actor, magician, dancer or performer. The experts and pundits that our society listens to are usually hopeless at making predictions A research conducted by world-renowned forecasting expert Philip Tetlock found that experts are absolutely terrible at making predictions about anything. Tetlock found that an expert’s years of experience, academic degree and even ability to access classified information made no difference. When experts said that some potential event was impossible, it happened in 15 percent of cases. Events declared to be an absolute sure thing failed to occur 25 percent of the time. One of the problems was that many of the experts’ focus was too narrow. Having spent entire careers studying a single issue, they tended to have explicit theories about how it worked. So, what makes a better forecaster of future events? Well, researchers like psychologist Jonathan Baron point to active open-mindedness – a willingness to question your own beliefs. Most of us fail at this, and can’t override our strong instinct to cherry-pick evidence that confirms our existing beliefs. So, how exactly can we combat our tendency to stick to our existing beliefs, despite the evidence? One personality feature is important if we want to stay open-minded and think clearly about the world around us. Instead of scientific knowledge (how much we know) – we must emphasize scientific curiosity – a desire to learn more, willingness to look at new evidence and ability to think with a genuinely open mind. Generalists geared up for future career success The rapid advancement of technology combined with increased uncertainty is making the most important career logic of the past, counterproductive. The world has changed, but our philosophy around skills development has not. Going forward, the breadth of perspective and the ability to connect the proverbial dots (the domain of generalists) is likely to be as important, if not more, as depth of expertise and the ability to generate dots (the domain of specialists). Many forward-looking companies look for multi-functional experience when hiring. This is essential for large organizations like Google, for example, where employees jump from team to team and from role to role. In fact, Lisa Stern Hayes, one of Google’s top recruiters, said in a podcast that the company values problem-solvers who have a “general cognitive ability” over role-related knowledge. “Think about how quickly Google evolves,” she said. “If you just hire someone to do one specific job, but then our company needs change, we need to be rest assured that the person is going to find something else to do at Google. That comes back to hiring smart generalists.” Because generalists have a set of tools to draw from, they are able to dynamically adjust their course of action as a situation evolves. So, for any hiring manager out there looking for fresh talent, here’s a plea - don’t just look for people who fit into your clearly-defined slots - make some space for those who don’t fit so clearly into any one category. Their breadth of experience might be invaluable! How we can embrace this kind of curiosity? How do we become a generalist? To be more of a generalist, we need to change our attitude toward learning and success. And to begin with, it’s important to zoom out and pay more attention to the context in which we’re making decisions. We need to start thinking bigger and wider than we’ve traditionally done. Another strategy is to think about how seemingly unrelated developments may impact each other, something that systems thinkers do naturally - study the interconnections across industries and imagine how changes in one domain can disrupt operations in another one. In a new role at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arturo Casadevall - a star in the world of microbiology and immunology - is developing programs focused on an interdisciplinary understanding of topics such as philosophy, ethics, statistics and logic. According to him, with a more rigorous grounding in reasoning and multidisciplinary thinking, students will be better prepared to make a real impact on our economy and society. Of course, not all of us hold senior academic positions like Casadevall. What can we do to expand our range? Well, one thing is to embrace failure. Dean Keith Simonton, a creativity researcher, has shown that the more work creators produce, the more failures they produce, but they are also more likely to produce a superstar success. Thomas Edison, for instance, held over 1,000 patents, many of which were ultimately failures. But his successes, like the light bulb, were revolutionary. Treading a wide-roaming, disorderly path of experimentation may not always bring instant results. But it may just be the best route to greatness in the end. The one certainty about the future is that it will be uncertain. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and technological innovation have commoditized information. The skill of generating dots is losing value. As Dr. Vikram Mansharamani puts it “the key skill of the future is - well, not quite a skill - it’s an approach, a philosophy, and way of thinking — and it’s critical we adopt it as soon as we’re able”. Embracing range, experimentation and breadth of experience is often a better road to success than specialization. Range demands patience, open-mindedness and scientific curiosity. If we can foster and exemplify these, the chances that we will generate major innovations and contribute significantly to our economy and society, increase.