One of the fascinating points in his wonderful book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World, is when David Epstein explains why a "T-shaped" person with a broad base of knowledge across many subjects is often more innovative and makes better decisions within their area of specialty.
Epstein finds that a breadth of knowledge encourages a person to make connections, think laterally and avoid the group-think of other experts in their field. This agile thinking is particularly important for solving what Epstein calls "wicked" problems, problems that are unique, complex and not rule-bound. This describes a lot of the most important problems out there and is contrast to "kind" problems, that have well defined rules and are repeatable.
For example, a golf swing is kind (despite what many golfers may think) because the general parameters remain the same every time. You aren't often given a shovel to use in the back 9. You can practice and perfect the relevant techniques.
Examples of wicked problems include geo-political conflicts and the famous examples of decision making gone wrong like the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Think novel situations with imperfect information and clouded motivations.
T-Shaped Software Design
For (much, much) lower stakes, the concepts of T-shaped and having broad range helped me articulate an advantage I thought my previous company had while working on contact center projects. We were brought in as subject matter experts on implementing contact center software like Twilio. Clients expected us to implement a contact center that was cost-effective in a timely fashion.
What ended up frequently happening was that our teams would dig into the problem as presented and surprise the client by suggesting non-contact center solutions. For example, we'd suggest ways to improve an app experience or streamline a process such that there was less need for customers to even use the contact center.
Our advantage here was having teams with broad consulting backgrounds who didn't live and breathe just contact center all the time. Having developed lots of types of apps for lots of business scenarios, we had the range and the T-shaped knowledge to connect our current problem to past ones and propose novel solutions. And it was really the combination of deep knowledge about the contact center platform and broad knowledge of other contexts that gave us the edge.
Range has a lot more going for it that I didn't cover here. Give it a spin and I think you'll learn even more about how diversity of thought, experience and background can give you and your teams an edge as well.
As always happy reading!
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