Generalist, juggling

In this episode, we explore the role and need for the generalist in a world filled with a myriad of hyperspecialisms…

The snarl in that CEO’s voice was palpable right across the room. “Huh”, he sneered, in evident disgust, as he casually tossed my resume back onto the boardroom table. “You’ve worked in so many industries, that must mean you’re no good at anything, right?”

Perhaps not the best way to start off an interview for an executive-level role? I’ll admit that that, well, it did put me off a bit - I didn’t take the job, anyway. But yeah, I suppose it’s true that he was sort-of at least partly right about one thing: I have indeed worked in many different industries. Lots and lots of them, in fact, right around the world. Healthcare, media, aviation, telecoms, utilities, banking, logistics, emergency-services, social-services, government, more and more again - at least a couple of dozen overall by now, maybe a few more. I’d even rebuilt a few of them from scratch, all the way out to a fully global scale.

So yes, I’ve worked in so many different industries; but no, that doesn’t mean that I’m no good at anything.

What it does mean is that I’m a generalist.

And there’s a lot of value that a generalist can provide. Maybe not for that specific CEO, of course, but for others, certainly - such as bringing insights from one industry to re-use in another. One example, a company that ran a franchise for fuel-stations right around the country: they were worried about the impact that the rising use of electric vehicles would have on their business. Yet that change was happening mostly in the city: things were less likely to change further out in the more rural areas, where vehicles needed longer range. But also, there were a lot of old closed-down fuel-stations out that way, where the big suppliers had abandoned the market out there. So hey, I said, why not re-use an idea that I saw from one of the mid-sized banks in another country: they do community-based banking, so maybe why not do community-based fuel-supply? Planning-permission is still in place; a lot of the hardware is still in place; the only thing different from their existing franchises would be a slightly type of contract. A whole new business-model for them, right there, ready for the taking, And as a generalist, working across so many different industries, that whole rethink and refresh took us no more than perhaps half an hour or so to map out all of those new connections, during a casual chat whilst we were waiting for one of the other executives to finish a phone-call.

People don’t seem to understand what generalists actually do. And part of that is because most businesses are still run on Taylorist lines, where everyone is supposed to be a single-function specialist who sits inside exactly one type of box and only ever does one type of job. Which, yes, gets things done. Sort-of. But it also means that there’s almost no way to describe how to get the boxes to work together - how to link between the boxes. And without that, it leads inevitably to fragmentation. Wherever there are no jobs for generalists, there’s no-one left who’s able to link things together - and then everything quietly falls apart, yet with no way to see why it’s falling apart. Oops…

‘Twas ever thus, perhaps. Take my parents, for example: both were doctors, yes but more specifically they were general practitioners - one of the few generalist roles formally recognised as a specialism in its own right. Yet even then their role was often denigrated by other hospital-based doctors - “not proper specialists”, they’d say; “fallen off Moran’s [career]-ladder” and all that. Even though the general-practitioner was literally at the front-line of medicine. Oops…

Generalists are the ones who connect everything together, who work out how to hold everything together at the front-line, who find the ideas and innovations that supposedly come ‘from nowhere’, but actually come from the disciplined practice of ‘being a generalist’ across multiple domains. It’s an essential role. Yet also a role that’s still far too much misunderstood.

The reality is that as we move further and further into change at ever-larger scope and scale, we’ll need vast numbers of people with the disciplined skills of the generalist. We need people who know how to work between the boxes; we need people who can link things together.

But at present, we’re still not doing at all well on that - on how to train and organise those kinds of work, and how to develop the skills that go with them. For example, to quote from a World Economic Forum study:

our educational system is not adequately preparing us for work of the future

At a societal scale - as I know to my literal cost - we don’t even know how to support the people doing that kind of work:

just because a profession is producing something desirable, or even necessary to the functioning of society, doesn’t mean society has figured out a way to pay for the care and feeding of its practitioners

And, to make it even worse:

our political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle these hard choices

So yeah, there’s a real problem here…

But what we can do, right now, is to start to learn more about what the generalist actually does. One way we can make sense of this is to see the generalist as someone who is almost literally juggling many worlds - and keeping the patterns together as a whole:

Public-domain graphic via the Dover Collection

Generalist, juggling.

And every now and then, in the midst of that juggling, a jewel of insight falls out of that pattern - and helps to create a better world for everyone around.