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When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa
Generalists vs specialists
- Generalists are more able to come up with new ideas and identify opportunities in fields with a slower pace of change, such as oil, gas, and mining.
- Specialists are better in fields with a faster pace of change, such as quantum computers and gene editing. They can more easily make sense of new technical developments and opportunities.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
The era of problem-solving generalists
From an era of specialized workers having expertise in one particular activity, the professional world has slowly moved towards problem-solving generalists. Workers are asked to don differe...
The pursuit of mastery
Mastery, once a sought-after attribute, is falling out of favour, according to the 2016 World Economic Forum report, and is slowly clearing the field for employees who can:
- Have a diverse set of skills.
- Can display the mental agility to switch between tasks.
- Are able to pivot towards a new problem or activity.
- Can take on a variety of roles at a short notice.
Expertise decline consequences
With the value of true expertise in serious decline, and the economy evolving towards a different set of requirements from employees, the impact on college education, career paths, worker safety, employability and even the nature of work is going to be profound.
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Key Ideas
Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory is a mathematical toolkit that allows us to extract ordered structures from chaos. The theory can reveal the intricate workings of such diverse natural systems as the beating of the hu...
Tiny variations vastly affect the outcome
Order on a small scale can produce chaos on a larger scale. In systems that behave without chaotic effects, small differences could eventually increase in size until they produce large effects - the hallmark of a chaotic system.
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz made this profound discovery when he attempted to predict the weather more accurately using a mathematical model. He found that rounding numbers off to three decimal places significantly changed the course of his weather predictions. Lorenz famously illustrated this effect with the analogy of a butterfly flapping its wings, thereby causing a hurricane formation elsewhere.
Understanding the butterfly effect
A good way to see the butterfly effect is with a game of billiards. No matter how consistent you are with the first shot, the smallest of differences in the speed and angle with which you strike the white ball will cause the balls to scatter in different directions every time.
What at first appears to be random behavior is completely deterministic. It only seems random because changes that are hardly noticeable are making all the difference.
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Key Ideas
The Half-Life of Facts
Facts decay over time. And the time it takes to disprove or replace half of it can be predicted.
Data in medicine become half as relevant in 2-3 years. For exact sciences, 2-4 years.
Half life of facts and compound knowledge
If we want our knowledge to compound, we’ll need to focus on the invariant general principles.
Half-lives show us that if we spend time learning something that changes quickly, we might be wasting our time.