Experts and Mammoths are prone to falling into traps and becoming extinct

Experts who specialise too deeply become less resilient. Mammoths who fall into deep traps tend to become extinct.
CorporateNature No 132

We live in times when deep specialisation is highly valued. Experts are traditionally associated with academia but the idea of knowing more and more about less and less (until you know everything about nothing) has also found its way into the corporate world. Yet, being an expert is not necessarily a good thing.

Many corporate jobs require an initial employee training period. These are usually designed to teach narrow skills that are mostly (if not only) useful in the employee’s current role. Thus the employee becomes an expert at their job, but for them to advance professionally, further training is required. This gives rise to a continuous process in which people specialise deeper and deeper in one area. Ultimately they end up developing narrow expertise in that area but very little else.

While deep expertise makes people more efficient at their job, becoming a narrow expert is a dangerous proposition. A narrow expert in a single area resembles a woolly mammoth that falls into a dug-out trap. If the trap is deep enough, the mammoth cannot climb out and ends up as steak on Neanderthal camp fires. Similarly, an expert developing a deep specialisations knows more and more about less and less. If they go too far down this path, they eventually end up knowing everything about nothing.

Wouldn't it be wiser and more resilient if we divided our energy and time and invested them in developing competence in multiple overlapping fields, rather than becoming a narrow expert in a single domain? Skills development benefits from diversification as much as an investment portfolio does. This would help keep the mammoth in the tundra, rather than in the trap dug out by our primitive ancestors.

Woolly mammoth
(image source: Wikipedia)

Megalodon was driven to extinction by giant white sharks; Airbus A380 to be phased out in favour of A350

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 76.

The prehistoric giant shark Megalodon may have been brought to extinction by the rise of its smaller cousin, the great white shark, some 6 to 4 million years ago, a new study claims.

On the same day, European plane maker Airbus announced it would stop production of the Airbus A380 superjumbo in 2021 because of lack of new orders and would focus instead on the smaller A350 and A330 models.

A smaller beast often happens to upend a bigger one in a typical David-and-Goliath fashion. However, extinction does not have to be brought about only by your own cousins: a giant can be outcompeted by species farther removed, like a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Fossilised Megalodon tooth and two great white shark teeth (Source: Wikipedia)

 

Airbus A380 (Source: Wikipedia)