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)

How to win against rip currents and Asian competitors? - Differentiate and specialise!

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 112

How do you escape a rip current at sea? Never swim straight back towards the beach and directly against the rip. Instead, swim sideways along the beach for 100 metres and then head towards land. Rip currents are narrow flows and should be avoided, not fought.

The same is true of global trends. If you are a western company or university, there is no point in fighting against the rise of Asian competitors. Instead, simply do things differently. If you have just fallen out of the Global Top 100 because five more Chinese entities have entered the ranking and displaced you, don't just fight back head on, on all fronts. Instead, decide in which direction you can differentiate and specialise, and focus on cornering the market in that particular field. It is unlikely that you will have to make a choice between more than two possible ways forward. 

Isn't this just like at a beach with a rip current: all you need to do is swim along the beach either to one side, or to the other.

Rip current diagram (Source: Wikipedia)

Focus comes from natural selection in animals and from individual choice in humans

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 83

Nocturnal lemurs seem to have lost their trichromatic colour vision in order to be better able to see fruit at night, shows new research. Colour is not visible at all in the dark but brightness is, so natural selection has weeded out adaptations that are no longer necessary, allowing the lemurs to focus on what is important for their survival.

Successful people also have "focus" as one of their key character traits. However, this does not mean one should only ever focus on one thing and nothing else. T-shaped people are the benchmark: broad skills across disciplines (the horizontal bar) and deep specialist skills in one area (the vertical bar). Yet, the vertical bar does not always start out in the middle (T): it can appear on the left (Г) or on the right. It is down to individual choice where the T bar will start from and what one will focus on. After all, you are what you take time to become.

Lemur (Source: Wikipedia)

Specialisation comes with age and because of age

Biological and psychological processes related to ageing lead to job specialisation
George ILIEV

(Photo: Elderly man, Wikipedia)

With age, neurobiological and psychological processes make us less interested in novelty and lead us to stick to what we know. (Scientific American, March 2013). "Old people do not need to remember as much new material as the young do because they are already familiar with so much of what they experience."

Professionally, this natural phenomenon is correlated with, and possibly driving, job specialisation: As we get older, we become more comfortable with our professional field and less comfortable with new fields. Experience builds on this trend and creates "the expert".

Specialisation pays off with higher income though it also entails higher risk of job redundancy. Last but not least comes the comical danger of overspecialisation: "knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing”.