Generally Speaking
On his blog yesterday, marketing guru Seth Godin raised the generalists-vs.-specialists debate and asked what benefit generalists bring. Before I had time to dash off a response, Godin himself defended the need for generalists, writing,
“It's okay to specialize in being a generalist, of course. By that, I mean that there are many problems … where someone who can see wide and doesn't have an allegiance to a particular solution is exactly the right person to call. I rely on generalists all the time, and so do you.”
To be fair to Godin’s argument, he adds, “My point is that you never call on these people when there's a better specialist available.”
We at S)T pride ourselves on being generalists—our staff of futurists is composed of Ph.D. chemists, historians, English majors, MBAs, and—yes—the occasional trained futurist. Collectively we thrive because we bring a divergent set of training, backgrounds and worldviews to our clients. We are generalists because, as foresight professionals, our job is to look at the big picture and to make the connections that experts often miss. Experts, while knowledgeable, often see trees, rather than the forest, mountain, river etc. We don’t lack for expertise, for in many cases our clients have all the expert knowledge we need and our job is to tease it out of them in order to help them see the larger picture of the future or futures.
My answer to Godin would be that all of my non-futures-trained colleagues combine to create a specialized knowledge base, and that it does our clients no good for us to know everything they do. That is a pointless duplication of resources. The benefit to hiring a firm of dedicated generalists is that collectively we create/own a specialized knowledge. This is reinforced as we bounce from project to project, so that one of our futurists may be writing on mobile telecommunications on Monday and infant formula on Friday. The generalist mindset allows our team to see the connections that exist between disparate businesses, consumers, and technologies. As a result, the sum of the whole is greater than its attendant parts.
That is why we are generalists.
Image: Angelrays (Flickr)
Christopher Kent
in General, Innovation, Futurism
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Source: We Specialize in Everything -
Source: We Specialize in Everything
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