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)

Last week, ChangeWaves welcomed its 50,000th visitor!

Thanks to everyone who reads ChangeWaves. Remember, you can subscribe to our RSS feed to receive ChangeWaves over email or in your favorite RSS reader.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for our blog, you can leave them in the comments section of a post or email me directly.

Image: (c) 2008 JupiterImages Corp.

As the number of posts on this blog has grown, and the topic diversity has expanded, finding that needle of insight in the haystack has become slightly more tricky. To help you, dear reader, we've implemented a Site Search function, available under the Navigation menu on the right side of the site.

Of course, you can always consulting the expanding Topic Index just below as well. Happy hunting! 

Image: Victor Geere (Flickr)

I was correcting an error in my email spellchecker and noticed how much the custom word list reveals what we are thinking about at Social Technologies. Words get added as they are used in email, so the dictionary is a capsule of what is new, or newly prominent, in recent years.

A few underlying drivers that emerge from the word list:

• New powers in the world, and their concerns -- seen in words like BRICs, Haier, Mercosur, Kerala
• New scales --15 nano- words, 10 micro- words, and 3 mega- words
• Surging technologies --12 bio- words, from biodiesel to bioweapons
• New ways of using technology -- Flickr, MySpace, blogger, geotagging, timeshifting, exergaming, and 9 tele- words
• New political and social issues -- offshoring, greenwashing
• New cultural flows -- telenovela, manga, pupusas, Jazeera
• New language -- bling, d'oh, blog

A small selection from the custom dictionary:

• bioethicists
• biomimetic
• bioweapons
• blogosphere
• crowdsourcing
• geolocation
• geotagging
• greenwashing
• halal
• haptics
• Islamization
• kleptocrats
• Maharashtra
• MMORPG
• manga
• mashups
• micropayment
• modding
• nanosensors
• nanowires
• neuromarketing
• nutraceutical
• nutrigenomics
• pharmacogenetics
• pharming
• podcasting
• quinceaños
• Roomba
• Sharia
• Skyped
• timeshifting
• transhumanist
• UAVs
• warfighting
• wearables
• windfarm
• Xinjiang
• xenotransplantation

In Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, recently reviewed in Science,* Philip E. Tetlock of the business school at UC Berkeley puts experts to the test. Over a 15-year period Tetlock asked 284 experts in politics, international relations, economics, and related disciplines to make over 80,000 predictions related to world political events. His conclusion is that “it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated statistical ones” (emphasis in original). Though no one does very well, some prognosticators are better than others. Those with varied knowledge, who draw from a multitude of traditions, and accept ambiguity as part of all situations (“foxes”) generally do better than those whose expertise and point of view are narrow and formulaic (“hedgehogs”).

We confess we haven’t read Tetlock’s book, but nevertheless make bold to add some observations from our experience as futurists. The reviewer (and perhaps the author) confuses “expert” with “specialist,” when there is a subtle difference. Many futurists have observed that narrow specialists do not make good predictions. (They tend to be too optimistic, among other biases.) This is true in technology as well as in economic and political forecasting. Many studies have shown that generalists, when they know what they are talking about, are better at making forecasts than specialists.

Because we rely on information and inference  to make forecasts, an informed person or "expert" is more likely to correctly anticipate a trend and maybe an event than an uninformed person making wild guesses. We doubt the assertion that mathematical and statistical models are categorically better than expert judgment in making forecasts. Statistical and mathematical models typically capture only continuities, not discontinuities. They are also much more accurate for well-defined, stable, and short-term cases, not the long-term future. Only expert judgment can capture discontinuities. And, of course, all statistical models contain expert judgment (some expert had to decide what elements to put into the model and what to leave out). Our recommendation: use modeling as a way to frame and provide consistency and rigor to the exercise of expert judgment. -- Bill Croasmun and Steve Millett

*John T. Jost, “The Perils of Prognostication,” Science, June 30, 2006, pages 1876-1877.

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Social Technologies is continuing the expansion of its foresight, strategy, and innovation capabilities with the hiring of Andy Hines, Christine Chastain, Steve Millett, and Traci Stafford Croft.

We are delighted to welcome aboard these new teammates, each of whom adds a rich background in both domain expertise and process experience to S)T’s portfolio.

Andy Hines will be our new Senior Director of Consulting. Andy is a lecturer in Futures Studies at the University of Houston (UH) and will remain with that program as an adjunct professor. After graduating from the UH Futures program himself in 1990, Andy spent six years as a consulting futurist with Coates & Jarratt, where he co-authored Future Survey’s “Super Seventy” book 2025: Scenarios of US and Global Society as Reshaped by Science and Technology. After that he spent seven years as an organizational futurist, first with Kellogg and then with Dow Chemical. He chronicled his experiences as an “insider” futurist in “Hinesight,” a column for the journal Foresight, and later compiled these columns into a piece called “An Organizational Futures Audit,” which won the 2004 Foresight Literati Prize for best journal article. Currently he is working on How to Think about the Future: Guidelines for Excellence in Strategic Foresight, which synthesizes best practices in strategic foresight from more than three dozen foresight professionals.

In joining S)T, “I feel like I’ve come full circle professionally,” Andy says. “I’ve had consulting experience, organizational ‘insider’ experience, and teaching experience. In each of these roles, I’ve had a professional hunger to make foresight practical and useful. I believe this opportunity with Social Technologies, with its incredibly talented staff, will enable me to leverage this experience and help us to deliver the insight so much needed by today’s organizations.”

Christine Chastain , a designer and cultural anthropologist, will serve as S)T’s Director of Primary Research. She is interested in applying new methodologies to the foresight process to create actionable insights for strategic planning and innovation. Christine has over 10 years of agency experience with McCaan-Erickson, Leo Burnett, and Lowe Lintas. As a member of General Motor's Advanced Portfolio Exploration Group, she focused on trends and brand strategy. Her most recent post was director of strategy and research for Herbst LaZar Bell, a strategic product and innovation consultancy, where she performed numerous ethnographic studies for Fortune 500 companies around the world. This July, Christine will be moving to our London office, from which she will lead studies in Europe and Asia. She speaks numerous European languages and has lived and worked  throughout Asia.

Steve Millett, PhD, joins Social Technologies after a 27-year career at Battelle, where he managed over 90 foresight projects for corporate, nonprofit, and government clients around the world. At Social Technologies he will be Director of our Technology Foresight multiclient research and analysis service. Steve is a widely respected expert in analytical scenario generation and expert-judgment methods of forecasting. He managed Battelle’s “top ten” technology forecasts, which received global media attention. He has authored 4 books and 27 professional journal articles.

Traci Stafford Croft joins Social Technologies as a futurist; she will work primarily on developing new and existing client relationships, while also contributing to project content in the areas of consumer trends, scenario planning, and internal corporate networking, communication, and innovation processes. Croft has worked for and with many Fortune 500 companies in the automotive, home appliance, retail, food, and advertising industries. Prior to joining S)T, she was a consumer insight manager at Ford, responsible for integrating consumer trends and foresight content into corporate strategy, product development, and marketing. She was recognized for her contributions to Ford’s 2006 Corporate Sustainability Report as well as for her subject matter expertise and innovation leadership in the areas of aging and changing physiology.

Welcome to ChangeWaves, the Weblog of Social Technologies. For those of you not familiar with Social Technologies, we are a global research and consulting firm dedicated to helping organizations understand and shape the future of their business. We combine global forecasting and analysis tools with expertise in strategic exploration and innovation processes, to equip our clients with the ability to look five, ten, or twenty-five years into the future.

At Social Technologies, we differentiate ourselves through our focus on moving beyond the transfer of knowledge, to the collaborative creation of new futures. This is achieved though various channels, including our two flagship multiclients, Global Lifestyles and Technology Foresight, our substantial custom consulting capabilities in strategy, foresight and innovation, as well as through our events, productions, and other communications expertise.

ChangeWaves is a channel through which our global team of futurists can bring into the spotlight information, observation, analysis and insight about the leading edge of change, around the world and in many markets and industries. Most importantly, it allows us to engage clients and other readers alike in a discussion about the shape, direction and potential impact of these changes. We welcome your comment and feedback, and look forward to sharing the many voices that make up the Social Technologies team.