Some social scientists believe that the more expert you become in your field, the more difficult it is to create innovative ideas—or even obvious ones. This is because becoming an expert means you tend to specialize your thinking. Specializing is like brushing one tooth. You get to know that one tooth extremely well, but you lose the rest of them in the process.
Organizational psychologists will beg to differ. That said, they’re usually in favor of tendencies that prepare an individual to be a great contributor in a specific role, not a generalist who is able to think across department lines to come up with something new.
