Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly. Surgical teams work faster and make fewer mistakes as they repeat specific procedures, and specialized surgeons get better outcomes even independent of repetitions.

Like surgeries and putts, the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized

Serial Innovators, Abbie Griffin

They are concerned that HR policies at mature companies have such well-defined, specialized slots for employees that potential serial innovators will look like “round pegs to the square holes” and get screened out. Their breadth of interests do not neatly fit a rubric. They are “π-shaped people” who dive in and out of multiple specialties. “Look for wide-ranging interests,” they advised.

Ehrlich was wrong about population (and the apocalypse), but right on aspects of environmental degradation. Simon was right about the influence of human ingenuity on the food and energy supply, but wrong in claiming that improvements in air and water quality also vindicated his predictions. Ironically, those improvements failed to arise naturally from technological

initiative and markets, and rather were bolstered through regulations pressed by Ehrlich and others.

Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better,” Yale historian Paul Sabin wrote. “The opposite ha...

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,” was right. Dilettantes

“There is often a curiously inverse relationship,” Tetlock concluded, “between how well forecasters thought they were doing and how well they did.”

There was also a “perverse inverse relationship” between fame and accuracy.

They actually got worse as they accumulated credentials and experience in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more they could fit any story to their worldview. This did give hedgehogs one conspicuous advantage. Viewing every world event through their preferred keyhole made it easy to fashion compelling stories about

anything that occurred, and to tell the stories with adamant authority. In other words, they make great TV.

Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, she told me, “but you have to understand that they may have blinders on. So what I try to do is take facts from them, not opinions.” Like polymath inventors, Eastman and Cousins take ravenously from specialists and integrate.

Superforecasters’ online interactions are exercises in extremely polite antagonism, disagreeing without being disagreeable. Even on a rare occasion when someone does say, “‘You’re full of beans, that doesn’t make sense to me, explain this,’” Cousins told me, “they don’t mind that.” Agreement is not what they are after; they are after aggregating perspectives, lots of them.

He chimed in to inform his teammates that this was exactly the opposite of what he expected, and that they should take it as a sign of something wrong in his understanding. In contrast to politicians, the most adept predictors flip-flop like crazy.

A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.”

The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.

The aversion to contrary ideas is not a simple artifact of stupidity or ignorance.

Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science.

Kahan thinks it could be because they are better at finding evidence to confirm their feelings: the more time they spend on the topic...

in the United States using skin cream and gun control. Kahan also documented a personality feature that fought back against that propensity: science curiosity. Not science knowledge, science curiosity.

Just as Tetlock says of the best forecasters, it is not what they think, but how they think. The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them.

God does not play dice with the universe, Einstein asserted, figuratively. Niels Bohr, his contemporary who illuminated the structure of atoms (using analogies to Saturn’s rings and the solar system), replied that Einstein should keep an open mind and not tell God how to run the universe.

Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic.

In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed.

narrowly on all the unique details of the present situation. Starting with the details—the inside view—is dangerous. Hedgehog experts have more than enough knowledge about the minutiae of an issue in their specialty to do just what Dan Kahan suggested: cherry-pick details that fit their all-encompassing theories. Their deep knowledge works against them. Skillful forecasters depart from the problem at hand to consider completely unrelated events

with structural commonalities rather than relying on intuition based on personal experience or a single area of expertise.

“Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.

we often just use the data people put in front of us. I would argue we don’t do a good job of saying, ‘Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?’”

Business professors around the world have been teaching Carter Racing for thirty years because it provides a stark lesson in the danger of reaching conclusions from incomplete data, and the folly of relying only on what is in front of you.

There was other important information the Thiokol engineers presented that could have helped NASA avert disaster. But it was not quantitative, so NASA managers did not accept it. The Carter Racing study teaches that the answer was available, if only engineers looked at the right numbers. In reality, the right numbers did not contain an answer at all. The Challenger decision was truly ambiguous. It was a wicked problem,

demanding more data actually became the problem itself.

NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.”

“Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.”

I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it,” Gleason explained. “If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.” He employed what Weick called “hunches held lightly.”

The process culminated with more concern for being able to defend a decision than with using all available information to make the right one.

dispositive

“When you don’t have any data,” Feynman said, “you have to use reason.”

As NASA engineer Mary Shafer once articulated, “Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.” It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them.

“Congruence” is a social science term for cultural “fit” among an institution’s components—values,

individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.

experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction.

The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.

“Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation.”

there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of communication, and that the difference represents a healthy cross-pressure.

professors who analyzed a century of Himalayan mountain climbers—5,104 expedition groups in all—found that teams from countries that strongly valued hierarchical culture got more climbers to the summit, but also had more climbers die along the way.

randomized clinical trials that compared stents with more conservative forms of treatment show that stents for patients with stable chest pain prevent zero heart attacks and extend the lives of patients a grand total of not at all.

Plus, about one in fifty patients who get a stent will suffer a serious complication or die as a result of the implantation procedure.

A patient reports knee pain; an MRI shows a torn meniscus; naturally, a surgeon wants to fix it. When five orthopedic clinics in Finland compared the surgery with “sham surgery”—that is, surgeons took patients with knee pain and a torn meniscus to operating rooms, made incisions, faked surgeries, and sewed them back up and sent them to physical therapy—they found that sham surgery worked just as well. Most people with a torn meniscus, it turns out, don’t have any symptoms at all and will never even know. And for those who do have a torn meniscus and knee pain, the tear may have nothing to do with the pain.

“no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.”