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July 20 - August 22, 2020
those specialist teams often got mired in working out small details at the expense of practical solutions.
“It’s these other puzzles or problems where you have to think outside the box.”
As organizational boxes get smaller and smaller, and as outsiders are more easily engaged online, “exploration [of new solutions] now increasingly resides outside the boundaries of the traditional firm,” Lakhani and colleagues wrote.
“Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.”
Academic departments no longer merely fracture naturally into subspecialties, they elevate narrowness as an ideal.
The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information—undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge.
They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.
communication technology has limited the number of hyperspecialists required to work on a particular narrow problem,
“When information became more widely disseminated,” Ouderkirk told me, “it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.”
A subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers that studied technological innovation over a decade found that there was no statistically significant relationship between R&D spending and performance.
Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.
She described her approach to innovation almost like investigative journalism, except her version of shoe-leather reporting is going door-to-door among her peers.
She is a “T-shaped person,” she said, one who has breadth, compared to an “I-shaped person,”
Research by Spanish business professors Eduardo Melero and Neus Palomeras backed up Ouderkirk’s idea. They analyzed fifteen years of tech patents from 32,000 teams at 880 different organizations,
In low-uncertainty domains, teams of specialists were more likely to author useful patents. In high-uncertainty domains—where the fruitful questions themselves were less obvious—teams that included individuals who had worked on a wide variety of technologies were more likely to make a splash.
an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had collective experience across the same number of genres.
Diverse experience was impactful when created by platoon in teams, and even more impactful when contained within an individual.
If you need to have surgery, you want a doctor who specializes in the procedure and has done it many times, preferably with the same team,
the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized by everyone involved,
University of Utah professor Abbie Griffin has made it her work to study modern Thomas Edisons—“serial innovators,”
Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.
The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.
Economist Julian Simon took up Ehrlich’s challenge to create a more optimistic picture. The late 1960s was the prime of the “green revolution.”
More people would actually be the solution, because it meant more good ideas and more technological breakthroughs.
Simon proposed a bet. Ehrlich could choose five metals that he expected to become more expensive as resources were depleted and chaos ensued over the next decade.
If, ten years hence, prices had gone down, Ehrlich would have to pay the price difference to Simon. If prices went up, Simon woul...
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In October 1990, Simon found a check for $576.07 in his mailbox. Ehrlich got smoked. The price of every one of the metals declined. Technological change not only supported a growing population, but the food supply per person increased year after year, on every continent.
commodity prices are a bad proxy for population effects, particularly over a single decade.
As each man amassed more information for his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.
The average expert was a horrific forecaster.
They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain.
the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”
Not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, they had qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators—partners in sharing information and discussing predictions.
in the face of uncertainty, individual breadth was critical. The foxiest forecasters were impressive alone, but together they exemplified the most lofty ideal of teams: they became more than the sum of their parts.
Eastman, like his teammates, is constantly collecting perspectives anywhere he can, always adding to his intellectual range, so any ground is fertile for him.
In contrast to politicians, the most adept predictors flip-flop like crazy.
The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing.
The most science-curious folk always chose to look at new evidence, whether or not it agreed with their current beliefs.
most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic.
forecasters can improve by generating a list of separate events with deep structural similarities, rather than focusing only on internal details of the specific event in question.
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.
“It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.”
“When you don’t have any data,” Feynman said, “you have to use reason.”
in the first study that systematically examined a broad swath of organizations across an industry, researchers who studied cultural congruence at 334 institutions of higher education found that it had no influence on any measure of organizational success whatsoever.
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.
The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.
I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.”
Casadevall declared that the pace of progress had slowed, while the rate of retractions in scientific literature had accelerated,
Part of the problem, he argued, is that young scientists are rushed to specialize before they learn how to think; they end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad (or fraudulent) work by their colleagues.
You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”
