Generalists > Experts

From an old HBR article on generalists:

Professor Phillip Tetlock conducted a 20+ year study of 284 professional forecasters. He asked them to predict the probability of various occurrences both within and outside of their areas of expertise. Analysis of the 80,000+ forecasts found that experts are less accurate predictors than non-experts in their area of expertise. Tetlock’s conclusion: when seeking accuracy of predictions, it is better to turn to those like “Berlin’s prototypical fox, those who know many little things, draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradictions.” Ideological reliance on a single perspective appears detrimental to one’s ability to successfully navigate vague or poorly-defined situations (which are more prevalent today than ever before).

On generalists

From an old piece by Meghan Casserly on generalists:

Environments with more competition breed more specialists. Rainforests, for example, are chock-o-block full of diversity and competition for survival, which results in hundreds of thousands of highly specialized species. Silicon Valley, New York City and most of the other highly-productive, highly-competitive business landscapes, operate similarly. Instead of countless species of spider, the modern workforce has become a highly specialized mass of MicroNuclear Physicists, Fiber Optics Engineers and Java Developers who all function brilliantly when conditions are perfect.

But what happens when the ecosystem shifts?

Despite the corporate world’s insistence on specialization, the workers most likely to come out on top are generalists—but not just because of their innate ability to adapt to new workplaces, job descriptions or cultural shifts. Instead, according to writer Carter Phipps, author of 2012’s Evolutionaries, generalists will thrive in a culture where it’s becoming increasingly valuable to know “a little bit about a lot.” Meaning that where you fall on the spectrum of specialist to generalist could be one of the most important aspects of your personality—and your survival in an ever-changing workplace....

Only by understanding the work within fields to the right and the left of your own can you understand the bigger picture, he says, whether you’re talking about a corporation (sales analysts understanding the supply chain as well as internal operations) or the world as a whole. “We’ve become so focused on specialization, but just as there are truths that can only be found as a specialist,” he says, “There are truths that can only be revealed by a generalist who can weave these ideas in the broader fabric of understanding.”

Why it's troubling

After posting (and tweeting) about The Presenter's Paradox yesterday, I spent a little time thinking about why I find it troubling. 

As a generalist, I accept that there are pieces of my skillset which will fall through the cracks. Not everything I do needs to add up to anything in particular, and I don't expect everyone I meet to appreciate each of my interests.

And yet I strongly believe that what others might think of as extracurricular activities are actually integral parts of what I offer. I feel that the breadth of my experience has a multiplying effect on the value of each component part. I have chosen not to specialize, and I consider my offering to be stronger as a result.

And so the Presenter's Paradox leaves me in an awkward position. If my value is estimated as an average of my levels of expertise, will I only ever be seen as an amateur? Or is it possible to present my breadth as an extraordinary skill in itself? What are the characteristics of the businesses best suited for generalists? Is giving in to self-direction (i.e. entrepreneurship, I suppose) the healthiest path?

I don't think these questions are intractable. But they are big. And they don't feel un-troubling to me.

The Presenter's Paradox

This is shocking, troubling, and so obvious. Emphasis mine; I recommend reading the whole article on HBR.

Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter’s Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65! Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of them chose the package with the free download...

The same pattern emergences when you are creating deterrents or negative consequences to discourage bad behavior. In another study, participants were asked to choose between two punishments to give for littering: a $750 fine plus two hours of community service, or a $750 fine. 86% of participants felt that the fine plus community service would be the stronger deterrent. But they were wrong — in fact, a separate set of participants rated the $750 with the two hours of community service as significantly less severe than the fine alone. Once again, they reasoned that the overall punishment was on average less awful because two hours of community service isn’t so bad.

 

Obscurity

Paul Graham, in an old essay:

Obscurity is like health food—unpleasant, perhaps, but good for you. Whereas fame tends to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it.

Much of what is wrong with our workplaces

Alfie Kohn, as quoted by Jacob Kaplan-Moss in a very good piece about "unlimited" vacation policies:

To describe much of what is wrong with our workplaces is to enumerate the effects of restricting people’s sense of self-determination...people are most motivated when they are able to participate in making decisions about organizational goals.

Agreed.

Hindsight

Roelof Botha, a member of the board of Square, talking with Fortune about Square's (costly) partnership with Starbucks:

It's dangerous to look at things with the benefit of hindsight.

This is hard for me to wrap my head around. I *think* that Botha is suggesting that one needs to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation, but I find the wording... problematic.

How do I make money?

Ben Thompson, writing about F8:

One of the key lessons I learned working with developers is that, at the end of the day, everything pales in comparison to the question: “How do I make money?” Developer tools are important, languages are important, exposure is important, but if there isn’t money to be made – or if more money can be made elsewhere – then you’re not going to get very far in getting developers on your platform.

Don't even try

Paul Graham:

Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.

Tony Hsieh

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, from a talk given to the Long Now Foundation: 

A company's culture and a company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of the culture. And with social media, and everyone being hyper connected, that brand is actually [lagging] less and less. So for example, if you ask a random person off the street "what do you think of the airline industry," you'll probably get back responses about bad customer service or apathetic employees and so on. And like it or not, that is the brand of the industry, even though no airline obviously set out for that to be their brand. 

Arbitrary and meaningless

Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, talking with First Round Review about developing a high quality product:

We tend to see a lot of deadlines as arbitrary and meaningless. At their worst, they compromise design quality and burn people out so much that they stop having good, creative ideas. Sprinting is not our core differentiator.

Ahh, product life :)

But seriously: Remember that not all successful companies sprint. Develop products how you want to, and reflect on whether it's going well. 

One Hardware Thing

Please, leave comments on this post!

If you had a group of 20 or so intelligent, inquisitive people - but none of them have any experience with hardware writ large - what is the one lesson/exercise that you would run them through? Assume a 90 minute session.

My thoughts: 

• Fix a flat on a bike
• Just tighten/loosen screws/nuts
• Overview of metric vs. English standards
• Overview of hardness vs. tensile/compressive/shear strength
• Basic solid modeling tutorial in Fusion 360
• Basic mechanical feature overview (lever, gear, screw, etc.)
• Industrial vs. Mechanical vs. Embedded design
• Analog & digital circuits

What are your thoughts? 

Personal OKRs

First: You should know what OKRs are. I'm not saying there the end-all be-all, but they're totally a thing.

Yesterday I updated my personal goals in the format of OKRs and habits. Here they are.

Objective 1:

Be smarter than I really am.

I use this as a euphemism for formidability & staying on top of shit.

Key Results:

• I’m more organized, and hence more at ease.

• My output results in more inbound traffic.

• My relationships are strengthened through my reliability and ability to communicate effectively.

Habits:

1. Keep a daily checklist & maintain a high “done” rate.
2. Pitch something unironically on a weekly basis.
3. Ship my newsletter weekly.
4. Post 250 words publicly on a weekly basis.
5. Post 750 words publicly on a monthly basis.

Objective 2:

Broaden and deepen my perspective and skillset.

Key Results:

1. A full stack of maker skills.
2. A continually broadening knowledge base.
3. A continuous stream of completed & documented projects.

Habits:

• Lunch/coffee/drinks with someone outside of my immediate sphere on a weekly basis.

• Show continued progress on extracurricular projects on a monthly basis.

• A half-hour of terminal time on a weekly basis.

• One unstructured weekday on a monthly basis.

These will change over time - perhaps sooner than later - but I feel good about them. Wish me luck.

When the Leadership can fail

Astro Teller, talking about the culture of failure at Google X:

When the leadership can fail in full view, "then it gives everyone permission to be more like that."

Cultures that allow for failure at the top are (in my experience) extremely rare. Success and age breed risk adversity (cf. this excellent post by Felix Salmon), and leadership positions tend to be filled by successful people. 

Willingness to fail is also, in my mind, the single most important factor to long term success. Failure offers lessons which are more learnable - and more causal - than success does. In the absence of failure, one's ability to learn is highly compromised.

To me, willingness to fail should be a top priority to everyone. Discussions of risk should be between all parts of an organization. A company's policy on risk & failure should be explicit, and its implications should be clear to all employees and stakeholders.

Not 10 times as hard

From TechCrunch's excellent article about Google X:

No idea should be incremental. This sounds terribly clichéd, DeVaul admits; the Silicon Valley refrain of "taking huge risks" is getting hackneyed and hollow. But the rejection of incrementalism, he says, is not because he and his colleagues believe it's pointless for ideological reasons. They believe it for practical reasons. "It's so hard to do almost anything in this world," he says. "Getting out of bed in the morning can be hard for me. But attacking a problem that is twice as big or 10 times as big is not twice or 10 times as hard."

You Can't Complain

Tamara Mendelsohn, talking with TechCrunch about how the culture of Eventbrite operates:

"You can’t complain here,” Tamara explained. “If you see something wrong, you must fix it."

This is how things should work.

Departure from the default

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine:

People expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. This has been verified in the context of gambling: people expect to be happier to gamble and win than if they refrain from gambling and get the same amount. The asymmetry is at least as strong for losses, and it applies to blame as well as to regret. The key is not the difference between commission and omission but the distinction between default options and actions that deviate from the default. When you deviate from the default, you can easily imagine the norm - and if the default is associated with bad consequences, the discrepancy between the two can be the source of painful emotions. The default option when you own a stock is not to sell it, but the default option when you meet your colleague in the morning is to greet him. Selling a stock and failing to greet your coworker are both departures from the default option and natural candidates for regret or blame.

In a compelling demonstration of the power of default options, participants played a computer simulation of blackjack. Some players were asked "Do you wish to hit?" while others were asked "Do you wish to stand?" Regardless of the question, saying yes was associated with much more regret than saying no if the outcome was bad! The question evidently suggests a default response, which is, "I don't have a strong wish to do it." It is the departure from the default that produces regret.

The Wrong Idea

Lou Lenzi, GE General Manager of Industrial Design, talking with The Atlantic about outsourcing: 

“What we had wrong was the idea that anybody can screw together a dishwasher,” says Lenzi. “We thought, ‘We’ll do the engineering, we’ll do the marketing, and the manufacturing becomes a black box.’ But there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”

Take note of this. Look around the hardware world today, and you'll see dozens of consultancies & outsourcing platforms that are dedicated to making manufacturing a black box. Their aims are good: to alleviate the strains of launching a hardware product. But the results can be highly problematic.

Designers who aren't knee deep in the making of their products are taking huge, unknown risks. Out of sight/out of mind is a recipe for avoidable mistakes.

Old (ish) goals

Me, last June: 

i have spent a while recently thinking about what, exactly, i have liked about my career. a few points:

1. i like being appreciated.
2. i like being compensated.
3. i like being a little over my head. i prefer to stay right on the edge between the things i know i don't know and the things i don't know that i don't know.
4. i like collaborating with people who are better at what they do than i am.
5. i like having an understanding of long-term objectives, and i like being a significant factor in the achievement of those objectives.
6. i like working with people like myself.
7. i like being fully responsible for the execution of a project, however large or small.
8. i like working on a new thing that will change some part of the world.
9. i like working in emerging markets.
10. i like working on things that people like me want, and want to interact with intimately.
11. i like for the product values and interests that i have to overlap significantly with those of my collaborators and our product's users.
12. i like being rewarded for my ability to identify, assess, analyze and solve problems, and i like it when those problems require me to learn about a new area of the world.
13. i like clear objectives - and clear metrics by which they can be judged - over aesthetic, or "gut" feelings.
14. i like working on general purpose technologies.
15. i like working on cross-functional teams, and having responsibilities in many categories of business

I like this. Probably worth updating.

Fertile Ground

I relate to this very strongly. 

Whether in the context of building products or changing cultures, my own core interest is in seeing what drives human behavior and how people react to change. I am drawn back to the technology industry over and over not because I care about bits and bytes, but because it is the most fertile ground for behavior change that exists in our world today.

-Becky Bermont

cf. something I wrote like a year ago - whether or not it holds up :)