New challenges require new approaches. All organizations have new challenges on the table all the time, but most are not equipped to come up with new approaches to conquer them because they can’t think and act differently.
This is a specialization challenge.
As a rule of thumb, your business needs more generalists than specialists if it wants to innovate. Don’t get me wrong, specialists are valuable. But Generalists are the innovators, the ones who are most capable of dealing with complexity; the ones that connect that dots.
Yesterday I joined Innochat to chat about T-Shaped people and culture for collaborative innovation (see transcript). I’ve written quite a lot about Generalists (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), so I won’t touch on here the well known factors about being a Generalist, hiring and managing.
Instead, I’ll touch on the challenges……