Expert Generalists and the importance of range

Jason Kottke linked a fascinating article from Martin Fowler and the Thoughtworks team recently on the concept of an Expert Generalist. This concept really resonated with me as someone with a diverse and unusual career background who can often end up classified in the "jack of all trades, master of none" bucket.

It also calls out to me a problem I am seeing in the job market currently where even at the Solution or Enterprise Architecture level we are constantly looking for people with n years of experience in a niche technology or toolset. Deep technical knowledge is nice but, in my opinion, doesn't equate to being a good architect. The best architects provide context, they ask questions, they bring a broad view of a problem and can learn enough about a technical space to know when they are being fed bullshit.

Below I'll elaborate on what my take on what an Expert Generalist is, why I think this idea of generalists who can provide context are important, the value they can provide, and some ways you can spot them inside (and outside) of your organisation.

What is an Expert Generalist?

The Thoughtworks team identified the following characteristics common across people they would identify as Expert Generalists:

• Curiosity
• Collaborativeness
• Customer-focus
• Favoring fundamental knowledge
• A blend of specialist and generalist skills
• Sympathy for related domains

So without just repeating their article word-for-word let's expand a little on how I would interpret those terms.

Curiosity

To me this is about a desire to know more about how things work, and more importantly why they work that way. An Expert Generalist can often be found deep in a support ticket, pestering the support team and the vendor, and questioning the developers and architects.

As a child they probably spent more time taking their toys apart to see how they got put together, or diving into books to understand more about a lot of topics.

The Expert Generalist is usually the one in the meeting asking the Product Owner how a feature adds value to the customer and why it needs to work in a specific way.

They are the first to question their own assumptions and challenge their own thinking.

Collaboration

An Expert Generalist is excellent at making friends. They carry the begginer's mindset, being well aware of what they don't know. The Expert Generalist knows they need friends who are specialists in the areas they are working to help guide their thinking.

The Expert Generalist is the go-to person on your team when someone has a question, not necessarily because they can answer the question but because if they can't they almost always know who in the organisation can.

Customer-focus

I think the expansion the Thoughtworks team makes here is the correct one, not so much a customer focus, which I feel directs most people to focus externally (the idea of anyone using your work being a customer I find hasn't penetrated a lot of IT teams yet), the idea of Getting Things Done.

The Expert Generalist is a "doer". The person in your team you turn to when something needs to get done, even if what needs doing isn't in their area of expertise. They are the person you trust to get to an outcome, knowing that they will build up the knowledge and people around them to fill in their gaps of knowledge and experience.

Favouring fundamental knowledge

The Expert Generalist doesn't just learn the latest fads. They have a desire to unpack and contextualise information into long lasting patterns and trends. They can zoom out and take a broader view of how the new things fit into broader patterns.

Blending specialist and generalist skills

The Expert Generalist isn't really a "jack of all trades, master of none". They are more like the "T-shaped" resource of every Agile manager's dreams. Like the Thoughtworks team I don't always love the way this term gets applied but I do believe the idea is correct.

The Expert Generalist can view a topic from multiple levels, understands when they need a specialist to help them, and can ride the "Software Architect Elevator" to deliver that at context to multiple levels of the organisation.

Sympathy for other domains

Extending on their "T-shaped" skills the Expert Generalist can look at a problem from the perspective of multiple specialist domains and ensure that all assumptions are challenged . They help make sure that the DBA doesn't build a beautiful schema that makes the user interface hell. They help ask the questions to prevent the MACH architecture from ever being reasoned about during an operational failure.

The value of Expert Generalists and the importance of range

Now that I've expanded the definition a little let's talk about why I think Expert Generalists are valuable. Let me make it clear up front that I do not mean to diminish the need of specialists, in fact without them an Expert Generalist is likely to be much less effective. After all everything is a trade-off.

In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World David Epstein lays out his case for why, in a world moving faster than ever, the combination of breadth and depth is critical to innovation and success. In it he references a study on the winners of the "Carlton Award" which is considered the "Nobel Prize of 3M". The results of which support the idea that you need to be able to combine knowledge across domains in order to innovate.

This is critical to understanding why Expert Generalists can help your team. An Expert Generalist can unpack a problem and look at it from multiple angles to find the best solution. They can help provide the context and framework for your specialists to succeed. They can provide focus on what needs to be done right now, and build it in such a way that it will adapt for the future. They can unblock work and keep the focus on the business outcome. They can provide the wide angle lens and help deliver context at all levels of the business.

How to identify one?

So if these sorts of skills are so valuable what are some ways you can identify them in candidates and on your existing teams?

Learning

The Expert Generalist is always interested in something new (to them). Ask them what they've been reading or watching lately. Ask them for the latest concept or pattern they've been researching. Ask them what the most impactful book they've read. Look for someone not satisfied with their current skills and who is driven to improve

Doing

You will usually find the Expert Generalist in the background of a lot of the work the team is doing. Is there someone supporting people in a broad number of topics? Is there someone who is always volunteering in surprising areas to help get something over the line? Is there someone who comes to the top of your mind when you have a tricky problem to solve? These people are likely to be, or have the skills to be, an Expert Generalist.

Explaining

Is there someone who is relied on by multiple different roles in the business to help them understand what technology is doing for them? Why the system works in a specific way? Offering advice on how the system could be changed to better suit a business outcome? Looking for this ability to provide context and empathise with multiple roles in the business is another key indicator of an Expert Generalist.

Conclusion

At the risk of talking my book I am a big believer in this idea that generalists provide a unique value in any team or organisation and that we often find them hard to spot in the desire to recruit the perfect candidate.

So when you are looking for your Solution/Enterpise Architect or IT team leader ask yourself if they really need to have 10 years of experience in a specific technology or if perhaps what they really need is a little bit of curiosity and the ability to ask the right questions of the specialists you already have.

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