As young children, we are constantly told to focus on one thing at a time. Expertise in one field is more valuable than having a fighting knowledge of a number of different disciplines. Instead of being Renaissance Men, we are told to be specialists.
Has the age of the Renaissance Man came to an end ? For the sake of future innovation, we can only hope this is not the case.
Jack of all trades - master of none
Homo Universalis (Latin for “universal man” or “man of the world”) was the ability of a scholar to be well versed in more then one discipline. Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Avicenna, Leonardo Da Vinci, Wolfgang Von Goethe and Isaac Newton were all polymaths. They excelled in more than one academic discipline at a time. They formulated mathematical theories, found medical cures, wrote books, painted - the list goes on. Some of the greatest work done in the fields of medicine, literature, nation building and art was done by these multi faceted human beings. What then caused the advent of specialization ?
Industrialization
As industrialization became more complex and its scope increased, concepts like ‘division of labor’ were introduced. Instead of one man working on different parts of the creation of a good, groups of men worked on individual pieces of the puzzle. Work responsibilities were perfectly defined and most jobs did not overlap one another. For example a shoe factory had one set of workers focussing on only the heel of the shoe while another set of workers was only focussing on the cutting of the leather. Such deliniations increased worker efficiency and allowed for the full benefits of the age of industrialization to be realised.
Industrialization - Evolution
Industrialization allowed solution development to become a precise science. Problems were understood and broken down into their axioms, the heuristics were identified and patterns for solutions were created. Furthermore, the dawn of the computer age allowed the heuristics and patterns to be represented as algorithms and finally as softwares. Before long, an assembly line approach was adopted to create solutions. Granted that this approach allowed for greater efficiency and end product reliability, it also took away any need for further innovative thoughts into how to make the solutions more elegant.
Industrialization - Aftermath
Specialization has become an asset for all professionals. Specialization might be important in professions where innovative problems are not tackled but in areas such as management, it is critical that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is rejected in favor of a more dynamic and fluid mind set.
The coming days will put the human race face to face with ‘wicked problems’. Such problems, by nature, are complicated and dont have a set number of causal factors which can be resolved by following a pre configured pattern. Because of the inherent complexity in such problems, their solutions are also complex. Russell L Ackoff identifies such problems as messes
Every problem interacts with other problems and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems…. I choose to call such a system a mess.
Wicked problems dont have true or false solutions. Due to their ever changing nature, their impact on our lives can only be guesstimated at best. The end of oil, our increasing need for energy, AIDS, spread of terrorism, universal health care are only some of the wicked problems that are generating a lot of interest and are being actively monitored.
The return of the polymath
In order to tackle complicated problems, it is necessary that our dependance on existing methodologies, which were created two to three decades in the past, be removed. This means that specialization should be ignored in favor of an approach which promotes integrative thinking. Integrative thinking is the process where solutions are created by combining ideas from a diverse set of domains.
Solution creators should adopt a polymathic attitude and instead of referring to just one knowledge domain, they should expand their boundaries and have an inclusive approach for all domains.
