Do you consider yourself to be an expert in your chosen area of work? If you answer with a resounding “Yes”: Respect. Becoming a domain expert requires years of hard work, and I commend you for having reached this high level of professional specialization. However, do you know that your expertise is one of the key factors that limits your creativity? Today, let’s talk about why being an expert can impair creativity, so that I can show you in two weeks how you can turn your expertise from being a liability to an asset for unleashing your full creative potential.
No doubt about it: Nowadays, we all need to be an expert in at least one knowledge domain to succeed in our chosen profession. In business, we have experts in marketing, PR, accounting, sales, HR, just to name a few. So what’s the crux of being an expert?
Typically, over many years, experts have accumulated a huge body of knowledge, acquired critical skills and gained much practical experience in their specialized area of expertise. But having learned more and more about a very special niche has also narrowed down their focus. The Indian mystic Osho pointedly described the dangers of this tiny, limited worldview: “All experts are blind. Expertise means you become blind to everything else. You know more and more about less and less, and then one day you arrive at the ultimate goal of knowing all about nothing. Then you are completely closed and not even a window is open. This is unintelligence. Intelligence is to be open to wind, rain, and sun, to be open at all.”
Experts tend to neglect and fail to take notice of other knowledge domains, skills and experiences outside their area of focus. Hence, they suffer from what is known as the “expert syndrome”: They see only and are interested only in their unique area of specialization. As such, their view on the world has narrowed down to cover only a very tiny window on the vast variety of life. They are like a horse with blinkers that can only see a narrow bit of the road ahead instead of enjoying the full panorama view of a wild horse. In short, most experts are trapped in the “expert tunnel” and hence are limited by their tunnel vision.
How can you get out of the “expert tunnel”? You need to open up and become what Tom Kelley of IDEO labeled a “T-shaped individual” — and what Leonardo da Vinci has symbolized in his famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man. T-Shaped Persons have great depth and specialization in at least one knowledge domain — and as such are domain experts — and additionally enjoy breadth of knowledge, skills and experiences in many other areas of their interest. They are open and curious to learn about things outside of their area of expertise; they are widely read and knowledgeable like inventor Thomas Alva Edison (“I didn’t read a few books, I read the library”); they have acquired many skills that are not directly needed for their job; they have cultivated hobbies and relationships; and they have accumulated a wealth of human experiences in many different areas of their life. In sum, T-Shaped Persons combine a sharp, deep and narrow focus on their respective field of specialization with a full-spectrum view of many other facets of life.
How does being a T-Shaped Person benefit creativity? When you’re an expert and work on a problem in your area of expertise, most of your thoughts, ideas and solutions to resolve the situation are linear, common, unoriginal and dull, because your thinking is trapped in the tunnel of your expertise and conventional thinking. When you’re a T-Shaped Person, however, you can look into your vast general knowledge, skills and experience repertoire for inspirations and stimuli that you can connect to your original problem in your area of specialization.
For example, I am an academic expert and business practitioner in Business Creativity and Innovation (my specialized knowledge domain), but I am also a former corporate banker, army lieutenant, Ph.D. student, school pupil, semi-pro runner and DJ. I am multi-skilled in various languages, sports, and crafts, have lived and worked in five countries and traveled to nearly 50 countries. While developing my unique Business Creativity methodology and courses, I regularly resolved some tough conceptual problems with ideas that resulted from connecting my domain expertise with some principles from my rich general knowledge reservoir.
Steve Jobs of Apple exemplifies a successful T-shaped business leader. He describes the benefits of combining expertise with broad knowledge and experiences on creativity and innovation as follows: “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
How about you? Are all your dots within the tiny tunnel of your expertise? Or do you have a rich reservoir of dots that constitute knowledge, skills and experiences outside of the expert tunnel that you can connect to your problem?
In two weeks, I will share with you some concrete action strategies on how you can transform yourself from being an expert to becoming a T-Shaped Businessperson — and how you then can use your new “T-Shape” for idea generation.
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 8 October 2009.