Hire the person who doesn't fit the org chart.

Every interesting problem sits between two departments. Here is the one kind of person who lives there.

Situation wanted

GENERALIST. Available immediately.

Has read outside the field. Will connect your two teams that do not speak. Comfortable being the least specialized person in the room and the only one holding the whole picture.

Previous experience: several fields, none finished, all still in use. No references from a single discipline available, by design.

apply to: any problem that does not fit a job description

The T-shaped myth

The fashionable ask is depth in one thing plus "some breadth." But the problems that matter are not shaped like a T. They live at intersections nobody owns, in the gap between the two experts who each assumed the other had it.

The Renaissance pattern

History's polymaths did not master everything. They connected everything. The notebooks jump from anatomy to hydraulics to optics, and the jumps are the point. The value was never in any single page.

The adjacent possible

Every field you enter opens doors into the fields beside it. Specialists guard one door. Generalists walk through more of them, and come back describing rooms the specialists did not know were adjacent.

Problems in want of a generalist

unassignedThe handoff between design and engineering, which belongs to no one.
unassignedFifteen reports that agree with each other and still say nothing.
unassignedA strategy that is true in every meeting and false in the hallway.
unassignedThe customer complaint that is really a supply chain problem wearing a costume.
unassignedTwo departments solving the same problem twice, in different vocabularies.
unassignedThe onboarding document nobody can write because nobody has seen the whole machine.

The Filter™

The Reader

Rejects the person who could do the job in 0.3 seconds

Reads to the end

Requires five years' experience in a three-year-old tool

Requires evidence of learning anything, ever, fast

Matched the keyword

Matched the pattern

Hired the résumé

Hired the range

We are not saying specialists are wrong. We are saying somebody has to notice the fire is in a different department.

The world rewards specialists. It is held together by the people who move between them.