Specialists have been ignored for too long, says the UK’s Minister for the Cabinet Office Matt Hancock. ‘Gone are the days of the gifted amateur. Today’s world is too complex and demands are too high.’

The pendulum’s describes an arc between relative value of specialists and generalists that has been travelled many, many times. 

The response of the conservative CEO struggling with the complexity of his or her modern times is often expressed as: ‘We need to get back to basics. It needs to be simple to understand and simple to manage’. 

The source of the ‘complexity problem’ of our CEO is often expressed as the outbreak of specialists in his or her firm. The sheer number ‘specialists’ is undermining the role generalist managers who just need to ‘get on with managing’. The solution is straightforward, reduce the number of ‘specialists’ and get more ‘generalists’. What could be easier?

No doubt our CEO would acknowledge the importance of qualified engineers to build bridges, surgeons to perform surgery and pilots to fly planes. But other than that, what has specialisation ever done for his or her firm?

In 1776, Adam Smith described pin makers that seek to do one thing very well in the knowledge that the combined effect will increase collective productivity. There is a second type of specialist that emerges from within specialisation. These are people who focus on providing capability at the level of the organisation. They coordinate, manage and connect the dots. They are not skimming lightly across the top but rather deeply focused on the structure and function of organisation. They smooth the ambiguity, uncertainty and fragmentation that is inherent in organising specialist capabilities. 

In 1937, as a member of the US President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Mr Luther Gulick set out a discussion on the ‘reasons for and the effect of the division of work’. For Mr Gulick, that we divide work and specialise was an inescapable fact of organisation. Specialisation was the foundation of organisation. Indeed, it was the very reason for organisation.

Mr Gulick’s concern was not about the specialisation that is inherent in dividing work; rather, he was more concerned about the practicalities of coordinating the division of labour to achieve a desired organisational outcome. In modern management speak, he was more interested in the problem of organisational design that comes from the inevitability of having specialists. 

There seems to be a strong bias in our modern debates about the relative merits of generalists and specialists that puts organisational design to one side in order to focus on the more binary argument that generalists are ‘better’ than specialists. It is an evolutionary argument that runs something like this: 

• Work is changing rapidly.

• We are data rich but information poor.

• Specialists have provided us with all this information but not the context within which the knowledge can be used.

• Context can only be provided by generalists whose breadth of knowledge can link the information together and make sense of it for others.

• So, workplace ‘evolution’ will through generalists who know ‘a little about a lot’ we will progress.

This seems to me to be a little fanciful. The challenge of specialisation I think is mostly about organisational control. 

Our collective knowledge advances in large part because specialisation is needed to get the necessary depth of understanding to produce solutions. Institutionally, we encourage specialists because there are limits to the knowledge that can be possessed by an individual or group. Specialisation is central to productive progress because it involves an intense focus on refining concepts and techniques. 

So, the problem for CEO’s is not specialisation but rather from controlling overhead that arises from increased workforce complexity. Deeper specialisation demands a concurrent improvement in the systems that coordinate and collect specialist activities. 

Increasing specialisation creates a greater need for organisational design that focuses on control and coordination. Without some way of collating information and ensuring the internal coherence, the division of labour would collapse into chaos. 

Increasing specialisation in our workforce should not result in glib calls to ‘make it simpler; rather, it should focus our attention on organisational design. In particular, on how efficient organisation contributes to generating and applying knowledge. 

In particular, specialisation suggests that organisational design should focus on how investments in exploiting knowledge are coordinated. 

The corollary of identifying the need for less ‘gifted amateurs’ and more ‘specialists’ is a more comprehensive and sophisticated focus on the organisational design of the UK Civil Service. 

Not an insignificant challenge!

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

[The views expressed here are the author’s and are not necessarily representative of those employing him, his family, or even those loosely acquainted with him.]

Sources: 

David Donaldson, Specialists welcome: minister says days of ‘gifted amateur’ over, The Mandarin, 14 July 2016.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1998 (1776).

Luther Gulick, ‘Notes on the theory of organisation’, in Papers on the Science of
Administration, L. Gulick and L. Urwick (eds), Institute of Public Administration,
Columbia University, New York, 1937.

Vikram Mansharamani, All Hail the Generalist, Harvard Business Review, 2012.