General thoughts on generalists

I was at a networking event last night hosted by a design consultancy. The idea was to bring a bunch of different folks together, ply them with drinks, set them a question, press "start", and see what manner of stuff they come up with.

Typical of these things, there was a round of introductions to kick things off. And I have a few standard ways in which I introduce myself, whether it's for a lecture, a workshop, or these meet-and-greets. Anyway, I introduced myself as "a professional busybody". (Sometimes I say dilettante, sometimes interloper.)

I say this partly as a joke, to break the ice. I say this also because, through the years, no matter which organisation I'm in (or not in, as the case may be, as when I was doing my own thing), my work somehow involves deconstruction, critique, reframing, operating at the margins of disciplines and surfing the edges of plausibility, and making non-adjacent and counter-intuitive leaps between topics and perspectives.

Now, that makes it sound sexier and more interesting than it actually is. And when I pair it with the line, "my work is daily flirtation with career suicide", it makes for a great story.

The thing is, though, after all this time, the gnawing feeling of inadequacy and inferiority in the pit of my stomach never really goes away. Sure, we acknowledge these days the importance of having that diversity of experience, of being able to connect dots in novel ways, of bringing breadth to complement depth. The importance of the generalist, in other words.

We all agree that the generalist, in this emerging world of irreducible uncertainty and growing complexity, is indispensable. Throw in the proverbial "soft skills" like agility, empathy and critical thinking, and the generalist really should be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But somehow, no. Well, largely still no, I think. Maybe things are changing, but there is still that deeply entrenched narrative of specialist-vs-generalist. Not just in Singapore but globally, for the longest time and still, there is the privileging of the specialist over the generalist. The specialist is lauded for his mastery of that one field or craft, which is in turn built on discipline, rigour, and focus. Contrast that with the generalist who flits from field to field, whose breadth is possible because depth is sacrificed (somehow, it is more acceptable to sacrifice breadth at the alter of depth). We describe the generalist as being "diverse", which is a polite way of saying "unfocused".

Joseph Campbell, the expert on comparative myth and religion, said this in an interview once, and it not only captures a lot of what I feel, but it is also consoling and encouraging:

"Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn't a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist -- and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist -- and that's a derogatory term, by the way, for academics -- gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural."

Oh sure, I sometimes regret not specialising in a field. I look at peers who did and the recognition and, yes, the rewards that have come their way, and I cannot help but feel a tinge of envy. I, on the other hand, have the kind of CV that the traditional Asian parents wring their hands and beat their breasts over. I still wake up sometimes saying to myself, Oh boy, when I grow up, I want to be...oh wait. Shit.

But in retrospect, I don't think I could ever have adhered to that linear route of progression. By disposition, I have always been one to chase every footnote, and then the footnotes in those footnotes. I have always found the book next to the book I was sent to check out more interesting. In fact, I found just about any section other than the one I was supposed to spend time at more intriguing. I was always the one for the scenic pathless route, the rabbit hole, the looking glass.

Now with this turn towards inter-disciplinarity in education that is causing such consternation among some traditional academics, I find myself surprising comfortable amidst the apparent growing discomfort. It helps too that I am not an academic. Oh no, not anymore. (And if that comes across as derogatory, then, well.)

Prof. Garry Brewer pithily and ironically observed back in 1999, “The world has problems, universities have departments." Finally, the messiness of the university is catching up to the messiness of the world. And my messiness is starting to make sense.