Keeping it Simple....

Amateurs built the Ark, Professionals built the Titanic!

Do you ever feel being stuck for want of execution or find yourself trapped at work owing to "Analysis Paralysis" ?

You drive your expertise or your expertise drives you?

The answer to this lies in introspecting the journey which one has covered while building his skill sets. This fast paced dynamic era belongs to experts and specialists and those who do not specialize, tend to lose their market value. To be in the market, one must adhere to expertise and specialization even if the results can be obtained by simple means. This over specialization is the genesis of why people get stuck at simple things despite being able to easily accomplish herculean tasks. Refer my article Skilled Incompetence to get detailed understanding into how our specialization can actually work against us.

As an HR Professional, I may not need to go to some other function to find a suitable example of overspecialization: The very HR function suffers from what I prefer calling as "Domain Obsession" and this stems up back from MBA days where right from day 1, You are developed as an HR person. A student is tagged HR, Marketing guy, Finance person etc depending on his specialization, right from day 1 when he joins his MBA college. This domain obsession isolates us from other functions around us but what we as HR professionals miss out on is the fact that all functions are inseparable and hence in order to being able to actually manage all humans, we must also have at least a basic understanding of the functions other than HR. This overemphasis by HR Professionals on their own domain isolates them from the rest of the organisation and this gap is difficult to be actually identified. If one needs to excel in career, he must be basically competent in all walks of life, be it Marketing, HR, technology, Finance etc as one can never stand out in isolation. The first thing I tell the MBA students is to undo what they learn at MBA. MBA can actually lead you to that level of specialization which is likely to kill your common sense.

To overcome this ill effect of over specialization, we need to understand WHY & WHEN it happens and HOW to avoid it. To be precise, WHEN AND WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE EXACTLY ?

The answer to WHY OVER SPECIALIZATION HAPPENS is primarily covered by three areas of study viz. Market, Economics and Psychology. The Market runs on what we are able to sell and over specialization often helps sell yourself as a brand by providing with a competitive edge over rivals. Economics, being closely related to Market actually focuses on Demand Supply rule and whatever the market demands, the person supplies. Economics and Market is what we usually know, can be seen, is pretty quantified and objective but the third, not so clear to decipher and more abstract is the reason lying in psychology- The Study of human mind. What we miss often is the attention to our own minds: In the quest for professional success and journey for specialization, we often fail to recognize the simple solutions that lie to most of the complex problems. Owing to over exaggerated corporate environments, we often tend to believe that if its simple, it wont work, because that is how the market has ultimately developed.

Since we know WHY it happens, lets now see WHEN this overspecialization happens: It starts right from the school days when a child is burdened to excel at academics, it happens when we spend nights mugging up things in graduation. It happens when we take supplement sheets because simple and to the point answers do not fetch good marks in Universities, specifically Indian Universities. The same trend continues after joining a corporate entity where the more simply you do it, the lesser it appeals, after all what cannot be shown cannot be sold. So technically, people tend to over specialize literally everywhere and anywhere irrespective of the fact whether it is actually needed or not. Overspecialization has become so generic that it is literally everywhere, thus defeating the very purpose and spirit for which it was meant to be. In layman terms, we just over do it all the time.

HOW TO AVOID OVERSPECIALIZATION: It is rightly said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Abiding by this, if one really knows what specialization is, one will be prudent in applying that everywhere. Our minds have been programmed in such a way that unless we complicate things to match our mental frequency we do not feel like solving them. To quote Ayn Rand, from The Fountainhead, If I do not know it, it must be a great thing. Overspecialization can simply be avoided by striking a balance at whatever task we do. This is possible only if we give room to our common sense. Common Sense is a beautiful asset and will help you with simple solutions to majority of the problems. One can understand it this way that you may not require a gun to kill a mosquito. Now when you need a gun and when you do not need is the question which comes from common sense and striking a balance. We at Perennial Systems believe in the philosophy of Keeping it Simple, because no matter how complex the technology or problem may be, the solution always lies in something simple. As a product specialist, the focus of the organisation has always been on Making Technology Simple!

With increasing use of AI and ML, Automation at its peak, what is ironically interesting here that machines are being programmed to work like humans whereas humans are programmed to work like machines. I am surprised at the level of automation, we have manually brought in the country, simply by programming human beings by specialized scripts. At times, I fail to understand whether I am actually chatting with a person or a Chatbot. Automation may be great but do humans need to be programmed that way ? Are we still in Drucker's world ? Its high time we must introspect and attempt to keeping it simple!

Someone rightly remarked: The biggest challenge organisations are facing today is: How to deal with Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity!