What Specifically Do Generalists Do?

Ideation feeds on lateral thinking and free association. And the farther one can look the more there is to learn and connect. In this sense, crossing cultural borders – replete with unique languages, customs, traditions, politics, religions, senses (sights, sounds, smells, tastes), technologies, and philosophies – is the most expansive lateral thin... See more

in the process of focusing, we lose sight of the context – the rhythms, patterns and cycles – within which that fragment exists and functions. So we fragment the whole into isolated bits and pieces.

“Today, most of us live in a shattered world. A world of disconnected bits and pieces, so it is no longer easy to recognize our place. And when we can't see the connections, we fail to recognize causal relationships and therefore feel no responsibility.” -- David Suzuki, The Nature of Things

“... the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap of computation are giving rise to more intersections than ever [and] the individuals or teams who find these intersections are likely to be the ones who radically change our world.” Exactly the domain of generalists. -- Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect

Perhaps the most obvious of generalist characteristics is the connect-the-dots serendipity-searching that comes from linking disparate subjects together. Such cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural knitting is core to moving from incremental innovation to transcending ideation.

Information is economic sunshine. Do you capture it and trade it around or do you let it bounce away?

The chief reason why ideation is now so important is that it starts at the beginning; in the truest sense of exploration. The main argument as to why generalists can offer such valuable assistance with this is that they can hunt down and recognize more different possibilities than can specialists. Generalism is not simply a nice-to-have; it’s essen... See more

Ideas follow inspiration, which comes freely at a friendly intersection of diverse multidisciplinary, multi-industry, multicultural thinking – exactly the kind of thinking that our focused lives tend not to have enough of.

perhaps it is fitting to say then that inspiration comes from everything. But we have no exact way of pinpointing what part of everything it derives from, and so open, freethinking is essential for its emergence. It could even come from the interplay of everything with everything else, in which case inspiration is most at home in highly communicati... See more