Generalists ARE specialists

As published in the Mandarin 21 March 2025: Why generalists ARE specialists

Firstly, congratulations to The Mandarin on their conference last week. It is one of the better conferences I have attended because they had the courage to allow competing ideas to be put forward. It was a bit unusual, the norm being a passing parade of policy statements, without any challenge. If you ever go to a Defence conference, be prepared to drown in the depths of sycophancy.

Well done to The Mandarin. In the interests of full disclosure, they don’t pay me. I did ask though.

There were a few issues I felt worth following through, so a couple of short articles are on the way to explore some of the themes that I didn’t feel were done justice. More truthfully, it means they didn’t fully accord with my thoughts.

The first is the concept of the specialist versus generalist, which arose several times: is there too much of a focus on being a generalist and how does the public sector recruit and keep specialists?

It is a mistake to think that generalists are not specialists in their own right – ask any medical GP. There are skills and capabilities that need to be developed to be a generalist. People don’t fall into being a generalist because they are not a domain specialist.  The management of policies, processes and procedures, even across multiple domains, is the antithesis of a specialist generalist. Being a general manager does not make you a generalist, though you can be both.

The foremost ability of a generalist is intellectual agility. The ability to see the world from multiple perspectives, to look at the world holistically and find patterns and connections that others cannot see. These are not common attributes, and they don’t come from being competent at running processes and procedures.

Professor Anthea Roberts of ANU uses the term dragonfly thinking. 

“Dragonflies have eyes with thousands of lenses and take the inputs to form a 360-degree vision of their world in a way that gives them incredible foresight.”

In fact, she is a cofounder of a startup working with government www.dragonflythinking.net exploring the use of AI to bring diverse perspectives to help with better decision making. Even with an AI tool to assist us, it will be a generalist that will find a way to use the tool in ways undiscovered. I’ll come back to AI in another article, but for now back to the generalist.

There are other characteristics of a generalist. They will be obsessive, curious and inquisitive. A polymath unlimited by the boundaries of speciality delving into many. They may or may not be a specialist in one, or more, areas but they will have a deep understanding that allows them to work meaningfully with a specialist. If they don’t have sufficient knowledge to engage, they are a book or two, a late night or three away from gaining sufficient understanding. A specialist generalist knows how to find knowledge and pursues it.

They will be numerate and literate. They don’t have to be mathematicians, but generalists have to see patterns, and mathematics is the language of patterns. So, they need to be comfortable with numbers, basic statistics at least, and have a healthy scepticism of the presentation of “truths” misrepresented carelessly or with nefarious purpose. Misinformation and disinformation.

If you can’t read about it, you can’t write about it. If you can’t communicate, your value is diminished. Great generalists are great communicators.

Great generalists are leaders, and great leaders are generalists. Most commonly, successful leaders of our best organisations, our companies, our governments are generalists. Few specialists are leaders without being a generalist. You can be a specialist without being a generalist, but I suspect it is harder to be a generalist without having some basis in a speciality, but it is not where they stay. Generalists are, by definition, polymaths.

Be in no doubt, we need specialists, those with unparalleled, deep knowledge of specific subject areas.

However, in my experience it is unusual to find those with such deep knowledge and passion for that knowledge, to have the breadth of view that allows them to see the inter-relationships outside their domain speciality. When we need such specialists, we can find them in academia, industry and allied organisations. From time to time, we will need them in public sector, but I suspect less often than we might think. We can engage them as contractors and consultants, recruit them if it is an enduring role. If we do, they will need a special career path that serves both their personal (money, position, reputation) and professional (development and recognition) needs. It is not immediately obvious that such a pathway is available.

That, of course, shouldn’t be a problem because specialist generalists make the rules, they don’t just follow them. 

We do need deep domain knowledge in a generalist, typically in several areas, but that’s not their specialty. To be successful they must come with much more.

Specialist generalists are essential to public sector capability and delivery. They see the inter-relationships, the underlying causal effect, the consequences of programs and actions across programs and activities. They foreshadow disasters and identify opportunity. They perceive both sides of the coin of risk – the exposure and the opportunity.

We need to develop specialist generalists who can lead and deliver. They won’t just lead us through the forests, they will work out which forests.  

Specialist generalists don’t develop by accident. They need to be given the opportunity to work in multiple disciplines, to develop and hone their skills in critical thinking, problem solving, ambitious execution, relationship building, and perseverance.

It’s a mistake to think that a generalist is one without a specialty, it is their specialty.