Why cultivating ‘Range’ in the impending AI-driven world is critical?

This weekend I finished reading the book, Range by David Epstein and I was left mulling upon the core theme, compelling enough to merit this write-up. The author points out that in real-world ‘wicked’ environment, where rules are not well-defined and one has to navigate uncertainty, it helps to be a generalist as one can view the problem through broader lens of multi-disciplinary analogies, leading to higher chances of breakthrough solution. There are fascinating examples of Johannes Kepler, Vincent Van Gogh and many other luminaries who exemplified this principle in their life journey on their way to making path-breaking discoveries and creations.

Whereas if you are navigating a ‘kind’ environment (structured, well-defined rules, full of patterns — think chess or golf prodigies), specialization and probably starting early could be the way to go but still the merit of sampling widely at early stage could not be denied. He gives examples after examples of how narrow specialization turned out to be a debacle (including NASA’s Challenger space shuttle fatal accident) and how being deliberate amateurs or enthusiastic hobbyists across wide spectrum led to many successes (including Nintendo’s first breakout product, Darwin’s discovery and so on).

Borrowing a leaf from the book and furthermore, taking liberty to think laterally as it expounds, there are parallels of this theme in multiple areas -

Cultivating Range and driving breakthrough innovation –

As information becomes easily and widely available in the internet age, the generalists’ skills of making connections across disciplines and synthesizing things in new ways will become more pronounced. These skills could be a huge asset to drive breakthrough innovations. Steve Jobs was not a specialist techie but his broad abilities across design elements, user needs, making powerful presentation or pitching, driving people towards common goal, all were legendary.

Cultivating Range and navigating in an AI driven world -

As the artificial intelligence & deep learning technologies start gathering more steam and routine tasks get routinely automated, the new world will demand more broader set of skills. When tasks of specialists like doctors, lawyers etc get partially or fully augmented by AI, it will be the generalists’ skills of synthesis, creativity, experimentation that will be much required.

Cultivating Range and building a learning organization –

A learning organization is built upon a process-driven culture, but still remains flexible enough to allow for all voices to be heard. It welcomes diversity and is inclusive in character. Such environment is conducive to developing ‘range’ and facilitating continuous learning & adaptation within the organization. This is in stark contrast to rigid command-chain culture which can hinder organization knowledge to be fully captured. The book says NASA’s Challenger debacle could be tied back to then rigid organization culture, which led to voices of engineers not heard up the hierarchy when the problem was detected in the space shuttle.

Cultivating Range and developing creativity or ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking –

Diverse experiences (and not necessarily years of experience) coupled with ability to draw linkages & analogies lead to non-traditional ideas and creative flow. There is growing body of research that basically reiterates that creative juices are best drawn out at the intersection of two or more domains.

Cultivating Range and Crowd-sourcing / effectiveness of Wisdom of the crowd –

The book contains example of Innocentive, a crowd-sourced innovation platform and how a typical specialist problem in a particular field gets solved by a generalist with some tenuous connection to that field.

In similar vein, there are examples of how wisdom of the crowd does away with the Specialists’ biases that could creep into the problem, just viewing it from a narrow lens. In effect, crowd-sourcing basically mirrors the characteristics of cultivating ‘range’.

There could be many more parallels drawn from real life. Navigating in an increasingly complex world is going to require an ability to apply methods of one discipline to another, outside the area of narrow specialization.

So seeking novelty, adventure, new experiences and an expanded network are all crucial in cultivating that required ‘Range’.