Suppose you have just taken on a senior leadership role and brought your team together to decide the priorities for the year ahead. Each person understands their field, can explain their reasoning, and has a sensible recommendation.
Your job is to set a direction they can deliver together, you need to decide where to commit resources, what to defer and which risks to accept. A choice that makes sense for one part of the organisation can change what is possible for another. The team brings its expertise; you are responsible for the decisions you make together and what follows.
Excellent. What are we going to do, and how are we going to make it work?
The seating plan we have selected can only get us so far.
This is one answer to what someone with broad expertise is actually expert in: understanding the relationships between disciplines and judging their combined consequences. Another is recognising when an approach from a different context can help. Both require enough depth to understand why something works, what it depends on and where it stops working.
Everyone can be right but we still need a decision
In Jensen Huang’s account of work at NVIDIA, a conversation about cooling or networking includes other specialists who can see what a proposed choice would mean for power or memory. These are deeply technical people working across boundaries because their design decisions depend on one another.
Knowing the parts and knowing how they interact are distinct kinds of knowledge in product design. The distinction is useful in organisations too: understanding each function separately does not establish whether their plans can work together. Someone has to understand the dependencies, examine the assumptions and judge the combined effect.
Earlier in my career, I worked on an operating model for a utility business unit. The work brought together perspectives from HR, finance and project management, alongside engineering, scientific work, and the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the utility’s assets. These were different responsibilities within the same business, all of which the operating model needed to accommodate.
I didn’t need to be able to do all those jobs. I did need to understand the reasoning behind them well enough to recognise what a choice in one area would mean elsewhere.
Understanding a specialist’s reasoning without having the same practical competence can itself require substantial learning. Breadth becomes useful when that understanding lets someone test the connections between contributions and make a better decision about the whole.
Someone has to take responsibility for the whole
At executive level, the purpose of that understanding is to choose what the organisation should do. A proposal might reduce a cost in one budget by moving work into another. Faster delivery might require accepting more risk. Each recommendation needs to be judged against the organisation’s objectives and purpose, including consequences outside the area proposing it.
The executive task is to decide which trade-offs the organisation should make, commit to a course of action and remain accountable through delivery. That requires enough understanding to challenge an assumption, recognise a dependency and judge whether the proposed combination will actually work.
I use coherence to test the account on which the decision rests. I check my understanding of specialist reasoning by playing it back for correction, then test its implications alongside what other specialists are telling me. Which assumptions hold together? Which disconnects remain after differences in interpretation have been resolved?
Crucially, that account must also match what people do, what the records show and the outcomes. The organisation has no obligation to behave as neatly as my explanation of it.
Some disagreements will remain because the interests genuinely conflict. Understanding them makes the decision clearer; it does not remove the need to choose. Agreement around the table is useful, but it cannot substitute for deciding what best serves the organisation.
The person from the wrong field
Breadth also matters when useful knowledge comes from outside the field in which a problem first appears. Someone can be unfamiliar with the setting yet deeply familiar with an approach relevant to the problem.
In a study of scientific problem-solving competitions, scientists whose expertise was farther from the problem’s field were more likely to submit a winning solution. These were people choosing problems they thought they could tackle and bringing expertise from elsewhere. Ignorance was not the secret ingredient.
The important question is what makes the knowledge transferable. An unfamiliar setting may contain a familiar problem, once you understand the relationships beneath the terminology. TRIZ makes this a defined process: move from a particular problem to underlying principles, consider how similar problems have been solved elsewhere, then develop a solution for the new setting.
This final step requires judgement which is getting progressively more difficult to develop (see You are pointing AI at the wrong half of your firm). An approach may depend on particular incentives, authority or information being available. If those conditions differ, importing the approach unchanged can import the wrong answer.
I ask whether the underlying logic holds here and whether it helps us understand or solve the problem. Where does it apply? Where does it break down? What needs adapting? The answers must stand up to evidence in the new setting, after all, changing the labels on a diagram is an efficient way to produce another diagram.
Alex Karp’s reflections on his own dyslexia touch on the value of distance from established taxonomies. For me, the useful connection is to questioning whether the categories we inherited are preventing us from recognising a principle that could apply elsewhere.
Bringing ideas from different fields to organisational questions is part of how I have approached WorkLattice. Its underpinning philosophy is to understand relationships and consequences in the light of an organisation’s objectives and purpose. The contribution of that breadth lies in what those ideas help us understand about organisations, and the decisions that understanding can inform.
Relevant experience can reside in the reasoning behind a solution, even when the surrounding context is unfamiliar. Its relevance still has to be demonstrated.
What would make the experience relevant?
There are perfectly good reasons to require specific expertise. When consequences are high and there is little room to learn on the job, those making a senior appointment need evidence that someone understands the work. The case for leaders understanding the core activity they lead deserves to be taken seriously.
From their side of the table, the current problem may always feel like the one that cannot afford a learning curve.
The distinction I would make is between requiring that knowledge and using a previous title, organisation or industry as a hard filter for it. Those backgrounds can contain essential experience. But what, specifically, do we need them to establish? Knowledge of a regulation? A particular failure mode? The commercial constraints? Those are requirements we can examine directly.
If the work also requires making trade-offs across functions or adapting an approach to unfamiliar circumstances, those abilities need examination too. A hard filter can sometimes exclude relevant expertise before anyone has considered how it applies.
Where a role requires decisions across disciplines, relevant experience includes how someone has brought specialist input together, made trade-offs and taken responsibility for the outcome. Comparable delivery matters, as does understanding what will and will not carry over to the new setting.
The new leader at the start of this article has a team with the expertise to inform the choices ahead. The leader’s responsibility is to turn that knowledge into a direction, make the trade-offs and enable the team to deliver. Broad expertise can be central to that responsibility.
This is the approach I bring to leadership and to building Sagentivum: understanding what different kinds of expertise mean together, setting a course and taking responsibility for what follows.