The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Dabbler
Jacks of all trades have a bad reputation. A greater value is placed on narrow specialisation, but this can often be of little use in a fast-changing world. Yet, what is even more important than distinguishing a narrow specialist from a do-all worker is the ability to tell a genuine do-all from a skillful bluffer.
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog — one important thing.” Philosopher Isaiah Berlin made this ancient Greek saying famous when he used the distinction to break down the whole intellectual history of the West. Berlin claimed that all the thinkers the Western world had ever seen had either been hedgehogs, who use one overarching theory to explain a diverse reality, or foxes, who pursue many, often contradictory, approaches and explanations.
The academic world is ruled by hedgehogs. With its cutthroat competition, it pushes researchers into ever narrowing specialisations. Publishing in a prestigious journal requires world-class innovation, which is best achieved by answering specific questions, not building big theories where there are already so many. Historically, academia has moved only in one direction — that of more, not less, specialisation. Great thinkers of the Enlightenment era with their concurrent interest in philosophy, mathematics and poetry would struggle nowadays to complete a typical grant proposal.
Business, on the other hand, is full of foxes. Yet it too has a specialisation cult. Sure, specific expertise and qualifications are of the utmost importance if you are hiring a milling-machine operator. But if you are looking for someone who needs to make independent decisions as part of their everyday job, you’ll need someone able to think across different subjects. The larger the responsibilities, the more synthetic thinking is required. However, when business leaders find themselves in need of advice, they turn to super-specialised experts.
All too often they discover that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” as Abraham Maslow said about the bias of using familiar methods. People who have dedicated years to mastering one theory, a few methods or a very particular area of expertise, tend to adjust the complex reality to the instruments of analysis they have at their disposal. This has an effect not only on the answers that are given, but on the questions that are asked in the first place. A much better approach is to start with a puzzle, evaluate at least a few perspectives on it and then choose the optimal way to find an answer. Yet this requires a toolbox that includes not only a hammer, but also a screwdriver, pliers and even a circular saw.
If academia is the wrong place to look for intellectual versatility, consultants who base their expertise on many years of practical experience are sometimes even less helpful. The truth is, practical experience is often much more monochrome than it looks at first glance. Practitioners soon acquire their favourite methods and use them wherever appropriate… or not. There are consultants for whom it’s all about leadership, for others communication, somebody else always finds a problem in business processes, another never forgets to remind everyone that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, and yet another argues that issue lies in the wrong office layout, which undermines collaboration and creativity.
So the real question is — how can we tell who is really a multi-faceted and flexible thinker and who just pretends to be a fox? Our answer is: look for the hedgehog inside the fox.
Ingenuous idea generators earn their praised versatility by investing lots of time and energy into several carefully chosen priorities, not by skimming a couple of Wikipedia pages on every possible subject. This ability requires years of reading, and preferably, even writing about their subjects of interest. Very hedgehog-ian, to say the least. So it is no surprise that the most brilliant foxes are to be found in the kingdom of hedgehogs — academia. Historian-economist Adam Tooze and economist-arts specialist-foodie Tyler Cowen are two outstanding examples of academic foxes.
In business, too, creative minds are… well, hedgefoxes. A book on “Serial Innovators”, published in 2012 by Stanford University Press, focuses exactly on such minds. The authors studied people who have repeatedly created breakthrough products or other types of innovation in large, mature firms. “Repeatedly” is a keyword here — one success can be attributed to sheer luck, but repeated innovations require a very specific set of skills. They include a deep technical understanding of their subject, a constant curiosity and hunger for new information, a problem-solving approach to the world, and — of no less importance — the ability to convince others of the viability of their ideas. In other words, to be a serial innovator, you need to regard the world as full of puzzles to be solved (that no one has solved before), you have to have enough “hard” knowledge to find a non-trivial solution and you must be a good communicator to ensure your idea is given a chance to prove itself.
These so-called soft skills are valued the most in business: the ability to listen and argue; to integrate competing, often contradictory ideas; and to make decisions in the face of the unknown. It is these skills, not a narrowly specialised expertise, that top CEOs get their incredible paychecks for.
As opposed to the inhabitants of the animal kingdom, humans can transform their character to an extent. You can become a fox, if you really want to. Sure, you’ll need a lot of time and stamina, because without substantial investment becoming a dabbler is a more likely result than a fox. But such investment does pay off big time, especially in times of uncertainty.
