All Hail the Generalist
There was an interesting article today in the Harvard Business Review about the roles that Generalist play opposed to Specialists in today's companies. While the last several decades seem to have favored those who specialize in one particular skill or a small number of closely related skills, the inter-connectivity of studios, industries and even countries are demanding employees with a multifaceted skill-set.
The original article can be found at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/all_hail_the_generalist.html.
Although the article does not mention art, studios are in fact businesses. When I was in school, we were told time and again that we need to specialize in one area and become great in that discipline. Not a year after graduating, they changed their program and decided that it was good to be a Generalist.
How do you all think this relates to our art world? Does the Specialist vs Generalist argument depend on the size of the studio? Would the length of a given project determine if it is better to have several people working in multiple departments to ensure any area that may need additional focus has an extra body without the need to contract more people or outsource assets? Or is the art world separate from this business-world mentality?
We have become a society of specialists. Business thinkers point to "domain expertise" as an enduring source of advantage in today's competitive environment. The logic is straightforward: learn more about your function, acquire "expert" status, and you'll go further in your career.
But what if this approach is no longer valid? Corporations around the world have come to value expertise, and in so doing, have created a collection of individuals studying bark. There are many who have deeply studied its nooks, grooves, coloration, and texture. Few have developed the understanding that the bark is merely the outermost layer of a tree. Fewer still understand the tree is embedded in a forest.
Approximately 2,700 years ago, the Greek poet Archilochus wrote that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" contrasts hedgehogs that "relate everything to a single, central vision" with foxes who "pursue many ends connected...if at all, only in some de facto way." It's really a story of specialists vs. generalists.
In the six decades since Berlin's essay was published, hedgehogs have come to dominate academia, medicine, finance, law, and many other professional domains. Specialists with deep expertise have ruled the roost, climbing to higher and higher positions. To advance in one's career, it was most efficient to specialize.
For various reasons, though, the specialist era is waning. The future may belong to the generalist. Why's that? To begin, our highly interconnected and global economy means that seemingly unrelated developments can affect each other. Consider the Miami condo market, which has rebounded quite nicely since 2008 on the back of strong demand from Latin American buyers. But perhaps a slowdown in China, which can take away the "bid" for certain industrial commodities, might adversely affect many of the Latin American extraction-based companies, countries, and economies. How many real estate professionals in Miami are closely watching Chinese economic developments?
Secondly, specialists toil within a singular tradition and apply formulaic solutions to situations that are rarely well-defined. This often results in intellectual acrobatics to justify one's perspective in the face of conflicting data. Think about Alan Greenspan's public admission of "finding a flaw" in his worldview. Academics and serious economists were dogmatically dedicated to the efficient market hypothesis contributing to the inflation of an unprecedented credit bubble between 2001 and 2007.
Finally, there appears to be reasonable and robust data suggesting that generalists are better at navigating uncertainty. Professor Phillip Tetlock conducted a 20+ year study of 284 professional forecasters. He asked them to predict the probability of various occurrences both within and outside of their areas of expertise. Analysis of the 80,000+ forecasts found that experts are less accurate predictors than non-experts in their area of expertise. Tetlock's conclusion: when seeking accuracy of predictions, it is better to turn to those like "Berlin's prototypical fox, those who know many little things, draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradictions." Ideological reliance on a single perspective appears detrimental to one's ability to successfully navigate vague or poorly-defined situations (which are more prevalent today than ever before).
The future has always been uncertain, but our ability to navigate it has been impaired by an increasing focus on studying bark. The closer you are to the material, the more likely you are to believe it. In psychology jargon, you anchor on your own beliefs and insufficiently adjust from them. In more straightforward language, a man with a hammer is more likely to see nails than one without a hammer. Expertise means being closer to the bark, and less likely to see ways in which your perspective may warrant adjustment. In today's uncertain environment, breadth of perspective trumps depth of knowledge.
The declining returns to expertise have implications at the national, company, and even individual level. A collection of specialists creates a less flexible labor force, one that requires "retraining" with technological developments creating constantly shifting human resource needs. In this regard, the recent emphasis in American education on "job-specific" skills is disturbing. Within a company, employees skilled in numerous functions are more valuable as management can dynamically adjust their roles. Many forward-looking companies are specifically mandating multi-functional experience as a requirement for career progress. Finally, individuals should manage their careers around obtaining a diversity of geographic and functional experiences. Professionals armed with the analytical capabilities (e.g. basic statistical skills, critical reasoning, etc.) developed via these experiences will fare particularly well when competing against others more focused on domain-specific skill development.
The time has come to acknowledge expertise as overvalued. There is no question that expertise and hedgehog logic are appropriate in certain domains (i.e. hard sciences), but they certainly appear less fitting for domains plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and poorly-defined dynamics (i.e. social sciences, business, etc.). The time has come for leaders to embrace the power of foxy thinking.
The original article can be found at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/all_hail_the_generalist.html.
Although the article does not mention art, studios are in fact businesses. When I was in school, we were told time and again that we need to specialize in one area and become great in that discipline. Not a year after graduating, they changed their program and decided that it was good to be a Generalist.
How do you all think this relates to our art world? Does the Specialist vs Generalist argument depend on the size of the studio? Would the length of a given project determine if it is better to have several people working in multiple departments to ensure any area that may need additional focus has an extra body without the need to contract more people or outsource assets? Or is the art world separate from this business-world mentality?
Replies
As far as the "Program or be programmed" quote programmers like to throw around, I'd like to counter with "Draw or be drawn - with your features exaggerated in order to make you look silly"
But I tend to have a problem with any single broad stroke of advice - Valve doesn't always hire T-shaped people. It's their ideal, yes - but does not hold true for their entire workforce. And I bet it was introduced only after a certain time. It's nice to throw out flavor-of-the-week advice about doing something a certain way, certainly nice PR when you are already successful.
Some people need generalists, some specialists - some need a sound guy who can also balance a stack plates on his head; point being that no one requirement can adequately encompass all possible needs. Routes into the industry can be as circuitous as they can be straightforward.
At the end of the day, do work - get it done, and at a good enough quality level, make sure you're being seen by prospective employers and eventually you will be hired. Besides that, there's a ton of factors that figure when, where, and why you will end up working. Heh, even what I just said can be viewed as the aforementioned 'broad-stroke advice'.
Also, I'm not in the industry, so I may just be spewing nonsense in the eyes of the Pcounters that actually have jobs.
That's pretty much what I've been saying all the time. People should understand at least a little bit of everything and then focus.
Imagine a modeler who has absolutely ZERO knowledge of skinning, rigging or even deformation! An env artist who has NO clue about gameplay. And yes, those guys do exist and it's pretty annoying to teach them things you'd think they're common sense in our industry. Knowing about the departments / steps that are next and before your own job in the pipeline is absolutely essential because you can anticipate the needs of the people who're going to work with the assets you create. This makes it all go so much smoother.
I'm not really asking for Renaissance men, but I just don't like it when people show absolutely no interest for anything that's before or after their stage in production...I mean, you're int he games industry. It's pretty exciting - aren't you curious??? (ok, I'm a tech artist, being curious is my job
Polycrafter.
Does this mean Tails outranks Sonic??????????
At least you'll end up with theoretical knowledge of the other areas. Usually if you're good enough to get into the games-industry, then you're probably good enough to quickly get a foot into the other areas as well. You don't have to master them but working knowledge of them is always good.
I think the fitness statistic really fits here, hehe.
Yes, I'm talking 'bout you guise.
so i was told all my life i have to be a generalist, and what that endet up leading to, is that most people in my age don´t know what they want to do in theyr life.
and that is mostly because they were never forced to focus on something and realy find out if they are good at it or enjoy doing it.
so i´m more on the specialist side here. the valve-idea is a very good one imo.
i most of the time end up doing lots of different stuff, cause someone has to fix that shit, and i can´t realy say i enjoy it.
But the aquired knowledge might be very usefull later, when working with bigger teams.
But i realy don´t care to master all the different categorys of (game-) art, and i don´t think it is realy possible for one person.
It also allows me to have meaningful conversations at work with programmers or LDs or artists ... I understand what they're saying and I can put it into a useful context in my brain.
That sort of thing is why I think generalists are definitely needed. They're the glue that keeps the departments together.
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I had a math teacher Mr Uangua, who could draw perfect circles on the board. We spent one class measuring and remeasuring, it came down to the thickness of the stroke, which was surprisingly consistent depending on how beat down the tip of the marker was.
He had a some kind of weird trick elbow that allowed him to do prefect circles (with a lot of practice) but only of a certain sizes, based on specific joints as the center pivot. He claimed that anyone could learn to do it but they had to accurately account for the movement of the center pivot, which his elbow minimized.
I tried to learn his elbow circle which was the easiest and I got pretty close but never as close as he could do it but they looked pretty good. Which I think is the difference between a specialist and a generalist. A specialist might prefect one skill but a generalist will be able to do a few things almost to the same level. The better the generalist the smaller that gap is.
TLDR: When money is tight and times are tough the industry leans more heavily on generalists. When the money is flowing and projects balloon, the industry reaches out to specialists.
A generalist is like a swiss army knife, you mostly use the blade but when you need the other tools its nice to have them.
Its just not the fact that you can do more things. But your curiosity to understand more and how things work has helped me learn so much about code, technical development and art. I don't feel uninterested when someone starts to talk about a shader technical problem, i look at it, see what i can do, and solve the problem using tools that a regular artist would do in his day at work. To me its more satisfying. But, i am also in a studio where its small and our work impacts the project in a big way.
So its encouraged (or at least thats how i see it) to get involved and become an asset that can understand every aspect of development to make a better product. Which i guess is something that should go without saying. If you don't know how code works, its difficult to make art that blends easily with it. Also... i just like doing more than just door knobs for a whole month.
By Generalist you might mean having related skills. Like a Prop Modeler that can do characters, or a Concept Artist that can do UI. Secondary skill are certainly very valuable. Especially as a project transitions from pre-production to production to post-production.
By Generalist you can mean someone that knows all aspects of production. For example, I can code, concept, model, texture, rig, and animate. I do them all at a professional level. Am I the MOST valuable member on the team? Nope. Because I'm not the best at any one of those things. Certainly it's good for a team to have someone like me, but without a few people that specialize in their skills the project won't really shine.