EDITOR’S NOTE:

The following is an invited contribution written by Sian Allen PhD. Sian speaks from first-hand experience when it comes to diversifying areas of expertise and the merits of being adaptable. Sian began her professional career in physiology, working with British Swimming, before obtaining her PhD in statistical modelling of sport performance with Swimming New Zealand, leading to a strategic role as Performance Intelligence Manager with Paralympics New Zealand. She now works in industry R&D as a Senior Research Scientist in the innovation team at lululemon athletica.

Future-Proofing Skill sets for Uncertain Times

Will the Olympics take place in 2021?

Will our gym be open next week?

Will I even have a job in sport next year?!

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that one of the few certainties in life is uncertainty! Those that emerge from this period will be those who can successfully manage volatility, disorder and uncertainty. And those that thrive will be those who learn how to embrace these kinds of questions, extract wisdom and grow stronger as a result of the experience. In other words, these brave souls who rise to the occasion will be Antifragile, a term coined by author, investor, philosopher, and mathematician, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This concept aptly describes how we might tailor our approach in order to thrive in a world we will never fully be able to understand.

As great poker players and investors know, the best strategy for navigating uncertainty is often to hedge your bets and spread your portfolio of assets. For young coaches, practitioners and researchers, the first step is to build our portfolio, so we have something to spread! Once we have that foundation, we must develop a point of view on where and how to spread our assets, in our quest to diversify for the best possible return during the good times and hedge our bets to accommodate unforeseen events. After all, if all we have is a hammer in a world where nails become obsolete, our tool kit is redundant, and so are we. To that end, gaining exposure to different sports, environments and situations helps us build the context needed to be adaptable and make better decisions in times of uncertainty.

For some time, successful corporate enterprises such as IDEO & McKinsey have championed an interesting approach to employee recruitment, designed to build innovate, creative and exceptional interdisciplinary teams, not entirely dissimilar from those desired by top sporting organizations. This concept of ‘employee shapes’ is shown below (Figure 1) and represents a valuable framework for personal and professional development in a world of increasing uncertainty.

If we extrapolate this model to sport, an example might look like:

- I-shaped: strength and conditioning specialist in rugby union

- T-shaped: strength and conditioning specialist across sports

- Pi-shaped: strength and conditioning specialist across sports with data science expertise

- Comb-shaped: strength and conditioning specialist across sports with expertise in data science, biomechanics, business operations, strategic planning etc.

From an employee’s perspective, it pays to be both a generalist and a specialist. A generalist with multiple areas of specialist knowledge and expertise is better still. In any case, being a ‘generalist specialist’ gives you differentiation in a saturated market. Steve Ingham outlines this nicely in his insightful letter to the annual 15,000 UK sport science graduates – both breadth and depth are essential for capturing one of the limited number of roles in elite sport. Further, the more prongs of specialism you have in your comb, the more you offer unique value to an organization and the bigger asset you become.

From an employer’s perspective, the combs are rare and valuable; people who can pivot rapidly in the face of changing demands and adapt quickly. If you can hire one person with the skills you’re after, does it make sense to hire two, or three? This question is especially pertinent considering that the lines of communication within teams increase disproportionately with increasing numbers of team members, often resulting in reduced productivity and performance. Indeed, Brooks’ Law states that adding people power to a late project makes it later, largely because of the communication overhead associated with bigger teams.

The trend for ‘generalist specialists’ appears to be growing in all sectors as employers increasingly cotton on to these benefits - how many job adverts in sport science these days stipulate a desire for data analytics skills alongside discipline-specific skills? With this in mind, signs point towards a flywheel effect taking hold in the market, whereby the more this becomes a standard expectation for employment, the more people will step up to fill these expectations, driving demand for similar roles across other clubs and nations to keep pace with their rivals.

The thing is, all of this looks brilliant on a piece of paper. But let’s be honest, who has time to become a specialist at 20 different things while doing their day job, and have a life at the same time? So, the flip side to this argument is to ask what added value you’re getting from investing further in learning within your current specialism? In seeking to maximize the return on investment in our professional development and continuing education, applying the Law of Diminishing Returns (Figure 2) may be helpful. This law states that for every output, there is a point at which input no longer yields proportional output. To take a simple example, the first bite of an ice cream often tastes great, but after a certain number of bites we become more accustomed to the sensation and it starts to taste less great. Continue eating too much, and it becomes sickening, producing negative returns!

In the case of personal development, this might look like the steep learning curve you experience in the first couple of years in a specialist support role, whereby you learn a lot from each unit of time or effort you put into the role. Once you have a good understanding of the application of the first principles, you then start to pick up details and fine-tune your practice, and it’s at some point here where you likely cross over beyond the point of diminishing returns.

There are many cases in which it pays to continue beyond the point of diminishing returns – if you want to be a market leader in one particular specialism, for example. However, if we’re optimizing for a market that rewards ‘generalist specialists’ and a future in which the only true certainty is uncertainty, identifying the point of diminishing returns in a specialism and pivoting to adopt others once this point is reached seems like a viable strategy.

Breaking it down a little, if we can learn the first principles of a discipline in our learning phase of the curve, by the time we reach the point of diminishing returns, we then have the necessary framework to apply them across circumstances. From here on, we can use these principles to critique, assess and make decisions about different situations that would benefit from specialist knowledge. To quote Elon Musk, “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

One footnote to this strategy, however, is the need to persist with investment in a chosen specialism through to somewhere close to the point of diminishing returns. Otherwise, we risk falling foul of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (Figure 3), whereby we remain in either the unconscious incompetence phase of our journey (atop Mount Stupid), or the conscious incompetence phase (languishing in the Valley of Despair). Our sweet spot occurs on the uptick of the Slope of Enlightenment, or the point at which we’ve done the work to acquire deep knowledge, have due respect for the complexity of our chosen specialism, and have practiced applying our learning in the real world.

Those interested in learning about the services we offer to organisations and teams can find more via the consulting section on the site. You are also welcome to reach out via the Contact page.

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