Are the days of specialists behind us?

THERE is a growing debate around the future of specialists in a world where technology can seemingly pump out results on steroids.

A recent piece in The Atlantic focused on this debate with its report on the minimal manning behind USS Gabrielle Giffords, a combat ship built in 2014 that sails with one-fifth of the crew on board as compared with legacy ships constructed in the past.

Armed with high-tech display screens and several thousand remote sensors, such new-age ships depend on multi-tasking generalists who can switch between tasks as disparate as handling a lookout report, while heating up garlic bread in the kitchen.

"The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one," the article said.

A friend sent the article to me, lamenting that the pursuit of productivity has killed the need for expertise. What seemed disheartening too, was that jobs in the future appear to favour those with a large dose of socialising skills - the gregarious, the attention-seekers, and by extension, the most political in the office.

But it may be too hasty to think the future belongs only to the generalists, or worse, the proverbial empty vessels.

Returning to The Atlantic piece, it referred to a test administered to crew on these ships that not only assessed the candidates' reaction to four different tasks, but also monitored how the crew did when the equal-score weightage was switched such that finishing one task meant securing three-quarters of the score. The crew who adjusted according to the switch in the scoring system tested highly in fluid intelligence - the underlying processing power that drives decisions.

Those who did not switch out their scoring tactics ranked highly in conscientiousness, and the worry here is that the value of hard work would be eroded in this era of "more for less".

On the contrary, it shows that the workforce of the future will reward the mentally agile, those who can learn on their feet.

It will also serve a heavy penalty on graduates who have unthinkingly depended on rote learning to churn out model answers in a controlled environment of exams and best-laid plans in an education system. Such students would be less adept at understanding concepts, making connections, or adjusting to a change in a scoring system - that is, the working environment.

Those who love reading understand the upside best. The knowledge bank built by a bookworm comes from compounding and connecting concepts gleaned from ploughing through a wide range of books. It is enriched by each reader's unique life experiences. And an avid reader's knowledge bank pays best dividends when a sudden problem springs up. A mental framework can be quickly constructed to break down the issue.

Many now emphasise problem-solving through second order thinking, popularised by investor Howard Marks, where analysis should be done by considering factors such as the competition's reaction, the current consensus, and the outcomes of a first-order thought. Deriving such complex thinking is built on a solid foundation of nimble mental computation at any given time.

So rather than assuming that only the generalists survive, the lesson here may be that those who are conscientious about building a core knowledge bank that is brimming with new ideas will get further ahead. In an increasingly volatile world, it is those with "psychological hardiness", as The Atlantic piece put it, who are more likely to survive.

There is also valid criticism of the unfettered trust in an army of so-dubbed experts. Experts have been proven wrong because they have been unable to question old assumptions on which ivory towers are built. One tell is that many experts often cannot relay their expertise in simple language, falling back on jargon that suggests certain mental rigidity and narrowness.

In the explosion of data today, experts should be humble enough to ask if they have been wrong by actively reviewing their cherished assumptions against new data points. It doesn't mean that expertise is dead. A democratisation of knowledge is progress.

This leaves the final conundrum: will social and political animals rule the jungle? Sure, a 2016 World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs suggested that social skills such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching, will be in high demand across industries. But these build upon existing skills, with workers of tomorrow expected to solve problems with leadership, creativity and logical reasoning. Someone still needs to tell the robots exactly what to do.

To add, nearly half of all jobs requiring technical skills today will have a stable need for them in the coming years, the report showed.

So it is, in fact, less likely that buying a round of drinks for colleagues, and topping that off with oratorical flair, would mean a shoo-in for the next promotion. With the crisis cycle expected to compress, it is those who have well-rounded technical and social skills who should excel.

The bottomline is this: prepare to adapt.

It leaves me recalling words from my former boss, who advised that a top performer today has to work hard to be "a jack of all trades and a master of some". In the same breath, he rejected office politics. Far from idealistic, his observation has been right on the money. For that early preparedness, I can only be grateful.