The Priceless Value of Un-specialization

“if you can design one thing, you can design everything”, the famous quote from Massimo Vignelli, it always keeps me passionate and challenged about design.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that specialization is a powerful thing, Though there’s something I recognize about that un-specialization that is greatly valuable but sometimes is taken as “unwise” for business purposes or personal life.

Here are 5 things that I learned from my latest un-specialization process:

1. Un-specialization teaches respect for others:

An MBA is nothing if your crew stills thinks of you as an asshole.

Empathy with other disciplines is not just an emotional intelligence thing, It’s about understanding their language, pain, and challenge, Not just drawing an empathy map, closing your eyes and picturing yourself in their shoes.

To reach a greater point of connection, you have to get your hands dirty, It’s the only honest and true path to reaching peoples heart, and understanding their real value.

In the meantime, they will also understand yours.

2. It helps you remember the design basics.

Education at the Bauhaus School was diverse and faced the theory to experience, technicians and craft-mans from carpentry, ceramics, fine arts, and business passed their thesis through fire.

That type of design teaching pushed the student’s thinking forward, through the experimentation across a whole range of materials and disciplines; expanding their vision, skipping mere drawing on the search of long lasting products, achieving excellence in the return to craftsmanship!

With that thinking, instead of jumping into the boot camps, I went back to the office, and coded back-to-back with the crew. All those late work hours and pizzas, added to my portfolio the factor of creation of viable products, by far a foundation art usually forgotten.

3. You can coach a crew more efficiently.

Leadership involves walking at the front and against some new challenges, but if you can’t recognize the new grounds outside your comfort zone your ship will sink, Captain. And don’t expect any happy faces from the crew!

Otherwise, if you have these multiple experiences, it’s easy to encourage your team, not just to say “been there, and done that” but controlling more experienced areas will help you get an efficient leadership and honest empathy.

4. Un-specialization makes you dispensable, what’s good.

Some leadership philosophy says that an organization can go as far as the leader can guide them… that’s bullshit!

A 2006’s book, The Starfish and The Spider (one on my favorite books from all times), talks about the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations, and how Napster, Wikipedia, Craiglist, Linux, Apache and all the peer-to-peer movement guided us to the collaborative consumption era.

The uberism of everything wasn’t just circumstancial, it was fruit of the work of many catalysts profiles.

If you are indispensable, sadly you become an asset, a valuable asset that could take down an organization if it fails.

if you re-think yourself as a catalyst, you transfer your properties to other peers creating a stronger organization and multi-disciplinarian culture. If you leave the organization, it’s tangible but sure it’s still growing. The best way to be a catalyst is to have multiple port link.

5. Change the Game.

A lot of people still miss Steve Jobs, and his impact on apple products. He was also an un-specialized and dropped out of the system several times, dropping out of non-interesting classes, and dropping in interesting classes during his school years, later recognizing himself that the curiosity and intuition from that time was priceless later on.

Taking classes like calligraphy and understanding the deep side of typography. bloom ten years later in 1984 with the introduction of the first personal computer; beautiful typographies that change the game of digital communication, interfaces and the graphic industry.

Because of that un-specialization gap during Jobs’s formative days, we got a platform and tools that let us perform our passion for design.

Not a mac lover, but I’m thankful for all their tools that help me grow my family and career. I’m also following that intuition for un-specialization now and getting fruits sooner than I expected.

I don’t defend un-specialization over specialization, Unicorns don’t exist, I believe people could get priceless value crossing disciplines.

Stay tuned and stay curious.
Jose Aljovin.