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Transcript

It's Time For T · Humanity Working

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, Paul, we're all asked, so what are you gonna specialize in?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Does that question even make sense in 2025?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Matt, everybody.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um kind of.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Have you noticed the number of times on the podcast we say kind of?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is coming up more and more.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I think that it's coming up more and more is that people are looking at AI specifically.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they're thinking, you know, how does this change?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um gonna work.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And specifically, I think what we've seen over the course of the last maybe six months to a year is everybody got excited about this version of AI, the generative AI, that sort of kind of did general things kind of well, right?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Some people actually thought Gen AI stood for general AI versus generative AI for that reason.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like general purpose, right?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: And now uh in some roles at least, you're starting to see real uh the AI being targeted at very specifically at certain types of job role, even if the interface is still like the generative AI type interface.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you might have seen, for example, that you know AI is pretty darn good at doing work of a junior accountant or a junior lawyer or some of those uh some of those things.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's got you know all the information that it needs to uh that it needs to be able to draw those types of conclusions.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And also we're starting to see the idea of like the generative AI being combined with more expert knowledge and creating a fact, sort of a fact check of the uh of the AI output.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's starting quite rightly, I think, people to question okay, well, does specialization even really make sense anymore?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or am I better set uh in devoting my attention to kind of like being the orchestrator of these AI systems or being the interface between AI and other humans and you know, and and thing and things like that.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the um that's the challenge, I think, that we have to we have to try to figure out what how that applies, um, and whether that implies that we need to be doing more specialized work or more generalized work.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I've heard you talk before about the T model, which is kind of breadth across the top, depth down the stem.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what do you what do you mean by that?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and why does that matter now?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um the T model is gosh, I mean, certainly I've been using about maybe 20 years, something like that, maybe a little less, um, in my world of of skills development.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's designed to describe something fairly fairly simple, um, but but kind of impactful.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: The idea here is that um the vertical part of the T corresponds to domain specific knowledge.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're to come back to that idea of an accountant, right, it's your accountancy, right?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then the the horizontal part of the T along the top, that corresponds to the cross-domain knowledge you have, and um, in most cases it's interpreted as the durable skills or the soft skills that you have.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So what this implies is that in order to be successful at work, you need both of those, right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have some kind of like understanding of a domain that gives you that gives you value, and you need to be able to potentially collaborate or communicate with others.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be able to engage in critical thinking, you need to be able to um to be able to cross from your domain to to others.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think one of the reasons that it matters right now is that we're starting to re-evaluate, I think, what the what the relative attention should be across that that vertical part and that horizontal part of the T.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um But I still think it's very relevant.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think it's actually kind of highly relevant because if you think about it in a in a AI world, right, domain-specific knowledge is still important.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um we need to fact-check AI environments, for example.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we need to to draw conclusions from them and make connections that humans would otherwise.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the horizontal part of it is is a hugely important as well.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And as we've discussed before, um a whole bunch of people, including uh the uh World Economic Forum and others believe that these kind of cross-functional skills are going to be more important rather than less over the course of the next decade or two.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that made me think of something.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: This might be a little bit of a tangent, but stick with me for a second.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you got the T model where the across the top is your cross-domain knowledge, right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then the deep the stem of the T, if you will, is is uh uh an area where you can go deep, right?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: But you talked about the foundational things about durable skills.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it starts to turn more into an I model because the foundation needs to be on the bottom.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you think about the modern workplace, you actually have to start structuring it out like a uh like almost like a set of railroad tracks with a bunch of deep connections.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those deep connections, though, can be AI agents that are assisting you to get depth across the domain.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you if you really want to be successful, you got to keep laying tracks, and both of those things have to keep expanding, right?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe maybe your personality still is a bold colored T in that model.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know, it just the visually that just started to Yeah, we've been wondering about something similar, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because as you'll notice, like I'm kind of talking about the connected things but different things, right?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like cross-domain knowledge is um is is related to things like durable skills, but you're quite right that durable skills are found are foundational in nature.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: What we believe this translates to is if you stick, you know, if if you stick with it as a T, right, what we believe it relates to is sort of almost like the order in which this stuff is built out, right?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it was very, very common uh for people to think of this as like, okay, I'm gonna build my specialty.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: So this is really easy to think about in terms of like professions.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: So law, for example, right?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna build my specialty, I'm gonna learn law, I'm gonna go study law, et cetera.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm building out that vertical part of the tea, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: But then when I get, if I'm gonna get promoted, if I'm gonna, you know, make partner and all that kind of stuff, then I need to do some of those other things that I didn't have to do before.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so in order for me to get to that next level, I got to build out the horizontal part of the T.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it was pretty clear for most people, it was like focus on the vertical bit first and then focus on the horizontal bit later.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: What you're kind of hinting at here, which I think is very important, is AI can help you build out the build out the vertical piece.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: It can even help you build out the horizontal piece for that matter.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you are gonna need those cross-domain skills and those durable skills earlier than you would have done otherwise.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's either a question of building out that horizontal part actively first, and or building out the horizontal part and the vertical part at the same time, which is why you're starting to see much more integrated uh learning experiences for people.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you go to medical school 30 years ago, you were you didn't you didn't even enter a hospital for the first two for the first two, three years.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a lot of those you're uh um in certain places they're they're doing medical school quite differently, and you're kind of on the ward week one.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you're building out those durable skills at the same time that you're building out the the sort of more academic aspect of it.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we're starting to see, we're starting to see that.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um we also think that there's an opportunity for us to reconsider learning and development inside organizations, whereby when you get your early in career people in those organizations, you're consciously having them flip from one role to another role to another role to another role inside the organization.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: As you're doing it, you're building out that horizontal part of the TE, and then you're creating all kinds of candidates, as it were, for vertical parts.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then ultimately they'll you'll figure out which of those vertical parts is the most useful for you.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's really important because obviously, as we've discussed before, a lot of traditional careers won't exist uh in a few years' time.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: So having those different options, understanding where they fit in while you're building out that horizontal part is really important.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the the base is like a times new Roman T where it's kind of wide to keep it stable, right?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um I love how you're creating these new shapes, which is funny enough, it has happened, has already happened in this field.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like there are uh people talk about pi shapes where there's uh where um basically one horizontal and a couple of verticals, even M shapes where you got like one horizontal and three uh verticals.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's touching on something a little bit different, the idea that like, okay, if you can have more than one specialty, you can then start to create uh different, um, you know, interesting connections between the two.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was that was me for years, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was a um I was a technologist and I was a writer, and that gave me an opportunity, and you know, I was highly skilled in both of uh both of those and studied those to a a deeper level.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then that allowed me to be able to do some things in the world of technical writing that would not would would not normally be be possible, right?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: So these are um it's it's useful to to think about these things in different ways, but having a really, really, really strong vertical pot allows you to then figure out how you're gonna build out the specialties underneath them.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's great.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's sort of like the T can double as a self-audit, maybe.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um you can spot if you had to draw out your T, you know, um I don't know.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: How would you how would you you how would you apply that maybe to uh spot what might be shallow or missing and yeah well gosh, it's a really it it's a it's a really good question, and I think the first part of it is that I would wager a few people listening to this podcast had never even you know thought about the concept or heard of the heard of the concept before.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: For many people, just like knowing the concept and then using that as a as a uh a way of consciously measuring yourself is is enough, right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're now starting to, if you think about this and go, okay, the people who get um who do well in the workplace, yeah, they have a specialty, but yes, they're also and that then that's their way of consciously working on the on the vertical part of the T.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they don't have the cross the cross-domain knowledge.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, the the sort of how you would do an audit of this stuff is gonna depend upon where you're at in your in your career.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, if you uh one thing is very clear, and we think about this a lot, right, is if you have a particular type of job that requires a particular type of specific domain knowledge, and you can look forward a year from now and or three years from now, and you can go, that's not gonna be a human thing in in two or three years' time, right?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: This area of expertise that I have is not gonna be a thing, right?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: So if that's true, then now is your time to start building out another one of those sort of vertical strands so that you can flip from what you from where you are to something else, right?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're not lost.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's absolutely possible to build out domain specific knowledge faster than we've ever than we've ever built it before.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and maybe so, for example, maybe you were a stat, you know, uh looking back a few years, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you were an anal data analyst and you were like, feels like that's going away, but data science is really is really coming to the fore.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you learn data science, right?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one aspect of it.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: But then of course the other aspect of it is maybe that's the thing that's holding you back, but maybe it's not.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's the top part of the team.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of using this as a mental model and then figuring out should I be working on the vertical part or should it be working on the horizontal part most?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Which of those two things should I be working on most?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then for, you know, you figure out you want to work more on the horizontal part for six months, do it.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Make that your priority.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: You want to work more on the on the vertical part for six months, go ahead and do that.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: So using it in that way can be really, really helpful for people to take as a really simple guideline as to how where and how they should devote their attentions.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And AI obviously can help and disrupt at the same time.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: While it may it may take out one of your T-bars, it may be the way you can build more, more, more lines there.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: So uh and it can help you figure it out as well.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It can help you with that audit process, right?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you speak to, you know, pick up any generative AI tool, start talking to it about this model and have it help you do that audit.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, heck, I've done that on myself, right?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um I would I would absolutely do it.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: AI is a terrific thinking part.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Good one.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 14:40
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• 14:44
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• 14:46
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