Colin never left his village

#BR41

I was meant to be on that trip with my girlfriend at the time. We broke up on the drive north, so I took her home and went on my own. (I've done a lot of solo travel. Not because I'm always breaking up with people and taking them home. That was just the once.) Solo travellers find each other, and that day Colin was my best friend.

The word geomancer rang a bell, but I couldn't place it. "Are you in earth sciences?" I asked.

"No. I harness earth energies."

He was a kind of warlock who healed the world through ley lines. It took me a little while to work up the courage to ask, "Is geomancy lucrative?"

He said the geomancy was just to heal the Earth. He said he did it for free. His actual job was clearing ghosts out of people's houses.

"I've got clients all over the world," he told me.

"How? I thought you'd never left your village."

"Skype."

Colin was a walking example of a limiting belief and its opposite. Seventy years inside one village. Clients all over the world. The opposite, at the risk of sounding like a life coach, is what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset.

Most businesses have the mix backwards. They've got every tool, channel and capability they need to go anywhere, and they've drawn a line around themselves that's tighter than it has to be.

"We're a tech company." "We do corporate events." "Marketing is a cost centre." Those lines feel like strategy. Choosing what you're known for is strategy. Refusing to try anything outside it is a story that stuck, and it's holding you back.

Some businesses never draw the line. I've been thinking about one a lot lately, because we've just launched a glorious new website for I Want Orange. It's led by another Colin, Colin Ennor, one of the best event directors on the planet. Colin and I worked together at Orange Productions, an earlier incarnation of I Want Orange, before he bought the company.

The year before I met the geomancer, someone asked if we could deliver the largest Indian wedding New Zealand had ever seen.

If we'd drawn a line around what we were, the answer would have been "that's not what we do." Instead we said yes. We built horse-drawn carts with the prop maker from Xena: Warrior Princess. We flew helicopters in V formation. We put Daler Mehndi, a huge Punjabi star, on the back of a flatbed truck going up Sandringham Road. TV3 News came along to cover it, and I ended up being interviewed one night (the wedding, naturally, being a multi-day affair).

Nobody on that team was an Indian wedding specialist. But when you are surrounded by amazing people, anything seems (and is) possible. We brought both a generalist mindset and specialist depth, and the combination made magic.

Tim Brown, who ran the design firm IDEO, popularised a way of describing the people he wanted to hire. He called them T-shaped. The vertical stroke is depth: one discipline you know cold. The horizontal bar is breadth: enough feel for other disciplines to work across them and connect them.

For most of my career, the smart money was on the vertical: specialisation. Generalists were people who hadn't picked a swim lane yet.

I've wrestled with that, because I've never been the deepest specialist. I collaborate with people who are far better than me at top-to-bottom expertise. What I've figured out, slowly, is that I'm good at connecting and seeing patterns. Seeing how the brand problem connects to the sales conversation, and how both connect to the product.

Economists have been watching this play out for years. One study across 18 countries found that specialist training gets people into work faster, but the advantage flips later in life, when those specific skills go stale. Broad skills age better.

AI changes the maths on the T-shaped individual idea. A curious generalist can now go deep on demand. It's been invaluable in my work with applied science and forestry businesses, industries with deep specialisation and a language all their own.

I can get across the terminology and the science much faster than ever before, even for this humble marketer. I can essentially “borrow” some deeper domain specialisation, enough to ask good questions.

So the T can get wider and deeper at once, with two conditions.

The first: borrowed depth (such as from AI) only goes so far. When it comes to executing strategy, deep specialists are more valuable than ever.

The second condition is intellectual honesty. Peter Drucker put it this way in 1954:

Without honesty about the limits of what you know, your questions only ever reach as far as your own expertise. Curiosity is what takes them further.

AI raises the stakes. It will answer almost anything you ask, fluently and fast. It won't tell you that you asked the wrong thing.

Limiting beliefs usually get filed under personal development. Like most people I know who care about what they do, I wrestle with my share of self-doubt, and it’s both motivating and not helpful at the same time. But it’s equally true for humans in a collective configuration, especially in business.

Nicola Taylor's framework from her Revved keynote works for both, and it's a bit more intellectually grunty than mirror affirmations. The timing of Nicola’s talk was amazing, as I’d just emerged from 3 weeks stuck in a dark room.

Her argument is that strategy gets stuck when it's built on a limiting, untrue story. Her way out has four steps:

So here's the question for this week. What line has your business drawn around itself? "We don't do that." "We're too small for that market." "That's not our space."

I highly recommend you pick one. Ask whether it's true or… just familiar. Ask what would change if the line wasn't there. Then ask whether the evidence still supports it, or whether the evidence moved on and the story didn't.

Colin cleared ghosts by Skype from a village he'd never left. He didn't let the line stop him.

The question is whether yours is stopping you.

Are you stuck on a story you're starting to question? If so, hit reply. I'd love to hear about it, and I have a 100% reply rate. And if you want to embark on a new story, book some time with me.

Cheers, Dave