We are often more certain than the evidence really allows.
More quotesGeneral Patton and Vincent van Gogh represent very different forms of exceptional ability.
Neither offers a sensible template for every person.
Specialists tend to be uneven. The person who moves quickly may miss risks. The analyst who notices every risk may delay action. Someone capable of opening an entirely new direction may be poor at maintaining the detail that follows.
Competency frameworks often respond by asking each person to improve towards the same middle. The result can be a group of acceptable generalists with nobody unusually good at the work’s hardest parts.
Composition offers another approach.
Technical depth can sit beside translation. Speed can be paired with doubt. Experience can be challenged by a newcomer who has not yet accepted the category’s strange conventions.
Difference by itself achieves little. A varied collection of temperaments can disagree indefinitely. Members still need relevant skill, a shared problem and enough permission to challenge the person with status.
The practical question concerns coverage: which demands of the work currently have no natural owner, and which failure would the existing strengths repeatedly miss? One person need not become passable at everything if another can supply the missing strength and both can understand each other well enough to work together.