The Importance of Range for Program Management

Key Takeaways

• Program management operates in "wicked" environments where patterns don't repeat and feedback is delayed or inaccurate
• Breadth of experience enables creative problem-solving by allowing managers to draw analogies from diverse fields
• Generalists excel at collaboration and can help specialists break out of their silos
• The ideal team combines foxes and hedgehogs - generalists who can see the big picture and specialists with deep expertise
• Range is developed through diverse experiences across different industries, functions, and challenges

Executive Summary

Ever since Malcolm Gladwell popularized the "10,000-hours rule" in his book "Outliers", the professional world has become increasingly obsessed with specialization. While this makes sense in many fields, program management operates in what David Epstein calls "wicked" environments where range and breadth of experience often triumph over narrow specialization.

Program Management is Wicked Hard

David Epstein differentiates between two types of environments: Kind and Wicked. In "kind" learning environments, patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. Golf or chess are examples where the 10,000-hour rule applies effectively.

However, program managers operate in wicked domains where "the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both." As psychologist Robin Hogarth puts it, much of the world is "Martian tennis" - you can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules, and they are subject to change without notice.

Program management fits squarely in the 'wicked' category. You're typically dealing with complicated, cross-functional initiatives that are critical for the company's performance, future competitive landscape, or sometimes even the outright survival of an enterprise. During these projects, you're often dealing with dozens of different stakeholders with their own agendas, spanning anywhere from a few months to a couple of years, usually with major budgets to execute.

Real-World Example: Customer Experience Centers

In one recent Torq program, we were tasked with driving an initiative to evolve to a more customer-focused enterprise by merging disparate, regional customer service centers into new "experience centers." Every employee at one of these customer service centers suddenly needed to move to the new experience centers.

Navigating this change was not only a major challenge from a program management standpoint but also a major change management challenge that had to be handled delicately. While these challenges have been done numerous times before, they are never quite the same because you are dealing with people's lives - their jobs, their spouses, and their kids would all be impacted by this project.

Take a Deep Breadth

Epstein suggests that "breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they've never seen before, which is the essence of creativity."

When someone has a vast array of experiences and knowledge in seemingly disparate fields, they are able to pull analogies and examples from those domains to connect the dots in ways that a specialist cannot. Specialists are so experienced at being a hammer that every problem starts to look like a nail.

The Healthcare-Automotive Connection

One great example comes from our newest project manager, Mathew, who was working on an automotive financial services program. When Mat was brought on, he had no experience in the automotive industry but had worked previously with many years of experience in healthcare.

On face value, this experience seemed less than helpful for a complicated program in a new industry. However, as an outsider to the specialized knowledge, he was able to reframe the problem and add monumental value to the program. The hiring and recruiting challenges that Mathew faced as a healthcare director allowed him to quickly ramp up many of the workforce management aspects, such as training, hiring, and turnover challenges, which had many identifiable similarities across the two landscapes.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Just as not everyone can/should have deep specialization in a particular field, we cannot all swing the pendulum in the exact opposite direction and all become generalists. The magic really happens when you have a symbiotic relationship between specialists and generalists.

Psychologist Philip Tetlock characterized his volunteers as hedgehogs or foxes in his "Good Judgement Project." Hedgehogs know one big thing really well (specialists), while foxes know many little things (generalists) very well. "Hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise...foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect."

Tetlock found that generally, volunteers with foxlike breadth performed better than the volunteers with hedgehog-like depth at forecasting. The generalists were also the best collaborators and "the best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions."

Jake's Financial Industry Range

On a recent Torq program centered around building out a new business unit for one of our biggest clients, our project manager Jake leveraged his range effectively. The program team was full of experts in their various areas, but the team had been stagnating before we were engaged.

Jake leveraged some of his recent experience in the financial industry to ask probing questions about the financing process and how attrition was being considered. The key expert in this new business unit had specialized in this type of business for so long that he hadn't thought about the implications of attrition on this model because of the nature of the business.

This novel perspective allowed us to bring in other specialists who had deep financing expertise to weigh in on the question. We were able to uncover a potential risk very early in the program and effectively mitigate what could have been a major issue down the road.

Summary

While the 10,000-hour rule is a great concept that has captured the attention of corporate America, "stories of innovation and self-discovery can look like orderly journeys from A to B." The reality is that we live in a very 'wicked' world where range plays a major factor.

While we cling to stories of superstars who have been training their whole lives in one area (Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, etc.), that "path minimizes the role of detours, breadth, and experimentation." We forget about the mostly trivial 1,000 patents of Thomas Edison and just look at the light bulb. We forget that Roger Federer didn't start focusing on tennis until his teenage years, or that Dirk Nowitzki was more of a handball player until he decided to pick up a basketball later in life.

Just like these greats showed quite a bit of range to become masters in their respective fields, we believe that in the wicked world of business, 'rangey' program managers are absolutely critical to deliver the most complex, strategic initiatives for our clients.