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personally carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. Darwin always juggled multiple projects, what Gruber called his “network of enterprise.” He had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into thirteen broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which “ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion.” When his chaotic notebooks became too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, the Azores, Jamaica, and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.

Toward the end of their book Serial Innovators, Abbie Griffin and her coauthors depart from stoically sharing their data and observations and offer advice to human resources managers. They are concerned that HR policies at mature companies have such well-defined, specialized slots for employees that potential serial innovators will look like “round pegs to the square holes” and get screened out. Their breadth of interests do not neatly fit a rubric. They are “π-shaped people” who dive in and out of multiple specialties. “Look for wide-ranging interests,” they advised. “Look for multiple hobbies and avocations. . . . When the candidate describes his or her work, does he or she tend to focus on the boundaries and the interfaces with other systems?” One serial innovator described his network of enterprise as “a bunch of bobbers hanging in the water that have little thoughts attached to them.” Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda painted the same idea elegantly: “I have a lot of apps open in my brain right now.”

Griffin’s research team noticed that serial innovators repeatedly claimed that they themselves would be screened out under their company’s current hiring practices. “A mechanistic approach to hiring, while yielding highly reproducible results, in fact reduces the numbers of high-potential [for innovation] candidates,” they wrote. When I first spoke with him, Andy Ouderkirk was developing a class at the University of Minnesota partly about how to identify potential innovators. “We think a lot of them might be frustrated by school,” he said, “because by nature they’re very broad.”

Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.

CHAPTER 10

Fooled by Expertise

THE BET WAS ON, and it was over the fate of humanity.

On one side was Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. In congressional testimony, on The Tonight Show (twenty times), and in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse from overpopulation. On its lower left corner, the book cover bore an image of a fuse burning low, and a reminder that the “bomb keeps ticking.” Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade, Ehrlich warned. The New Republic alerted the world that the global population had already outstripped the food supply. “The famine has started,” it proclaimed. It was cold, hard math: human population was growing exponentially, the food supply was not. Ehrlich was a butterfly specialist, and an accomplished one. He knew full well that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blew past the available resources, and crashed. “The shape of the population growth curve is one familiar to the biologist,” he wrote.

Ehrlich played out hypothetical scenarios in his book, representing “the kinds of disasters that will occur.” In one scenario, during the 1970s the United States and China start blaming one another for mass starvation and end up in a nuclear war. That’s the moderate scenario. In the bad one, famine rages across the planet. Cities alternate between riots and martial law. The American president’s