The Imperative for Developing a Hybrid Mind

This is the first post in a two part series where I aim to convey my strategies for adapting to the pace of the technology industry. You can read the intro to the series here.

Everyone today seems to talk about how hard problems are to solve. But how much harder are they really than in the past? Well, quite a bit harder. Solutions today increasingly combine hardware, software, services, and networks. This wasn't the case 15-20 years ago. Today, developing just a good service is hard enough - let alone factoring in all the other components! The reality is more landmines than ever before litter the problem solving landscape. And those that navigate it best have a diverse, multi-disciplinary background (i.e. a hybrid mind), team well, and have a disciplined process for homing-in on great solutions.

The shift towards these types of "hybrid workers" is perhaps nowhere clearer than within large IT sales organizations. Single specialty sellers, e.g. traditional Account Executives, find themselves on the endangered species list with little hope of getting off. Replacing them is a new guard of Technical Account Managers, Product Specialists, Customer Success Managers, Technical Strategists, and others. These sellers are multi-dimensional, having experience and skills in at least two areas, like industry + technology, or business + technology. By combining their diverse knowledge, they're able to better find the contours of problems and identify high value opportunity areas, which is partly why customers overwhelmingly value these new sellers.

While the market is forcing the transformation of sales organizations, the demand for hybrid workers applies to everyone. In fact, a senior leader at one of the largest tech firms in the world started this year by challenging his organization to become polymaths – i.e. someone who can draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve problems.

How do you become a polymath though? To help, I've outlined some questions below that I use to guide my development:

What are your dimensions?
That is, what are the two areas where you can gain significant experience and skill? Examples could be design, software development, business or tech strategy, etc. Pick two. It's not possible to properly go deep on more, so don't get overly ambitious. Any additional areas of interest are great. Just pursue them as secondary areas of focus to your top two.

For example, my job overwhelmingly develops experience and skill around business strategy and ecosystem develop. However, I strive to also have the mind of a technology strategist. To realize this vision, I purposefully augment my day-to-day work with training. Finally, my tertiary focus is data visualization. I develop on this front primarily by reading.

What's your plan to gain experience and skill within each dimension?
You must be honest with yourself about where you are and have a clear plan for improving.

• Who are the leading thinkers progressing each dimension? What medium do them use to communicate, e.g. blogs, books, podcasts, vlog? Building a view of the network takes a little work, but you have to do it.
• What skills do you need to acquire? For example, I recently completed a Python course to gain a deeper understanding of the data scientist's workflow.
• What are the major trends driving change today in each dimension? How about over the next 3 years? If the best you can answer with is buzzwords, you know you need to do better. Everyone should be aware of what's happening around them.
• How do you see each dimension evolving? What companies within a given dimension have good strategies? Which don't? Do market events confirm your hypothesis or are you wrong? Here's a simple example – I believe Dropbox, with its Spaces offering, is underappreciated as a platform for powering team based workflows. Lots of people talk about chat platforms, but Dropbox's solution is arguably better. I predict the market will see this within the next two years and I validate this hypothesis quarterly after Dropbox post results.
• What work projects will develop you best? How can you work on them?
• Do you have mentors in each dimension? This one is particularly important. I find mentors help calibrate me and validate whether I'm making good progress or not.

I understand these questions might seem obvious. The main point is to realize you need to develop a hybrid mind if you haven't already. To do this you need a plan! So hopefully what I've outlined gets your gears turning and starts you down that path!