Expand Your Thinking, Not Just Your Skillset

by Sébastien Thibault

Often when we set out to better ourselves in our chosen creative field, the first place we turn is to our core skillset. If I am a painter, I will learn a new painting technique. If I am a designer, I will learn a new rendering program. We are taught that the better we are at our job, the further we will go in our career. However, this can only take us so far. Yes, your skills are very important. For example: if you have an amazing idea, but cannot communicate it through your sketching abilities, the idea will be lost. Yet, what good are your sketching abilities if you have no ideas to share? For that you need to develop your thinking, as IDEO partner Michael Hendrix explains in a How Magazine interview:

There are so many avenues. There are lots of online training sites that are great for learning new software — if you need to learn Adobe Premiere so you can create animations, for example. But that doesn’t change your thinking. When it comes to these more complex skills, you have to start thinking entrepreneurially. You’re starting to ask why something exists in the world, how it might live, how people might interact with it. And by asking those questions, you find you have to learn new things — like psychology, or basic financial skills, or how the supply chain works.

Entrepreneurs are required to have a general knowledge in everything. Unlike a large corporation, they do not have the luxury to assign tasks to specific departments as they are running entire businesses themselves. They still have a greater knowledge in their specific area of expertise, but they also know about human resourcing, raising money, and marketing. IDEO partner Tom Kelley describes how the same idea can be applied to expand your thinking and make you a “T-shaped” person.

At IDEO we like T-shaped people who have a strong core of expertise, but combine it with a genuine respect for, interest in, and preferably experience with, other areas as well… A T-shaped person might be an engineer who does fine art in their spare time, is interested in anthropology and maybe took some under-graduate courses in it, or some other esoteric combination of interests. T-shaped people have more attachment points. They are more likely to make a contribution to a team, and build on the ideas of others.

While Kelley encourages an ‘esoteric’ combination of interests, Hendrix references the designers Charles and Ray Eames who expanded into other design fields. Their core expertise was based in architecture, but they also designed furniture, produced films, invented toys, and created graphics. Hendrix himself is well-rounded in the fields of design, cultural studies, linguistics, psychology, and cognition. This multifaceted design is a combination of being both a specialist and a generalist. It allows you to expand your thinking as you have more ‘attachment points,’ as Kelley notes. These are points of connection between different industries and ways of thinking that will lead to new ideas. Ideas which you can then communicate with your skills.

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