Can you dance at all parties? Be the expert at the intersection? Sounds like an oxymoron—Jack of all trades, master of none.
Beyond the fact that you need to be curious, open-minded, and a lifelong learner, I have a trick for you.
You don’t need to be an expert in every snowflake when you’re a snow expert.
Once you understand the pattern of a Fractal, you can zoom in and out.
Focusing on the underlying principles of the practices/frameworks you’re using will make grasping new ones much easier.
Pattern-matching will help you see the similarities and you will be able to focus your learning effort on the differences.
You can then consider whether the new patterns can be useful in other contexts.
Here are some examples of how I’ve done this:
I’ve seen the similarities between OKRs, EBM, and Agile ways of working to help me get up to speed on OKRs much faster, but also to improve OKRs with emphasis on Agile and Evidence-informed thinking.
I’ve noticed that Flow is a challenge at all levels of an organization, and I’ve used Kanban to help me see and improve flow at all levels.
Next week at the SAFe Summit in DC, I’ll be talking about another example—recognizing push/tell/centralized control at the Portfolio level as an opportunity to bring forth the patterns/magic of PI Planning and apply it to bring decentralized control with alignment to both planning/road mapping and strategy deployment (OKRs) at the Portfolio/Enterprise level.
Once you start to see Snowflakes and Fractals, I promise you’ll start to see them all the time…