The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event and security practice
ioc.exchange
ioc.exchange
> Polycultures are important. People have different skills, perspectives, and connections. They have different institutional incentives and roles, and collaborate with others in diverse ways.
I’ve always found this to be true. I’ve spent my entire life, in fairly “heterogeneous” cultures.
Mixed teams can be difficult to manage (which is a big reason for today’s insistence on monoculture). Weak management tends to result in chaos, but a well-managed mixed team can do amazing things.
I tend to see people wanting to optimize for one or the other, and that they they even manage to tie it to politics and morality.
I spent a majority of my career in "R&D-heavy" companies, so I'm fairly used to diverse teams.
... When the solution fits inside the lines of a particular specialty; otherwise, you need a different specialist, and knowing which one is not at all trivial. From time to time, the solution doesn’t fit within any established lines, in which case you’ll never find it at all this way.
Which is why the commonly expressed sentiment that domain experts should stick to their domains of expertise drives me up the wall. Especially the experts in question are scientists and the specific lines can be ... less than well established, to put it mildly.
That is not to say there aren’t plenty of examples of people being wrong outside their domain, but that’s not even a problem. Being confidently wrong would be one. Unfortunately, that’s not how the incentives are set in most places.