The Generalist Advantage: Why Not Knowing Can Be Your Superpower

I started my career as a web designer, back when that was still a novel thing. UI, UX, digital design; that was my world. Then I moved into marketing and creative direction, spending a good stretch in agencies doing work for all kinds of big brands. But somewhere in the middle of that, I started running design thinking workshops and sprints under the banner of Ritual Thinking; working with teams at Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein to help them solve problems they'd been circling for months. Then back into creative direction for a time, before a contract at AstraZeneca's Insight and Analytics team pulled me back into digital in a way I hadn't quite anticipated.

The point isn't the zigzag. The point is what the zigzag taught me.

Because I didn't know the analytics world, I started asking questions that people embedded in it weren't asking. Why are we building the dashboard this way? Who actually uses this? What's the workflow they're trying to do? The answers revealed something the team had been living with but not naming: they were solving for the technical transformation, but the people part hadn't been fully thought through. How analysts would actually use the new tools. What would feel intuitive or confusing. Whether the outputs would give people what they needed to do their jobs.

Design thinking wasn't mature in that context; not because anyone was doing anything wrong, but because the domain expertise ran deep in certain directions and shallow in others. That's normal. Every specialised world is like that.

So I had to do two things at once: learn the domain itself, what analytics teams actually do, what SAP Analytics Cloud could and couldn't do, what the real constraints of the transformation were, and then bring my actual expertise on top of that. Which is seeing how groups need to work together and how processes need to be designed so people can actually use them. That's what design thinking gives you; a structured way to move into unfamiliar territory and still add value, because the methodology travels even when the domain doesn't.

Learning the domain wasn't optional. If I'd come in waving design principles without understanding the real constraints of analytics work, I'd have been useless. But because I learned it fast and in service of solving a real problem, I could see things that pure domain experts sometimes miss. I wasn't locked into "this is how we've always done analytics." I could ask: what if we approached this differently?

That's the generalist advantage. It's not that I know a bit about everything. It's that I can move into an unfamiliar context, learn what actually matters in that world, and bring a different way of seeing to it. The fresh eyes aren't a liability; they're the point.

It requires something, though: genuine curiosity and a willingness to look like you don't know everything. You have to actually want to understand how someone else's world works. You can't fake that. And you have to be comfortable asking questions that might seem obvious to people who've been there five years.

But if you can do that; if you can sit in the unfamiliar and genuinely try to understand what's actually going on; you become useful in ways that pure specialists sometimes aren't. You can see patterns across contexts. You can spot gaps that no one's named yet. You can help groups move in directions they didn't think were possible.

That's been the through-line of my career, whether I was working with fashion brands on retail challenges or analytics teams on transformation projects. I get brought in because something needs to shift; a team's stuck, a project's not moving, people aren't aligned. And the reason I can help is partly because I've learned to see what's actually happening beneath what people say is happening. And partly because I'm not so embedded in one world that I can't imagine doing things differently.

The generalist path is harder to explain. It's easier to say "I'm a SAP UX specialist" than to say you help organisations get unstuck by bringing fresh thinking to familiar problems. But it's more honest about what I actually do. And increasingly, I think it's more valuable too.