The problem with specialization

Introduction

The competitive environment today hinges on operational excellence in all aspects of business. This applies to any field of occupation and study. Most fields of study seems to expand with regards of specializations designed to fit particular roles the modern society needs, and people tend to get more and more lost in abstractions and categorizations which is the world order's tool to approach societal developement, where problems are defined as puzzles to be solved trough a mindless and endless split a conquer mentality. But why are we all not just taking a deep breath and spending time to resolve the real causes of out own and the problems we are facing in a diligent way? This blogpost touches how specialization paradoxally undermine developement in larger organizations. and also societal implications of it.

Business world / effect on world harmony

When people go to job interviews, principles of sale and subjective perceptions is what determines the outcome, its the indicator used today along with IQ tests which has no relevance at all for most roles, but is used as people with high IQ tends to be most confident with their own perception of things - this is a dualedged sword also in terms of progress. Anyway, in the end of the day, it is really about finding match between the interviewer and the candidate beeing lucky. The effect of all this is that most people/employees are acting and playing as they believe the interviewers want them to be, and when they are employed they either becomes the suppressed or the vultures suppressing in an athmosphere emphasized by buzz words, headstepping, career, positions, status and money.

Academic implications

As for subjects students doesn't care so much about, the majority of students will typically just satisfy their teachers with the book material simply formulated in with different words trough fine formulations and culture specific formulations appealing the professors/teachers. My point is that self reflection is not needed, which is maybe more important than the narratives in the book itself. The result is that academies are creating "robots", employees which blindly follows what they have learnt, and the paradox is that this is what the market demands - in the case of huge MNCs at least. Middle size and emerging/smaller companies still need human intellect in order to survive and that is comforting to know.

The societal effect

Since standardizations of operations seems to be a luxury os huge established corporations which already have kind of a monopoly, those companies will even grow bigger because of this, and the smaller is required to navigate more, thus is not ready for standardizations in the same way. The result is a society where more and more will work as specialists in there standardized corporations where they have a role and a set of responsibilities. Developement, career and status is the priorities of most people in the western world, because you need to hang on if you want you and your family to live well for generations. The specialization leads to disintegration on all levels:

• Communication level: abstractions becomes an aim in itself not the material, as facade/image tend to win over content
• Emotional level: institutions teach citizens to classify and categorize everything and apart from emotion. This leads to all kinds of segregation and unhappiness, and even schizophrenia.
• Relation level: contracts and formalities tend to replace natural relationships which is best glued with trust and love

A better approach?

An environment with manipulative career hawks on one side and hard workers stribing to satisfy measurement criterias on the other side, is in my opinion not the best ground for technological development as the workers will be exhausted. How much better wouldn't it be if research and developement employees could resolve problems trough qualitative insights in a state of mind free of social pressure to drink tons of coffe cups every day and worries about irrelevant/meaningless tools of measuring emplyee performance, and coworkers stepping on your head for the sake of their managing "hawks" self realization? I believe the body (and head) is strongest both physically and mentally in a state of calmness in the long run, not stimulation and selfish motives, and I believe organizations made of calm and happy people creates a competitive advantage for those organizations. Still, the reality is ofcourse business competition where simple market principles are ruling, and the shortest way to compete is trough this type of dynamics as mentioned.

Conclusion

On one side big corporations seems seeks educated "idiots" or "robots" and not critically thinking individuals as those may interfere with existing operations/and agenda of operations. I believe people want real people prior to sales arguments and formalities on papers, even if they buy into the opposite themselves. Human resources with roles and paper responsibilities are still humans which is driven by emotions in order to make a change, but the question is again, does huge companies really want people which can make a change?

I believe the business atmosphere of the day and tomorow need this type of change, and in the same way as IT systems tend to move from monoliths to microservices, I think the same change would benefit huge corporations - with regards of standardizations of operations as not all subsidaries benefit/needs all the standardization thus halts and slows the operations of those subsidaries which in the end of the day makes them less competitive.

Discussion

My understanding of it is that most people are afraid/just trying to survive and takes the easiest route which is to play it like everybody else is playing it trough cultural behavious and tools to satisfying social expectations and other types of contracts with as little effort as possible to get a better stand/get trough it. There is nothing new really from todays society in that matter compared to the one for 500 years ago from a social antropological view except the difference that non-conformity will not hurt you physically in the degree as in other times/cultures and that inheritance of the social liberal culture im very proud of and is a good example to the world. I just think that the mainsteam hierarchical organizational business model of the world should be changed to serve the market better by having localized/highly-maneuverable organizational "frontends" with real humans in it thus putting aside globalized operations in terms of "internal organizational mechanics".