We keep promoting hedgehogs
Archilochus left us one surviving line worth remembering: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Isaiah Berlin turned it into a way of sorting minds — hedgehogs run everything through a single defining idea; foxes hold many, distrust the grand unifying theory, and move between them depending on what the situation in front of them actually needs.
Here's what I keep noticing: organisations promote hedgehogs. The person with one legible specialty, one number they own, one story that fits on a slide is easy to evaluate, easy to rank, easy to bet on. A fox's contribution is diffuse and faintly annoying to measure — it shows up as connections nobody assigned, disasters quietly sidestepped, the right question asked at the right moment — and none of that survives a performance review.
So we systematically over-promote the one-big-thing people and under-rate the many-small-things people, then act surprised when leadership optimises a single variable beautifully and walks the whole organisation off a cliff that nobody saw, because the cliff wasn't anyone's one big thing.
I should declare the obvious bias: I'm a fox, so it's suspiciously convenient that the trait I happen to have is the one I've decided is underrated. Read accordingly. The part that isn't just self-flattery is Philip Tetlock's decades of forecasting research, which found that foxes consistently predict the world better than hedgehogs — who tend to get famous for one bold idea and then stay confidently wrong.
I'm not anti-specialist. The hedgehog is exactly who you want when the one big thing happens to be the right thing. The catch is that nobody can tell in advance when that is — which is, conveniently, the fox's entire argument.