Love this quote from Gregory Northcraft: "The difference between experience and expertise is that with expertise, you have a predictive model that works." Sort of adds a new layer to 'you can either have five years of experience, or one year of experience five times.'
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There are lots of non obvious implications from this single quote.
For instance: want to hire a good generalist for your startup? The best indicator: they have a history of finding ‘predictive models that work’ in all their previous domains. You can test for this.
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When you say “that person might not be the smartest person in the room, but boy are they effective” what you’re essentially saying is that they have a history of systematically looking for predictive models that work. This quality is orthogonal to intelligence.
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When you’re hiring a good individual contributor, you might not require them to have a legible explanation of their predictive model.
But if you’re hiring a manager, they damn well better be able to explain their approach, because that’s table stakes for being a good teacher.
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Replying to
my question would be what if the domain in question is rapidly changing so fast (think cynefin chaos quadrant), that the model breaks down faster than the manager can finish teaching?
Or am i overthinking this?
unroll pls
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Definitely overthinking.
Most of the time I'm hiring e.g. senior programmers, HR execs, marketing. The deep principles in those fields don't change that much.