T-shaped life: A brief overview

T-shaped skills are in demand in every industry. People are talking about it lately, though, references can be found as early as the '80s when the term was used internally by McKinsey & Company for recruiting and developing consultants and partners.

This shouldn't be hard to understand. You must have in-depth domain-specific knowledge (vertical component) with a cross-discipline competence (the horizontal one). Professionally, you can't be a good data scientist or a program manager or a management consultant and personally, you can’t be a good leader until you have both.

Our domain knowledge gives us depth, skillset, and ability to perform. However skilled and knowledgeable we are, we don't perform in a vacuum. Our broader understanding gives us the vision, context, and applicability. Bear with me, we will again come back to T-shaped skill and learning later on. Let me first convince you of something important here.

It’s worth mentioning, that there're differences between information, knowledge, and wisdom. Gathering information doesn't mean we know how to use that practically. And, knowing how to do our job doesn't mean we can perform in a team with a broader goal in our mind, analyze a situation contextually, or take critical decisions from a bird's-eye view.

It’s often said that knowledge is to know what to do. But wisdom is to know what not to do.

It takes time to translate information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. That’s why recruiters demand experience. Experienced people are informed and knowledgeable. But side by side they also know what matters and what doesn’t. If they somehow lag in a specific skillset or latest know-how, their productivity and functioning don’t go south. They always find those young, energetic and skilled people who can get the job done for themselves. So far as we have the big picture in our heads, we know how to mobilize resources, we understand how to move pieces together, someone will always be there to do the ground job for us.

But when we say experience comes with time, it puts us in the passenger’s seat. It somehow makes us passive. We can’t manipulate time (unless you are Doctor Strange). So, we don’t have any option left to gain ‘experience’ or be ‘wise’ unless being old. To earn experience, we must have the currency of time with us. The more in the reserve, the better. And it seems a bad deal!

I want to convince you here that T-shaped learning and skillset can come in handy here. We must learn something in-depth, but we must learn that contextually. Otherwise, the gathered information will not only get lost but will lose its objective value, and intended purpose. What’s the use of mugging up cold facts when every piece of information we need in the world is practically a click away? Not only that, we fail to consolidate our learning if we don’t do it laterally. Lateral learning is cross-disciplinary. Learning practically, strategizing, implementing. It’s scientific, modern and effective. And most importantly it solves the problem of the ‘time-based experience gaining' model for us.

Don’t quote me out of context here. I’m not saying this is a shortcut. There’s no shortcut to achieve anything ‘important’ in life, let alone experience. (There’re always shortcuts to achieve ‘big & fancy’ things in life though; and of course, there’s a Himalayan difference between what is ‘big & fancy’ and what is ‘important’)

We need to put time and effort. But we can accelerate the process from the driver’s seat. The more we think and learn and work in a T-shaped manner, the more we actively consolidate our understanding of a subject. We learn and act and fail fast, and pick ourselves up faster. We implement our textbook learnings in a practical, probabilistic and messy world and create opportunities to succeed more often.

I love to teach. Not only because it challenges me every single moment individually, but it gives me a kick. A state of flow. I try to distill a topic, conceptualize it as far as possible and disseminate it in the class so that everyone learns it contextually. My subject gives me that opportunity also and I’m extremely lucky in that sense.

For example, when we try to learn about malaria, we start with why (I try that in every other situation, thanks to Simon Sinek). Why it’s important to learn about malaria, or in fact, any disease? What’s the disease burden? (What do you mean by disease burden, by the way?) We try to do a small math here. If you, as an individual physician try to diagnose and treat a single case of malaria, and you work relentlessly 24*7, how much time you’ll need to treat all those malaria cases? And we are just talking about annual cases here. How many doctors will you need with you to tackle this number annually? Just for this single disease? How many doctors our country produces in a year? (What is the suggested doctor-population ratio by the way?) Can you see why malaria or any disease in that sense, is important to be dealt from a public health perspective? Can we be on the same page that public health matters? Without this basic premise, you will never be convinced why we should learn about causative agents or different indices or malaria control strategies under NVBDCP.

We try to be interactive, develop a conversation, go to the field (program officer in this specific context) and learn together. It’s not that I understand or know everything. That’s not the point here. I try to develop my lateral thinking more and more and push my students in that direction. (Also, to spark interest in the beautiful, lively and important but often misread and misinterpreted subject named community medicine).

I don’t try to be ‘right’ during this. I try to develop a process. I myself learn through this. If our education system, our teaching and learning process doesn’t come out from the hierarchical mindset and habit, we will never be able to ‘learn’. We can gather information, we can be right, we can be awarded for gathering information and being right a number of times, but it won’t serve a single purpose.

It's worth noting here that lately but finally NMC has developed a brand-new Competency-Based Medical curriculum for MBBS students across the country and it’s already been in action. A ‘professional’ curriculum must be designed and implemented keeping its practicality and applicability in mind and NMC has done a noteworthy job in this regard.

If we want to have a piece of specific knowledge, a skillset, it’s always beneficial to develop a T-shaped approach.

I see myself as a lifetime learner. And I try to learn effectively, practically, in context. I happened to be a rote learner in earlier days. I think every one of us was. But I lost this part of mine during my college days. Initially, I thought only I was to be blamed and I did that over the years. Lost my confidence too. But I learned the hard way that my brain automatically rejects most of the information that it doesn’t find relevant or can’t understand contextually. I’m an intuitive learner. I can’t function in a high information-based repetitive environment for long. I need to see the bigger picture, understand the context and applicability, and most importantly I need to align my learning, understanding and work with my worldview. Accepting oneself is a beautiful thing. It eases us. It changes our perspectives, life.

I don’t want to sound like I’ve sorted everything out. I have not. I still need to memorize subtle, unnecessary information which I’m well aware is of no use outside a textbook. I still need to perform repetitive works in a hierarchical structure with a skewed (? flawed) feedback system. But whenever I get a chance, I try to learn myself, teach others and develop my skills keeping both the dimensions in mind.

Am I making any difference? Is that a significant one? Well, I’m running my own ‘T-test’ here. It seems it’ll take some time.

Till then, bye.