hedgehogs vs foxes

Nicholas Kristof, in his column, wrote about Hedgehogs vs Foxes in American foreign policy... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opinion/26Kristof.html

I love the idea of hedgehogs vs foxes - the idea that hedgehogs dig deep into single issues, are considered specialists while foxes are people who go from idea to idea, explore it long enough but not so deep, and back out again , venturing into other topics.

Kristof wrote about it in context to the issue of experts - how experts sometimes get things wrong because they become so single-minded that they fail to realise that the problems they study sometimes are complex creatures that require multiple angles to look at. Hence his writing that foxes ought to be better than hedgehogs.

I felt that such a simplistic dichotomy is fallacious. I mean, its difficult to classify hedgehogs and foxes in the first place, and there are still many problems out there in the world which requires specialists - years of experience in dealing with problems... there is still room in the world for specialised experts who have worked on specific fields for years, even decades.

But there are also obviously issues out there that are not specific, focused issues, and these issues tend to be the ones that plague our world right now, because specialists, by their simplification, might fail to understand the complexities, and by resorting to some simplifications might instead aggravate the situation. I can think of no specific examples, but again, there probably are many anecdotes about it.

Maybe foxes are prized today because of the large issues today - the credit crunch that led to the economic crisis, climate change, energy, sustainable development, poverty in africa, rural development - these are huge multifaced problems that require people who know how to work and coordinate across many disciplines, hence the jumping around that's required.

Alright then. But then I would actually highlight that hedgehogs are still required anyway - people who have been working on the ground, worked with tonnes of experience - these people are still required, and these are the people that education systems tend to produce. I guess now we see the importance of foxes because we realise that issues are too complex. Maybe the truth is, foxes and hedgehogs need to be in equilibrium in any kind of organisation. Too many hedgehogs and the big picture gets ignored, too many foxes and no actual implementation might be accomplished.

Meantime, our education is still going down the path of the hedgehog-centric style of education, with the emphasis of the major still important, if not utterly important. If we need foxes-type of people for the future economy, there really should be serious reconsiderations to the style of education that we give to our kids. Not everyone will be a hedgehog, and not everyone will be a fox. In the rarest of occasion, we might even see the rise of the hedgefox - people who have the capability to move across vastly different disciplines with equal ease. That will be utterly mindblowing.

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