“Stay in your lane.”

That sentence is usually uttered by insecure blowhards with small d*ck energy.

But it’s also a mindset that perfectly well-meaning experts fall into when they’re caught incomprehensibly off-guard.

Which is understandable. 🤷

Imagine you’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education, then worked your entire career to become a top expert in your field— 

Only to have a random chick with very little understanding of your discipline walk into a meeting and solve an unsolvable problem.

It must be unnerving.

Shit, I was shocked I solved it too. 🤯 

Stop killing people

Fun fact— 

Hospital deaths decrease in the weeks when cardiologists are all away at big national conferences.

You read that right. When the heart doctors are not around to do their heart doctoring, fewer patients die of heart-related issues. 

I can’t think of a more poignant example of the dangers of too much specialized thinking.

When the top-tier heart surgeons are present, they tend to overdo interventions, eager to showcase the skills they’ve worked so hard to develop. 

But when they’re absent, generalist doctors take over, opt for less invasive treatments, and —surprise!— more people survive.

Researcher David Epstein breaks this down beautifully in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World — which was probably the most validating read of my entire life.

The book explains why people who think relationally — seeing connections across disciplines — tend to make better decisions than hyper-specialists, drowning in their own expertise.

And no one blended ideas across disciplines better than Leonardo da Vinci. 

That guy spent years dissecting corpses (probably left behind by those cardiologists) to understand human musculature.

Kind of an unsettling hobby. 😬

But thanks to that, his paintings had next-level realism. He didn’t just paint people — he understood the physics of their skin, bones, and movement.

This is what relational thinking does. It lets you borrow wisdom from one field and apply it somewhere unexpected.

Let me be clear—

I’ve never treated a cardiology patient or dissected a corpse to test the limits of my own relational thinking.

But I did save my client millions of dollars by stepping into the shoes of an engineer.

Whoops.

Back in January I told you about the days when I ran a real estate development consulting practice and began working with The Howard Hughes Corporation.

The project was redeveloping Manhattan’s Seaport District and Pier 17 following the destruction of Hurricane Sandy.

The jewel in the crown of the development was Pier 17’s rooftop—

A 65,000 square foot space sitting five stories high, and jutting 300 feet into the East River.

The rooftop was a blank slate to activate seasonally with concerts, events, and even ice skating — all against the backdrop of lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge.

But we had a problem.

The rooftop consisted of an invisible grid of support beams, and we were only permitted to allow a certain amount of weight in each square of the grid. 

The whole thing was a precision balancing act.

Award-winning architects had spent months designing the space, and then the engineers had spent months figuring out how to build it.

It was only then — after construction methods had been decided, and materials had been sourced — that we discovered we were overweight on one of our grid squares.

Shit. 🤦

I’m not an engineer

Our problem was simple, but the solution was not.

The square that was overweight had two hugely heavy things positioned on it:

• An industrial chiller unit

• A ballast for a critical building

Both were non-negotiable items. 

The chiller was powering an ice skating rink, and very heavy ballasts were required to weigh down our buildings because, ya know, we were on a windy rooftop in the middle of the East River.

And the rooftop was already packed with other stuff, so it wasn’t like we could just shift things over a little bit without falling off the building, or causing a chain-reaction of other issues. 👇

The engineering team, bless their overly-specialized hearts, had one solution— 

Rip up months of planning and redesign the entire project. 

That would literally cost millions.

And we’d be precariously close to missing critical deadlines.

So me, the non-engineer in the room, spoke up, and suggested a workaround:

The chiller was definitely heavy enough. Plus, it would be enclosed in a steel cage, enabling it to be craned up onto the roof, so it had plenty of places we could tether the building to.

But when I floated the idea, the room went quiet.

Then came the look. You know the one. That “aw, that’s cute, but leave it to the grown-ups” look.

The lead engineer finally spoke:

“That won’t work.”

No explanation. Just dismissal.

Now, I’m not saying ego was at play here, but let’s just say engineers don’t love it when a non-engineer walks in and suggests a solution they didn’t think of.

And up until that point, I had truly enjoyed working with these guys. They weren’t assholes or anything.

I started second-guessing myself. Maybe I was the idiot in the room. Maybe I should just shut up and let the pros handle it.

So I was stunned when the VP of Development, (the actual decision-maker), intervened. He said “Try Kristin’s idea,” — then stood up and walked out of the room, completely shutting down the possibility of a debate.

Clearly, he had a lot of experience handling guys like this. 😆

And just like that, my little idea got a shot.

It f*cking worked

The engineers continued to battle me, saying that the company providing the chillers would never allow something like this.

But I had been working with that company for years, and they valued their relationship with me. When I explained the situation we were in, they were eager to be part of our solution.

So we tested it. And it worked — flawlessly.

• No massive redesign. 

• No budget implosion. 

• No timeline delays.

The engineers had to eat their words. 

Nobody ever said, “Hey, you were right!”, but just seeing my idea implemented with success was all the validation I needed.

This whole experience made me realize:

👉 Specialists are great at going deep into one field, but that same depth can make them blind to alternative solutions.

👉 Generalists connect dots across disciplines and come up with innovative solutions — often the ones specialists miss.

The world needs both. 

But (at least in my case) generalists are sometimes insecure about their lack of specialization, and don’t speak up.

Unlike my colleagues, my thinking wasn’t constrained by an engineering degree. 

I had seen enough different problem-solving methods in various industries to recognize a pattern that the specialists didn’t.

And that kind of lateral thinking was exactly what this project needed.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

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