If I have been on a decades-long drive to make work more flexible, Alton Brown has been on a similar one in the kitchen. There is no shortage of rants on his various shows about “unitaskers”... things in your kitchen that can only do one thing and therefore are only useful in a few, often unlikely, contexts.

Alton Brown takes a dim view of unitaskers and lax workplace safety. In agile and lean, and in good business in general, we seek to mimic this flexibility by getting people to experience different projects, job types, and perspectives. This helps us deal with frustrating situations by having many people in the organization who can respond quickly to variation or opportunity.

Having said that, in the great pendulum-swing that is human excitement, we have gone so far the other way that we want everyone to be a generalist and shy away from being purposeful about who is going to do what.

And, in general, it’s helpful to know what we are doing.

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