Do you have any experience in my industry?

It's a fair question, and one that got me thinking. In most industries, we reward depth, and for good reason... until it stops working.

Psychologists Fernand Gobet and Christopher Connolly studied top performers in sport, business, and science. David Epstein explored this in his book 'Range'.

Their insight?

The most successful weren't the ones who stayed in their lane. They were the ones who could move between them.

We've built systems that reward specialists, yet breakthroughs usually come from the people who wander outside them.

The best product designers might borrow from behavioural psychology; a great marketer might learn from urban planning. New ideas often arrive wearing someone else's uniform.

Nobel Laureate Psychologist Daniel Kahneman noted that deep expertise flourishes in stable systems with unchanging rules, but business can be messy.

I appreciate that things don't change as much, or as quickly, as we think they do. However, new opportunities can be found in areas where shifts are happening. Entrenched in your field, confident in your knowledge and abilities, you may miss them.

The rules can, and indeed do, shift. Patterns can be unstable, with certainty not always certain. Even human behaviour, although it's predictably irrational, is still decidedly illogical at times.

That's why breadth matters.

If you're wondering who does this well, particularly in a business and marketing sense?

You could look at the agency strategist? You may well be thinking, "Oh really, Gareth, being one of them for years, you would think that."

True, but with good reason.

They have depth in how marketing and advertising actually work, across categories, formats, and media.

But their real strength is breadth.

They've worked on banks, beers, building companies, and SaaS startups, sometimes all in the same month. They read psychology, behavioural economics, pop culture, and decision science. They draw on frameworks, not formulas. They're not just trying to optimise what already exists. They're trying to imagine what else might work, and why people might care.

They are, by nature and necessity, circuit breakers in thinking.

And for the good ones, AI is supercharging their abilities to think broadly and delve as deeply as they want, which is very exciting. It's fast, scalable, efficient and makes both breadth and depth easier.

This combination brings to mind chess. The world's top players aren't AI or humans. They're human-AI teams - depth, context, intuition, strategy, speed, memory, breadth, and calculation.

The same is true in business. AI can scale and sort with those humans who think broadly, deciding what's worth building, sharing, or saying.

Let's face it, in business, everyone is looking for an edge.

The competition will have depth, so think wider.