A Hammer often finds a nail

We used to reach for the unconventional expert when the problem was genuinely new. Somewhere along the way, we started reaching for the person who had solved it before. A hammer often finds a nail. The question is whether you actually needed one.

In 1956, the Suez Crisis pushed fuel into rationing across Britain. Leonard Lord, the chairman of British Motor Corporation, looked at the bubble cars flooding the market and reportedly said he was going to drive them off the road by building something much better. He gave the brief to one engineer: Alec Issigonis. A tiny team. No committee. No benchmarking exercise. A clear problem, a clean mandate, and someone who thought about mechanical systems differently from everyone else in the industry.

Two years later came the Mini: front-wheel drive, transverse-mounted engine, rubber suspension. A car that rewrote the architecture of small vehicle design, dominated British motor racing for a decade, and influenced automotive engineering for fifty years.

Leonard Lord didn't go looking for someone who had already built a successful mass-market car. He went looking for someone who could see the problem differently.

The logic was not always this narrow.

Somewhere in the last few decades, the hiring logic in large organisations shifted. The implicit question stopped being "who can see this problem in a new way?" and became "who has solved this problem before?"

It feels like prudence. It reduces variance. The board understands the hire. The references check. The trajectory makes sense on paper.

But what it produces, over time, is a particular kind of stagnation dressed up as sensibility.

I want to make a specific point about technology, because it is where the pattern is most visible and most costly.

When a large technology organisation faces a genuinely novel challenge, the instinct is to hire for the specific credential. A payments transformation needs a fintech payments leader. A digital overhaul needs someone who has run a digital overhaul at a firm of similar scale. A platform migration needs the person who has done exactly that before.

A hammer often finds a nail.

That is not a criticism of the people being hired. It is a structural observation. If your primary frame of reference is the problem as it was last time, that is where your pattern recognition runs. You will recognise the familiar moves. You will apply the familiar solutions. Experience alone can become strangely recursive. The organisation starts solving for resemblance rather than possibility.

If what you actually needed was something new, you may have hired the wrong frame entirely. You may have optimised for reassurance when you needed range.

And the harder truth is that most modern technology problems are no longer purely technical. They are human system problems wearing technical clothes. Can you reimagine a system that people already live inside? Can you hold technical constraints and commercial reality and human behaviour and organisational culture simultaneously, and find a path through all of them?

That is not a credential. That is a kind of thinking.

David Epstein's book Range is where I keep coming back when I think about this.

One of its most striking examples comes from research on professional forecasters: people whose job is to predict geopolitical and economic outcomes. The best performers over time were not the deep specialists. They were people who drew from many different models, who were willing to update their views, who borrowed frameworks from biology, history, economics, and psychology in the same analysis. Epstein calls them foxes: people who know many things, versus hedgehogs who know one very well.

The specialists were more confident. They were also less accurate.

The people with the widest range of reference were the most reliably useful when the problem was genuinely hard.

There is something worth naming about the boutique operator specifically. The small firm specialist. The person who stayed close to the whole system rather than ascending through a narrow vertical.

Their job is harder than most people in large organisations recognise. In smaller environments, the feedback loops are brutally short. You cannot hide behind process or hierarchy because consequence arrives too quickly. They hold the commercial, the technical, the operational and the customer in the same conversation, often the same meeting. They don't have a team for that. They are the team.

When they move into large organisations, they can look like a poor fit. They ask about things outside their stated scope. They are uncomfortable leaving threads untied. That is often interpreted as lack of focus. Sometimes it is actually systems fluency.

That is exactly what you said you needed.

Before you start the next search, it is worth sitting with one question: are you looking for someone who has done what you have already done, or someone who can do what you have not yet imagined?

Before you go looking for another version of you, open yourself to the idea that the answer might look nothing like the question.