# Routine vs. Adaptive Expertise > Deep specialization is no longer enough. Routine versus adaptive expertise, and what the difference means for how you design skills and mandates. - Author: Alexey Krivitsky - Published: 2026-01-28 (updated 2026-01-28) - Type: article - Canonical: https://www.orgtopologies.com/post/routine-vs-adaptive-expertise - Audio: https://www.orgtopologies.com/audio/post/routine-vs-adaptive-expertise/male.mp3 · https://www.orgtopologies.com/audio/post/routine-vs-adaptive-expertise/female.mp3 For decades, we have rewarded **deep specialization**. A radiologist reads scans. A frontend developer writes UI code. A paralegal prepares contracts. These roles were seen as focused, professional, and trustworthy. We encouraged our kids to get an education that makes them experts—the go-to person for one well-defined kind of work. The times are changing. In environments shaped by rapid change and growing uncertainty, success depends on more than executing well-learned domains and well-practiced tasks. Professionals are increasingly expected to learn as they go, apply knowledge in unfamiliar contexts, and respond when standard solutions no longer fit. This is new in practice for most of us, but the theoretical distinction is not. In the 1980s, cognitive researchers Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki introduced a useful concept to describe this phenomenon: **routine expertise** versus **adaptive expertise**. *Routine* expertise is the ability to perform known tasks efficiently and accurately by applying established procedures. Routine experts excel in stable conditions. They produce reliable, high-quality outcomes—as long as the situation remains familiar. *Adaptive* expertise goes further. Adaptive experts can extend, recombine, or reinvent their skills when conditions change. They handle novelty without freezing. They learn while acting. The COVID-19 pandemic made this distinction painfully visible. Health professions educators around the world were forced to abandon standard training models almost overnight. One post-pandemic study showed that adaptive expertise did not correlate with age or years of experience. Instead, it emerged as a distinct capability that had to be deliberately developed. Those scoring higher in adaptive expertise also performed better during periods of disruption, while seniority alone offered little protection from disruption. As it turns out, work experience does not automatically result in adaptive expertise. Adaptive expertise is a different kind of mastery—one built through continuous learning, exposure to variation, and the embrace of new challenges. In other words: purposefully and with broader mandates. After the pandemic, the professionals who had demonstrated their surprising adaptive expertise were able to return to business as usual. But are there domains where such behavior is not a crisis response, but the daily norm? ## Adaptive Expertise Means Innovation One special trait of adaptive expertise is the ability to recognize how existing knowledge or tools can be repurposed to solve a new problem or applied in a different domain. For example, during the Apollo 13 space mission crisis, astronauts famously had to build an improvised air filter from mismatched spare parts. This feat was a quintessential display of adaptive expertise: they combined their deep knowledge of spacecraft systems with creative thinking under pressure to solve a novel, life-threatening problem.  In contrast, a routine expert might know the spacecraft’s procedures inside out but would be at a loss when those procedures no longer apply. The Apollo 13 scenario illustrates how efficiency and innovation together can produce extraordinary results in a professional context—efficiency in understanding the materials and systems at hand, and innovation in assembling a new solution under novel constraints. Outside the “rocket science,” a similar innovation emerged at XING (now New Work), one of Europe’s largest professional social networks, where Alexey had the opportunity to observe it firsthand—from zero to hero. At the time, mobile development faced a hard constraint: the app could not be built or evolved by more than one team. As the organization grew to several dozen teams, this limitation turned into a severe organizational bottleneck. Mobile became the critical path for delivery, learning slowed down, and dependencies multiplied. The breakthrough came from a web developer who was new to mobile development and eager to learn. He joined the iOS team as a *junior mobile developer* to expand his skill set, bringing deep web development experience. Let’s call him Pete. As a newcomer with a broader perspective, Pete quickly began questioning established practices inside the team. From the start, he challenged assumptions that long-time team members no longer noticed. At the time, the iOS team had been under pressure to enable other teams to contribute to the mobile app. The idea was met with resistance. From the iOS team’s perspective, opening the codebase threatened both technical quality and the team’s identity. For a long time, there was no viable technical approach to make this safe. That changed when Pete, pairing with other senior iOS developers, demonstrated a way to modularize the monolithic app so that parts of it could be owned and evolved by other teams in a controlled manner—an approach inspired by patterns from other areas of software engineering he knew well.  The idea introduced a new development model. Over time, it enabled dozens of teams to work on mobile features in parallel rather than queue behind a single bottleneck team. The result was faster delivery, higher developer autonomy, and a noticeably better user experience. ## Adaptive Performance In the late 1990s, researchers found that adaptive expertise correlates strongly with performance in dynamic environments. Hesketh and Neal introduced the concept of **adaptive performance** to describe an employee’s ability to remain effective as work conditions change. An employee with adaptive expertise is therefore more likely to demonstrate adaptive performance—for example, by quickly learning a new technology or finding a workable solution. The condition for this performance to emerge is *exposure to the unexpected*. While the idea of adaptive performance is compelling, in practice, it is often blocked. Many organizations never discover what is possible when people are actually allowed to act, improvise, and perform. The main blocker is organizational design built around narrow, static mandates—structures meant to preserve stable work conditions rather than enable people to respond, learn, and take advantage of change. ## Specialist vs. Generalist Dilemma One systemic impediment to establishing adaptive performance is the false choice: “specialist or generalist.”  > We are trained to be loyal to our jobs—so much that we confuse them with our own identities, wrote Peter M. Senge This problem is familiar to many of us. Going broad, getting more versatile to gain adaptive performance, means transitioning from “I am X” to “*I can do X, and also Y, and by the way, I am also learning Z*.”  It doesn’t mean being a “jack of all trades” but instead being adept at learning, trying different things, acquiring new skills, noticing patterns, cross-pollinating practices, and thus transferring and integrating knowledge from one domain into another to achieve a cumulative effect. From 1X to 2X to 10X... 100X. This is a radical paradigm shift from being deeply specialized in one function to having *several deep and expanding areas of expertise*.  Martin Fowler and colleagues refer to such employees as **expert generalists** and explain how having them in the team enables new organizational capabilities, for instance, solving more complex end-to-end customer problems more effectively. In their 2025 article, they write: > Modern software systems involve many components, needing collaboration between specialties to deliver features to production. Too often, we see stifled communication, with folks blocked while waiting on dependent teams to schedule necessary work. Lots of these queues between teams impede flow, slowing down the release of valuable features. > Expert Generalists can unplug the pipes. Sometimes they do this by making the interaction smoother due to their overlapping skills, and sometimes they know enough to do some of these dependent tasks themselves. Indeed, one of the greatest values an Expert Generalist brings is the ability to Get Things Done. > The customer focus drives a good Expert Generalist to use their collaborativeness, curiosity, and skills blend to drive features to completion. If it requires crossing competency boundaries, they will find a way to do it. If they need to rapidly acquire some deeper skills, they will do so... > That ability to close the deal is often imperative in getting critical software out the door.” Although the above is written from an IT perspective, it can also be applied to other domains.  The organization’s trajectory towards **broad generalization** is a powerful lever to 10X. ## References 1. Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1986). “Two courses of expertise.” In H. W. Stevenson, H. Azuma, & K. Hakuta (Eds.), Child Development and Education in Japan (pp. 262–272). 2. Jayawardena, C.K., Groenier, M. & Nawarathna, L.S. Relationship of adaptive expertise of health professions educators with age, experience, academic rank, and their work performance during an altered academic environment. *BMC Med Educ* 24, 862 (2024). [https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05838-9](https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05838-9) 3. Beryl Hesketh and Andrew Neal, "Technology and Performance," in *The Changing Nature of Performance: Implications for Staffing, Motivation, and Development*, ed. David R. Ilgen and Elaine D. Pulakos (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), 21–55. 4. Peter M. Senge, *The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization*, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2006), 18. 5. Expert Generalist, Fowler, Venkatraman, Joshi. 2025: [https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist.html](https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist.html)