As ad agency press releases announcing “digital czars” continue and soapbox speeches on the need for reinvention drone on it seems as  good a time as any to revisit the idea of T-Shaped People - T-Shaped Creativity. This article from Ideo/Fast Company is a good read to reinforce that organizational alignment, and buiding out specialty resources is simply just a small part of the road to reinvention.  The mindset of your people, the ability to collaborate, and the philosophy of the organization are equally (if not more) important.  A excerpt from Tim Browns 2006 article:

“Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can’t just stand in your own shoes; you’ve got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.  We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas. These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don’t put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts — notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they’ve seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another’s insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world“

Food for thought that reinforces the path that many of us have been trekking down, but also shows that we need to work harder at ways to get there. 

More thoughts here from Gil Rhys Jones of Ogilvy London.