Photo by Robert Clark on Unsplash.
Nobody is hiring a Chief Intersection Officer. Nobody has a budget line for a Head of In-Between, a Psychological Safety Engineer, a Slow Adopter Shepherd, or a Distributed Teams Gardener.
These titles don’t exist, but the need behind them does. And somewhere in your organisation, someone is probably covering that ground anyway—unofficially, invisibly, and without a mandate.
The Hiring System Wasn’t Built For This
Job boards, ATS, recruiters with briefs—they’re all optimised for labels. Specialist or Expert labels. The kind you can match to a box. Why are we so stuck with labels? Naming is hard enough as it is. So we default to the nearest approximation, post the job, and wonder why the shortlist feels slightly wrong.
The problem isn’t specialists vs generalists. The more interesting question is: what happens at the intersection of two or more specialist fields? That’s where new connections and meanings get made. That’s where the most impactful and rarest roles live. And that’s precisely where the hiring system breaks down completely.
David Epstein explored the generalist advantage in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. People who move across domains make connections that specialists, working in depth, rarely see. But it’s not just generalists who do this. It’s specialists who refuse to stay in one box.
What I Mean By Intersection
Here’s what this has looked like across my own working life (roughly one or more seven year cycles for each era):
As a Scrum Master, I was also deep in systems thinking, mindfulness, organisational culture, and group dynamics. The Scrum events were the visible part. The rest was what made them actually work, and what made the value reach the customer.
As a Senior Front-End Developer, I was also becoming a Web Accessibility Specialist—while pulling in usability, UX, DX, work processes, and the psychology of how teams work, prioritise, and make decisions together. The code was the output. The craft was wider than that.
As a Communications Officer, I was also editing layout for publications, liaising with network infrastructure vendors, and writing small apps on LAMP stack to support an aviation lobby’s policy work.
As a Musician, I was also teaching drums, studying composition, and learning music software. Performing together and teaching sharpened each other. Learning music software opened a door I didn’t expect. So did every language I picked up along the way, because music took me places.
The pattern here isn’t distraction or inattention. It isn’t a lack of focus either. Each time I held a formal specialist title, I was also doing adjacent things. And those adjacent things were precisely what made the specialist work better, paving the way to new paths. The connections across domains are the value, not a coordination tax on it.
The AI Question
AI makes specialists redundant, so be a generalist. Right? I don’t think that’s quite right either.
What AI changes is the cost of the specialist knowledge itself—not the judgment about when and how to apply it, not the ability to see across fields, and certainly not the human relationship work that makes any of it land in an organisation.
If anything, the intersection roles become more valuable when AI can handle both the shallow and the deep. What remains irreplaceable is the multi-disciplinary synthesizer—not just a person, but the AI-augmented team that collectively knows which depth to reach for, why, and what it connects to across the rest of the map.
The Job Ad Problem
Every time I read a job posting now, I find myself mentally deconstructing it: this role has elements of what I do, but it’s missing whole areas I’m good at. The description points at a problem. But the title and the expected background often point somewhere else entirely.
To really understand what a company needs, you have to read past the label and find the challenge underneath. That’s a skill too. And it lives at an intersection.
You Are Not Your Job Title
Teal organisations, self-managing teams, role fluidity—these ideas exist because some people have already noticed that the box doesn’t fit the work.
I haven’t worked in a teal organisation yet. But I’ve worked in enough conventional ones to know what gets lost when someone who lives at the intersection doesn’t have a seat at the table.
You’re not your job title. You’re the sum of everything you’ve explored, and the connections you’ve built between those explorations. A smarter way of working is always there, waiting for your action.
If you’re reading this and thinking yes, and I don’t know what to call myself either—welcome. You might be exactly who I’m talking about.
I’m curious: where do you sit on the specialist–generalist spectrum? Does the intersection idea change how you think about it? Have you invented your own job title out of necessity?
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