Call me a Deep Lateralist
Many years ago, as a newly-appointed fire shift captain straight out of my MEng in Civil Engineering, I was being instructed by a toad-like fire colonel with a fitting surname.
“…And when you arrive at the scene, and confirm the visuals from the façade, always check the back of the building. There may be smoke coming from the front, while on the other side, there may already be jumpers in the windows.”
I haven’t seen anything more helpless in my life than a jumper’s body hurtling towards the ground, forced by the choice between certain death and a minuscule chance of survival at the cost of permanent incapacitation. Worse yet, a jumper holding his baby girl in his arms and amortising the chance for her life with his own body. These are the costs of fires going wrong, and the firefighters see those in the darkness of their eyelids when those are shut.
I will not be telling you every single story from my practice or from the practices of my immediate friends and colleagues, but only one.
Five years from the day of that instruction, no longer a newly-appointed Deputy Chief, I arrived at the scene with the shift.
A residential building, 12 stories tall, with one entrance and one staircase. From the front – two people trapped four stories up, their door melting from the furnace-like fire that started in their next-door neighbour’s apartment.
They are in the window, a young couple. Black smoke out of every other window on their level, and out of every window up the staircase. The man in whose apartment the fire started is sitting at the front door of the apartment block – naked, with his penis tucked between his thighs and covered by a maple leaf someone probably picked for him from the ground, drunk to the point of not recognising where he is. A crowd of tenants from the apartment block stands outside, watching as their homes burn to charcoal.
There is nothing else left for our fire brigade but immediate action: pulling the cars that block access to the building to deploy an arriving ladder, suppressing the fire four stories up, and exploring the staircase and upper levels to check for people. The problem is – we are only nine people, including me, out of whom only seven have access to using BAs (breathing apparatus). We don’t have enough people for all the tasks, and we don’t have any time left as it stands.
At the same time, I have another personal dilemma running in the background:
I am the chief on the scene, where things are already going very badly, and I need to protect myself. If someone dies and I did not make sure that I have shown the Fire Department that I have done everything according to the protocol and to the best of our ability, I may face court and jail time, even if we all do the very best we could, myself included. You’re a chief – you’re a potential scapegoat. That means I need to stay on the radio, issue orders, make sure everyone in the city records them, call for additional forces, and stress every syllable so the radio noise cannot interfere with my potential freedom.
But I remember what the old toad colonel said to me five years before that moment:
always check the other side of the building. We never much liked each other, him and me, but it makes no difference when what’s said is practical and wise. So instead of me putting on my BA and getting into the fray where I would certainly make a difference, or staying outside and doing management and personal risk hedging, I run around the building, jumping over the undergrown little bushes in the front garden. What I see makes my blood chill. Same level – nine people trapped on the balcony, one man already dangling with his feet in the air in a failed attempt to climb down, and the others are trying to pull him back. Three families from Asia by the looks. They probably came to work and shared a flat, each living in their own room.
From the front – a tragedy in the making; from the back – a mass casualty happening in real time.
I could not get the crew from the second truck, which was in front of the building, to come and help me: it turns out that their chief went inside with the first group and left two fresh out of training firefighters staring blankly at the trapped people in the window and the inferno coming out of the neighbouring window. I could not blame them for losing themselves, but I needed at least one of them to act, which I managed. On my order, we broke protocol and deployed a three-story-rated hand ladder into the fourth story. Now, if anyone dies, it is a certain prison for me if I don’t drink myself to death for letting a woman fall while I was supposed to be the one holding fast. So, we held that ladder for our dear lives. When I described on the radio what we were doing, the colonels from the city fire marshals would not believe that – they forgot that this type of ladder technically reaches the bottom of the fourth story when put nearly vertically. We were also able to deploy the mechanised ladder from the front and reach the couple through the window; by luck, one of the bystanders turned out to be the owner of the car blocking the ladder truck’s access. We ended up 11 – 0 playing against death that night, against odds.
The toad-like colonel, inadvertently and without formulating it properly, pointed me at one of the fundamental problems that brought me where I am now, sitting in Brussels writing this manifesto.
It is the explore-or-exploit dilemma: an entity, or an organism, or an algorithm faces the choice between obtaining new information at the cost of some resource, or acting based on what is already known without investing additional resources – that is to say, exploiting.
A firefighter either spends resources to explore the scene or exploits the knowledge without spending the resources. A corporation either invests in an R&D department or builds a product based on current design and technology. A corporate governance analyst either reviews the broader company context beyond proxy materials or provides a voting recommendation based solely on the proxy materials folder. There needs to be a balance between the two, which is not straightforward in either practice or theory, as the example above shows. Firefighting offers one of the most visceral forms of it, applied to the most inelastic resource there is – time- and at the most precious cost – human life. I was lucky to deal with it in the most resource-constrained form, as a firefighting captain who never has sufficient resources to deal with a large emergency while being the first chief on the scene. I had the privilege of running in real time the calculus of this dilemma at two levels simultaneously – people’s lives and my own freedom. These lessons calcify in one’s bones.
After I left my firefighting career, people would ask me how it was that a former firefighter was doing an Economics PhD when his entire trajectory before that had been about “running through the burning buildings”. My response was that resource constraint is a universality that transcends domains, and that I just followed this fundamental principle into the field, which explicitly studies scarcity. Similar questions followed when I moved into the Corporate Governance and Valuations world. Still, the answer remained structurally unchanged, with only the added joke that firefighting is good in one’s twenties. The hiring managers didn’t know which bucket to put me in with such a career pivot without an interrogation, and I fully understand them. I tried to make their life easier: I searched for a term, and I couldn’t find one that suited. This is not a generalist, T-shape, or π-shaped specialist — the level at which the connection is made is foundational, not surface. It is not a polymath — that term connects the dots in retrospect and describes the distance travelled, not the engine that covered it.
What would you call a professional who makes a conscious career pivot into a seemingly unrelated discipline, following the connection between the disciplines at the fundamental root, or a fundamental question that is unanswered in their initial domain?
“I didn’t change. I kept doing the same things, and the fields moved past me”1
As pointed out by one of such people. This quote is from Nobel Laureate in Physics, Dr John Hopfield. A sequence of lateral moves – applying deep structural principles from his native discipline of physics – led him to foundational contributions to neural networks that catalysed the development of modern AI. The press was so confused by the gap between the common perception of the domain of physics and the contribution’s importance to computer science that the Washington Post questioned whether the contribution aligned with the discipline of physics at all. Ironically, in this case, lateral transitions confuse everyone, even at the highest level. And the lack of descriptors exists while institutions like the Santa Fe Institute quietly operate an interdisciplinary approach as a baseline, equipping people with the skills necessary to cross domains.
I propose that we call ourselves and people following a similar process Deep Lateralists™.
We move laterally between disciplines because those disciplines are connected by deep fundamental laws that an outside viewer without an inclination, capacity, or need to go deep is unlikely to notice. Deep Lateralists explore these deep-seated connections and exploit the possibility of bidirectional domain or information transfer. These are observable patterns for which I am currently running multiple case studies. I am hypothesising further that such capacities are in part connected to one’s psychological profile, and in another part to personal circumstances, including economic ones. I would expect that we can determine the personal and intellectual “engine” that underlies such transitions and arrive at a descriptor that will help people understand and be understood better. We need those people on the boards of directors, behind technological developments, and in any occupation or way of life that helps us in wondering at our place in the stars.
I say “we” because I am way past thinking that my type of process is an accidental fluke.
I am also convinced that it is not at all specific only to me, or requires a Nobel Committee to acknowledge it in someone else. It also aligns with the most modern understanding of brain function proposed by another Deep Lateralist – Dr Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist specialising in neuroimaging. He began his academic career as a Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he taught English literature, before starting from scratch as a medical student to become a doctor.
Dr McGilchrist’s research suggests that hemispheric specialisation is driven by the types of attention each hemisphere pays to the world: the left hemisphere’s attention is designed to be narrow, allowing us to manipulate the world to our needs – grab our food, use the tools, target the prey. In Dr McGilchrist’s own words, it is the hemisphere that allows us to apprehend the world.2 The left hemisphere sees things as inanimate and disconnected from one another. In contrast to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere pays vigilant attention to the world around us as it is, in its interconnectedness, complexity, and flow. It sees the world around us as dynamic and ever-changing. To borrow again from Dr McGilchrist, it is the hemisphere that allows us to comprehend the world.
A Deep Lateralist type of process would, therefore, rely on the right hemisphere’s function, which enables us to see connections that narrow focus would miss. If that is indeed true, then a Deep Lateralist process would be distinct on a structural level in addition to creating a visibly non-linear career trajectory.
Not incidentally, the paradox underlying the hemispherical specialisation in Dr McGilchrist’s own words – comprehend versus apprehend maps nearly perfectly on the explore or exploit dilemma
that the old toad-like colonel explained to me in a much less gentle and formalised manner, in a different time, place, and language. Hopefully, at this point, we can see past the perception of such a parallel being incidental. In the same way, I hope we can also perceive the biographies of people like Dr Iain McGilchrist or Dr John Hopfield as something other than a random walk of geniuses beyond the comprehension of a mortal human being. We can achieve that understanding without diminishing the scale and weight of the contributions both made, for anyone willing to listen to what they have to say.
I invite anyone willing to investigate this concept in good faith to explore this idea further. We don’t have to agree – my first instinct when the old colonel told me about always checking the building from behind was “yes, but…” In many other cases, when I checked a building from the back alley, there were no visuals. But the overall point stands: it was his thought shared with me that saved nine out of eleven people we rescued that night. It is also true that, without realising it, he ended up on the same page as Dr Iain McGilchrist, without even knowing who he is. Without them both, I would not have a keystone to hold together the nodes of the personal journey I had – from a firefighter in Russia, to a Belgian Corporate Governance and Valuation professional. I also would not have the means to share my thoughts or invite you on the journey.
I will publish regularly about Deep Lateralism here on deeplateralist.com. Next publications will address: a taxonomy of roughly sixty cases, from an electrical engineer who gave statistics its missing rung of cause and effect, to a medical student who dropped out to study architecture and coined her own term because the existing vocabulary failed her. The classification of pathways associated with the Deep Lateralist move across disciplines. Finally, the falsifiability question.
I invite critics, researchers, readers, reviewers, hiring managers, bystanders, and my fellow Deep Lateralists to think, read, ask questions, disagree, and keep in touch.
I wish you well, and I wish you be.
Gleb
Human-dominant™ work. The ideas, writing, and editorial decisions are mine. AI was used as a research assistant and editor. For full taxonomy, please see: Who Did the Work.
All photography on this site: © Gleb Klivitkin. Human-Made.