A mid-morning thought on what makes designing a set of digital era skills for government leaders especially tricksy.

Different digital era disciplines like design, data analysis, coding or product management, are like little black holes. They 'want' to pull students deep into each one, to learn all about them.

That's because each one is a rich, fascinating discipline filled with amazing people who love to share their knowledge and skills.

So as I range across the world of government digital teaching, I see quite a lot of people being taught one or two digital era skills very deeply - data science for example.

The problem is that real government problems only be solved when we bring all these skills, and more, together, not just one or two specialisms. That's why multidisciplinary teams are so critical to modern public service.

To lead such teams we need people who have a shallow but wide understanding of lots of digital era skills, as well as plenty of traditional public service skills.

'Generalist' has become a bit of a dirty word in recent times. But I think that the real challenge now is to produce a new cadre of generalists whose skills are different from what you get from traditional history, politics or law degrees.