What Did Leonardo Know That We Forgot?
The people who asked "why" used to be the same people who built "what."
Leonardo da Vinci designed war machines on Monday and painted the Mona Lisa on Tuesday.
He studied anatomy to understand how light falls on flesh, then used that knowledge to engineer hydraulic systems. Artist. Engineer. Scientist. He didn’t pick a lane because the lanes didn’t exist yet.
Somewhere between then and now, we forgot this was possible.
We created disciplines. Built walls between them. Told students to choose: thinker or builder, creative or technical, strategy or execution.
It felt like the natural order of things.
It wasn’t. It was a choice — one that made sense for a while.
But we forgot it was a choice. And that forgetting is costing us more than we realize.
Leonardo Would Fire Your Org Chart
Da Vinci would have found our organizations absurd.
He didn’t context-switch between “artist mode” and “engineer mode.” The distinction didn’t exist for him — because it doesn’t actually exist.
Da Vinci understood something we’ve unlearned: making things well requires understanding why they matter. And understanding why things matter requires the discipline of making them real.
The hand teaches the mind. The mind guides the hand. Separate them and you get philosophers who can’t build and builders who don’t ask why.
We’ve been producing both at scale for a century.
Look around. It shows.
When Theologians Did Structural Engineering
The master builders of Chartres and Notre-Dame didn’t just hand off drawings to construction crews.
They were simultaneously theologians, artists, mathematicians, and structural engineers. They understood stone and scripture. They calculated load-bearing forces and designed spaces that would move the human soul.
They had to. The work demanded it.
A cathedral isn’t a building with religious decorations added. It’s a theological argument made in stone and light. The engineering is the meaning. The flying buttresses don’t just solve a structural problem — they enable walls of glass that transform sunlight into scripture for people who couldn’t read.
Try to separate the “how” from the “why” in a cathedral. You can’t. The medieval builders never tried.
The separation would have struck them as a kind of madness — like trying to separate a word from its meaning.
What the Factory Made Us Forget
So what happened to us?
The factory happened.
Industrial production needed interchangeable parts — including interchangeable people. Specialists who did one thing repeatedly, efficiently, without needing to understand the whole. The welder doesn’t need to know why the automobile exists. The accountant doesn’t need to understand the supply chain. Narrow expertise, applied at scale, produced unprecedented efficiency.
It worked. For a while.
Education reorganized itself around the factory’s needs. We created disciplines with walls between them. We told students to pick a lane. We built careers around deepening expertise in narrowing domains.
And somewhere along the way, we forgot this was a choice. A trade-off optimized for a particular moment in history.
Not the natural order of things. Not inevitable.
Just a useful arrangement that outlived its usefulness.
The Failures We Stopped Seeing
The forgetting had consequences we stopped noticing because they became normal.
Engineers who build systems that work perfectly and serve no human need. Strategists who craft visions that can’t survive contact with technical reality. Designers who create experiences that can’t be built. Developers who implement requirements they know are wrong — because challenging them isn’t their job.
You’ve seen the failures. The platform that meets every specification and misses the actual problem. The product that’s technically sophisticated and humanly useless. The architecture that optimizes for metrics that don’t matter.
These aren’t failures of execution. They’re failures of integration.
Thinking and making happening in different rooms. By different people. With no one holding the whole.
This forgetting doesn’t just produce inefficiency. It produces systems that don’t work for humans. Because the people who understand humans aren’t in the room when the systems are built. And the people building the systems have been trained to believe that understanding humans isn’t their concern.
The Calligraphy Class That Changed Computing
Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. Then he did something strange.
He audited a calligraphy class. No practical reason. No career relevance. He just found it beautiful.
A decade later, that calligraphy class became the reason the Macintosh had proportionally spaced fonts and multiple typefaces. Jobs connected aesthetic principles from a medieval art form to the engineering of a personal computer.
The result changed how humans interact with technology.
This wasn’t genius in the sense of raw cognitive power. It was integration. Jobs held typography and technology in the same mind, saw connections that specialists couldn’t see because they’d been trained not to look.
The specialist asks: what’s the answer within my domain?
The integrator asks: what’s the actual question — and which domains does it touch?
Jobs was often maddening to work with. He was also right about things that specialists kept insisting were impossible. Not because he knew more about circuits or manufacturing.
Because he refused to accept the boundaries that specialization imposed.
The Generalist's Revenge
There’s a word we use dismissively: generalist.
Jack of all trades. Master of none. The implication is clear — real value comes from depth, not breadth. Serious people specialize.
But here’s what the specialists miss: the most valuable insights live at the intersections.
Da Vinci saw how water moved and understood how blood flows. Jobs saw calligraphy and reimagined computing. The best diagnosticians in medicine see patients, not symptoms — they integrate across specialties that have been trained to ignore each other.
A general practitioner can diagnose what a specialist misses. Not despite knowing less about any particular domain, but because they see the whole patient. They notice that the symptom presenting in the cardiology department is actually a medication side effect from a prescription written by psychiatry.
The specialist goes deep. The generalist sees across. Both are necessary.
But we’ve spent a century overproducing one and undervaluing the other.
The revenge is coming.
Why Specialists Are Nervous
The forgetting is becoming visible now because the world it was designed for is disappearing.
When change is slow, specialists can afford to stay in their lanes. Their expertise remains relevant. The boundaries hold.
When change accelerates — when entire industries transform in years, not decades — the boundaries become liabilities. The specialist’s depth becomes a trap. They know everything about a domain that’s becoming irrelevant, and nothing about the adjacent domains where the future is being built.
AI accelerates this. It commoditizes specialist execution. Code generation, legal research, medical diagnosis, financial analysis — the tasks that justified specialization are being absorbed by systems that don’t sleep.
What remains?
The integration. The judgment that connects domains. The wisdom to know which specialist to call, when to call none of them, and what question to ask in the first place.
Da Vinci’s way of working isn’t a nostalgic ideal.
It’s becoming a survival strategy.
Remembering
This isn’t an argument against expertise. Depth matters. You can’t integrate what you don’t understand.
But depth without breadth is brittle. And breadth without depth is shallow.
The goal isn’t to choose between Leonardo and the assembly line. It’s to recover what the assembly line made us forget.
Thinking and making are one activity. They always were. The separation was a temporary arrangement that outlived its usefulness.
The builders who will matter in the coming decades are those who refuse the false choice. Who develop deep expertise and maintain peripheral vision. Who write code and ask what it’s for. Who understand the technology and the humans it serves.
At Bluemind, we never accepted the separation. Not because we’re special, but because platform engineering doesn’t permit it. You cannot build systems that evolve over years, serving real human needs, if you’ve divided the people who understand humans from the people who build systems.
Leonardo knew this. The cathedral builders knew it.
It’s time we remembered.
Next in the Bluemind Thinking series: "The Deal That's Expiring" — How specialization served a slow-changing world, and why that arrangement is ending.
About the Author
Raghu Vishwanath is Managing Partner at Bluemind Solutions and serves as CTO at KeyZane, a financial inclusion platform live in Central and West Africa. Over 30+ years across software engineering and technical leadership, he has learned that the separation between “thinking” and “building” is a forgetting we can no longer afford.