I feel like it’s more than that though. Some researchers go too deep into their field that an adjacent one tied to the same goal becomes alien to them (e.g. developmental biology vs pharmacology)
Techies are very good because they own a thorough understanding of the low-level implementation of a tasks requirements, they can tell you exactly how they converted an input to an output down the finest T. But they do not necessarily know how to generalise, they’ve overtrained and specialised on that specific task that taking it into another context is foreign to them – i.e., they’ve learned a task within a specific environment but do not know what the task means outside of it, and in a way… haven’t actually learned what the task means.
Project managers (and, in theory, CTO’s…) have a high level overview of the task. They might not know how to implement it directly, but they know enough from a conceptual standpoint to extrapolate the task and apply it to different situations and understand the bigger picture that the task takes place in.
My whole argument is that neither the Techie nor the Project manager are masters of the task, because they see the task in different isolated scopes; one from a high level overview and one from a low level implementation.
A Teacher understands both – what the task is, how to extrapolate it to different situations, and how to implement it
Apologies - it was not my intention to paint those who have difficulty communicating as non-teachers. I myself am not a great verbal communicator, and construct thoughts far better in text than on-demand with sound.
“Verbal” was a poor choice of words in my original comment. I only meant that if you are asked to explain a task you do often through whatever means are available to you, and you are unable to in your own mind create an analog of it to something else, then that is a sign of overtraining