Expertise
One of the least questioned things in business today is the opinions of experts, and I don't mean that we should replace experts but rather consider how we evaluate information and secure our own minds, because this applies to everybody, that means you, and me too.
So even if this feels provocative it's not about experts not being skilled, it's about the environment we work in. The stability and repetitiveness of the modern enterprise is (in my humble opinion) somewhere between very low and low. Whatever worked yesterday may not work today. That means that whatever skilled action taken by any agent in the system the learning from it may be falsely attributed to the correctness of the action (you might have done the wrong thing but had luck with other circumstances, or vice versa) and as a result the knowledge gained is unreliable. This leads to a high risk of having overconfident experts, and risk of getting much less confident advice from the persons with the most expertise. This is well put in the epic quote by Charles Bukowski:
"The problem in the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, while the idiots are full of confidence..."
With this knowledge we need a safety net. For every piece of expertise gained always strive to put it down into a principle or algorithm that anyone can use. If it works repeatedly on several occasions then it might really be expertise, if not it might just feel right because it is familiar and we all know that familiar things feels secure and good.
In similar fashion to safe guard your own decisions make sure that you have colleagues to test your thinking with. It must be beyond doubt that any discussion is only about the idea, you don't defend your ego or get concurrence because you are the boss or have a good previous track record. If the idea still seems good after extensive reasoning then go ahead, and try to put into writing for future reuse or validation.
So even if this feels provocative it's not about experts not being skilled, it's about the environment we work in. The stability and repetitiveness of the modern enterprise is (in my humble opinion) somewhere between very low and low. Whatever worked yesterday may not work today. That means that whatever skilled action taken by any agent in the system the learning from it may be falsely attributed to the correctness of the action (you might have done the wrong thing but had luck with other circumstances, or vice versa) and as a result the knowledge gained is unreliable. This leads to a high risk of having overconfident experts, and risk of getting much less confident advice from the persons with the most expertise. This is well put in the epic quote by Charles Bukowski:
"The problem in the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, while the idiots are full of confidence..."
With this knowledge we need a safety net. For every piece of expertise gained always strive to put it down into a principle or algorithm that anyone can use. If it works repeatedly on several occasions then it might really be expertise, if not it might just feel right because it is familiar and we all know that familiar things feels secure and good.
In similar fashion to safe guard your own decisions make sure that you have colleagues to test your thinking with. It must be beyond doubt that any discussion is only about the idea, you don't defend your ego or get concurrence because you are the boss or have a good previous track record. If the idea still seems good after extensive reasoning then go ahead, and try to put into writing for future reuse or validation.
Inspired by the book Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman
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