Experts

Introduction

Expert is a title and the person is not your primary interest, the analysis done by the person is what matters. Like any title there are also variations, advisor, specialist, SME etc. Note that most of these titles are not protected by a definition or requiring a certificate, anyone can call themselves an expert.
What you should expect an expert to bring are three things:

1. A lot of knowledge you don't have.

2. Models and analysis tools and thinking you don't have.

3. Intuition in complexities of the subject

The quality of the analysis done is the responsibility of the expert, together with the advice presented. How well you listen and how you use it is your responsibility. Used wisely expert advice can greatly improve outcomes, even though experts are not super humans it is very efficient for you to leverage their expertise rather than to acquire it yourself.

Who is an expert?

The title expert is not an absolute or a well defined threshold, you can be everything from slightly knowledgeable to one of the most knowledgeable in the world. Frequently you can find expertise in persons who do not consider themselves experts or have the title expert or advisor, the difference being they have acquired knowledge have really bright and forward thinking minds. The main difficulty with this as always is to tell the good advisers from the bad ones as the latter typically outnumber former by a ten to one ratio.

Previously experts by their profession and contacts obtained access to data sources not publicly available and had access to tools like super computers needed for some analysis that was prohibitively expensive for ordinary people to get access to. This barriers are to some extent being reduced in some problem areas, this enables for clever persons with data science skills to cannibalize on expert territory to some extent. This can cause some confusion as to who is an expert since the time of working in a field can be slightly less dominant factor.

Not all is known or even knowable, even the best expert can only work with what is known or work on gathering more knowledge. In areas with high paced development and novel practices it might be hard or even impossible to find experts.

In addition to knowledge of hard facts an expert is expected to have some intuitive capacity when it comes to evaluate situations. Even though the expert might have difficulty to put this in words there is frequently a lot of sub conscious knowledge encoded in this.

There are areas where the expert is not necessarily a person with knowledge, it might in some cases be a type of intelligence (for lack of better words) or trained skill that involves motor skills or extraordinary coordination, a lot of athletes, musicians and creative talent falls in this definition. In these cases the expert is someone you bring in to perform a task you can't not perform yourself.

Analysis

It is your responsibility when asking for expert advice that they are given correct information to work with, otherwise performing the analysis is pointless. Any analysis is based on tons of assumptions made by the expert, these have big impact on the results and they can frequently only be improved or dissected by another expert. Properly checking and finding the correct assumptions for the analysis is key to a valuable analysis.

Context is important, an analysis is done with a certain depth and breadth, if you move outside of that context the analysis might be slightly bad if applied or even catastrophic. This is frequent cause for experts to have different advice on general questions, when asked very general questions they have to make quick assumptions about the context and with limited time to give an answer of depth and breadth it becomes a bit random what advice to give.

Some experts have the professional courage to inform you that although you started in the right way the problem turned out to be different than initially thought and this type of problem is outside their expertise. Recognizing a lack of knowledge with the context or the problem area can be hard for the expert to do, they probably didn't become experts by giving up easily. Experts are frequently problem solvers and creative thinkers, remember they have years of experience in applying various techniques to get to a conclusion, which makes it hard for them to know when there are much better ways outside of there area of expertise.

Even when applying all available expertise we are all humans. After working with a lot of experts in different areas I’ve noticed that some are frequently providing high quality advice frequently whereas other have a lot less correct suggestions for actions to take. To increase learning and quality it is valuable to both carefully evaluate an analysis early (perhaps with another expert) and to look at history of how previous analysis work have turned out when you have the benefit of hindsight. If possible ask for the analysis in written format, this allows for additional time and clarity when communicating and allows for peer reviewing.

Ethics is important for experts and some will fall in the trap of biasing their analysis based on what they think will be well received or because it will further their career or something similar. After years of experience working with experts I’d say that the ethical standards of experts are generally very high, possibly because they are trained to look into the future and are more aware of bad outcomes from poor decisions than others in the area. Be aware of this when you are buying expert advice or large amounts of money are involved, it may bias the result in ways that are concealed to you.

Interpretation

Expert analysis is frequently also interpreted by non experts or experts in other fields to create an overall picture suitable for communication to a wider audience of non experts. This interpretation and reformatting of the message can cause problems. When possible have as direct communication with the experts as possible. Avoid being satisfied with the one sentence summary, read the report that was written.

Frequently experts express both hard facts and suggestions on actions that are more/less good things to consider. Even if intuitive feelings are hard to put in a report you can get ideas about these by having a direct conversation with the expert. It is not uncommon for a few "why" questions to uncover a great deal of fundamental wisdom that the expert has that improves your understanding of the problem or effects of actions.

If the result of an analysis is simple to understand and doesn’t have any new questions to be answered there is a high risk that your assumptions are either to strict or wrong. There is also risk that the analysis is not giving you the nuances relevant or information on potential negative side effect resulting from an action as this information takes a lot of work to produce.

Opinions and bias

Even experts have opinions and they can often be different to general and popular opinions. Although highly qualified in their field experts are susceptible to bias and can be unaware of the layman’s view and understanding of the topic.

Using correct definitions become problematic if the theoretical definition no longer represent the de facto use that has evolved. In communication this might lead to misunderstandings due to the difference in interpretation of basic definitions. When you communicate with a customer it is likely that you are considered an expert on the topic be aware of how you communicate and consider what is easier, you adapting the popular opinion of the definition or clarifying the definition?

A common bias that experts have is towards quality, where they are for sure correct in their opinion on what is good or bad quality in a particular thing, this definition might be very different from public opinion because the standards and usage pattern are different. The average drilling machine is used 18 minutes in its entire lifespan, what the average consumer considers adequate is rightly considered crap that just breaks by an expert.

Selecting an expert

There are an almost infinite amount of things that could benefit from expert advice, and only a few things in which you can be an expert yourself. This practically translates to a lot of situations where you need to rely on an expert. But how do you pick an expert? A common strategy is to talk to multiple experts and pick the one that you perceive being the best, this however has a very basic flaw, since you are not the subject matter expert you will judge easily fall into the trap on judging the expert on something different, for example how nice you think they are or if they were punctual or something else that might be helpful but really isn't strictly an indicator of their expertise.

A common trap is to judge the value on an expert on the number of years they have been in the field. Give the rate at which the world changes and technology changes I wouldn't suggest that this is a great indicator, you would have a strong bias towards experts that have successfully adapted to changing conditions which in reality might often be people that can learn new things quickly but not necessarily mean that they are experts at the task at hand. The number of years criteria is similar to other metrics like number of projects or highlighting a specific project of great importance. A much more interesting topic to discuss when interviewing an expert is the number of failed projects and examples of learnings from those projects, and potentially in which way those were similar to the project that you need to finish.

Paradoxes

This world is complex and even simple things are sometimes extremely hard to understand, or in worst case complex but seemingly simple. Try to avoid thinking about what you expect or asking for something that "makes sense". It is frequent that simplistic reasoning leads to bad conclusions, while you shouldn't believe something just because the explanation sounds complicated you should also avoid selecting advice based on what you think sound reasonable. Remember, you asked for the expert advice for a reason (top section of this post).

Disclaimer: I’ve worked as an expert, with many experts, but that doesn’t necessarily make me an expert on this topic.

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