The demise of the expert

There has always been a tension between innovation and the reuse of knowledge.  Innovation focuses on creating new knowledge or applying old knowledge to new situations whereas reuse focuses on finding, adapting and applying knowledge that already exists.

In the company I worked for, the focus was on reuse of knowledge as these provide the quick wins in doing things better, and rather than research they focused on being an early adopter of knowledge. This led to closing some centres of expertise such as refining engineering and encouraging networks, or communities of practitioners (CoPs) based at operational sites, supplemented by external experts.

This in turn led to the belief that there is no such thing as an expert, rather that expertise is the collective knowledge of a CoP.  Together the community can generalise and make sense of what is known collectively, and structure that knowledge is to make it useful.

Over time that belief has been modified. Some so called experts brought in to help an organisation offer nothing more than their own experience but a true expert offers more than this.

An expert:

1. Is a  member of the relevant community of practitioners with access to the collective expertise
2. Sees patterns and meanings which is not apparent to the less experienced
3. Can apply the knowledge in a variety of situations, some of which have not been encountered before  [“Knowing which tool to take out of the tool box”]
4. Learns new knowledge with little effort and can relate it to what is already known.

So for the enterprise this means:

• Getting access to the expertise by being part of the community and structuring the knowledge to make it useful
• Focus on making sense of the knowledge through pattern recognition and visualisation
• Collaborating with others to boost the confidence to apply the expertise to new situations
• Provide an encouragement to learn, learning becomes a key objective of the organisation.

For existing experts it means offering the enterprise what they need, by providing access to expertise, pattern recognition and collaborating on solutions.

And a word of caution, the more we believe we are the expert, that we know best, the more we close the door on learning something new.

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