Counting on Expertise
I have lots of opinons about how badly expertise and experience (they are closely related) are managed inside the typical organisation, but very few of these opinions are what I would call well grounded.
There are several reasons why I believe expertise is hard to manage, but here are the five biggest ones I come across:
- We don’t know what we’re talking about – This is the old chestnut of thinking about knowledge too simplistically as either something that can be documented or something that can be told; however, in different situations leveraging our experienced staff can mean an incredibly diverse range of things: from being able to call in help from external people they have strong relationships with, to answering a difficult but precise technical question, to handling a challenging situation with skill, to diagnosing a problem quickly and accurately, to being able to remember why something is done the way it is, to being able to improvise through a point in the process where existing procedures don’t help
- We assume all expertise is of equal value – We don’t know how to identify the really critical knowledge for our business, we don’t know how to tell which experience is essential for our sustainability and when it’s a barrier getting in the way of innovation
- We don’t count the cost of not managing expertise well – The consequences of not managing expertise well are not formally observed or tracked in most organisations – I think this is because when we don’t leverage our experienced staff well, we typically end up in a fire-fighting mode, if we don’t die we keep muddling through somehow (which gives us a false sense of confidence), and expertise is one of those nasty big complicated issues we give lip service to but save up for a rainy day when we don’t have quite so much work to do
- We assume it’s already covered – KM says they have a knowledge capture programme, and/or HR say they have their competency or talent management programme, so where’s the need for a new concerted effort, especially if it means (horrors) asking KM and HR to coordinate with each other?
- We ignore the personality component – we treat expertise like it’s a commodity which can be produced and consumed at will, forgetting that experienced people have moods and motivations (and often a sense of being special)
As I say, these are opinions based on very circumstantial and limited experience. Aside from David DeLong’s magisterial book Lost Knowledge and a raft of academic literature on the nature of expertise and problems with its transfer, there’s very little research on the diverse contexts and the real ground issues around how expertise and experience are interpreted, leveraged and valued.
Until now! Matt and I are now kicking off a narrative research project aimed at gathering narrative evidence for how experience and expertise are viewed and treated by people working in a wide range of organisations. You can read the contributions already posted, you can subscribe to the project blog and discuss the issues you see there, and most of all, you can contribute your own stories. This will be a public project, so the findings will be made openly available via the project blog. Take a look, contribute and pass this invitation on!
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