The Vulnerability of Expertise
Much has been said lately about the value of experts today, or more precisely, the number of missteps that we are seeing among experts in nearly all areas of specialization, from global warming to economic recovery to the fall of the dinosaurs. How can this be? We need experts, and they are the people we go to to solve difficult problems. They are the people we trust, who can help guide us to make the best decisions when we don’t know what to do. So how can all of the bright and talented experts in the financial sector arrive at such different conclusions, even with them all looking at the same economic data? The political parties of our own government certainly don’t present a better picture of the wisdom of experts with such diametrically opposite perspectives on how to best run this country. So you begin to wonder, what is an expert’s opinion really worth, and how often does expertise translate into being right when our experts can’t agree on what is right?
Perhaps to solve this debate, we need a new set of experts who can retrospectively analyze the work of other experts to understand what went wrong when they missed the mark. Not too surprising, these types of experts are emerging and for at least the time being, they seem to be arriving at a common conclusion: differences in expert opinion typically stem from how much information outside of their field of expertise they were able to bring into their analysis. Because most experts’ knowledge is so specific to their field, it may make it even more difficult for experts to be able to see a broader perspective outside of that expertise.
While experts can’t know everything, they may feel they are supposed to … they are “experts,” after all. And we, as users who rely upon expert advice, may often want to believe that their recommendations are infallible, as otherwise we would need to find another expert or try to become our own expert. Who has time for that? So while decisions need to be made faster, information has become overly abundant, and expert opinion is springing up from every corner, it is good to be reminded of what Lau Tsu said in the Tao Te Ching in the sixth century BC: “The more you know, the less you understand.” These words could not better describe the challenges experts face today.
Expertise should breed humility, not hubris. But as the complexity of analyzing information increases, one can easily become convinced that they do in fact know it all. They’ve run the models, tested the analytics, applied their thinking to past situations and correctly predicted those futures. What more could there be, as our statistical probability tells us we are far beyond random chance in our forecasts and predictions? Nassim Nicholas Taleb answered this question for us in his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” It is the unexpected that always catches us off guard, but in hindsight, always seems so obvious.
So what do we do to be better experts, and to be better judges of expert data? As researchers and consultants who take on the role of expert every day, how do we recognize our limitations and see past the statistical expectations to the outlier that resets the entire curve?
In health care, where decision-making is highly complex, costs are out of control, and experts are found in every hospital and government agency, we are beginning to see a road to a better solution – that of collaboration. By having many experts working together, attacking the same problem from widely different perspectives and areas of expertise, the improbable event that one expert never sees is front-and-center to another. It is only going to be by bringing experts together in a truly collaborative fashion that we will be able to solve today’s complex problems.
As researchers, it is critical for us to also work with other experts. This doesn’t mean we need to bring in physicists and econometricians to every project we do, but rather, we need to seek out experts throughout the process and incorporate their insights wherever possible. Those experts can be our research subjects/participants, our clients and our partner organizations. But we must also seek out those who have an expertise in the subject matter we are studying and those who have an expertise tangentially to that subject matter. It is always wise to begin a research project by conducting at least a few “expert interviews.” Learning from those who are preeminent in the field provides a solid grounding for the work to come. Then, once we think we have all the answers, it always behooves us to finish our efforts by sharing them with experts outside of the field to look for the Black Swan. Marketing research is about gathering and understanding the insights we learned by talking to different types of people. Everyone has a unique perspective and understanding of the puzzle we are trying to solve, and the collective knowledge gathered from many different players will allow us to continue to provide the best possible answers to today’s complex problems. The better we, as experts, can keep our limitations in check and our minds open to the possibilities of what others can see, the greater our opportunity to truly understand the solutions which are in front us.
A collaborative commentary by Jonathon Reed, James Heichelbech and Karl Weiss
