What Makes You An Expert?

The #lrnchat conducted on 21 May 2015 was a blazing round of thoughts, opinions, and views on 'Authority and Expertise'. 
As many of us learned, there were variations in how we defined experts (it was difficult to come up with a definition in the first place). But here are some interesting definitions in 140 characters or less:

Quinnovator

a1) expertise is a level of understanding that goes beyond being able to do, to being able to improve on #lrnchat

ryantracey

A1) Knowing more about something than other people. Therefore, apparently I’m an IT expert. #lrnchat

JD_Dillon

A1) Subjective but recognized capability from which others can benefit #lrnchat

hjarche

@lrnchat expertise today is access to a diverse, giving, knowledgeable professional network of trusted relationships #lrnchat

OhThatRachel

A1) I would have to go beyond just saying “knowing a lot” but actually being validated in that knowledge. #lrnchat

brunowinck

A1) Expertise: having a deep enough knowledge to cover a domain sufficiently well that u can act or share with a relative assurance #lrnchat

SimonBlairTrain

A1: Expertise is being able to handle the unexpected, not just the expected. #lrnchat

JaneBozarth

For me now expertise is less having it all in my head and more being resourceful/knowing where to find/knowing who #lrnchat

On Quora, George Siemens (@gsiemens) defines an expert as:
An expert is someone who has sufficient experience and knowledge in a field to be able to recognize novel patterns from noise. Or, more abstractly, it's the ability to collapse possibilities of a topic/domain to their most salient in order to decide/act meaningfully. 

Scientists have debunked that 10,000 hours of practice does not make you an expert. So, if it is not practice, what is it that makes someone an expert?

Well, I am no expert on expertise. But based on our discussions during the chat, some of my reading on this topic and my interaction with experts that I have really enjoyed being around, here are some key characteristics that I look for in experts:
1) They are knowledgeable. 
2) They have valuable experience.
3) They are able to communicate their expertise.
4) They are connected to other experts.
5) They are humble about their expertise.
6) They are continuous learners.
7) They like to share their knowledge and wisdom.
8) They know the limitations of their own knowledge.
9) They have contributed to their field/area of expertise.
10) They are acknowledged as experts by others including their peers.

This old post by Lorelle Vanfossen, What gives you the right to tell me? highlights some of the key issues we had discussed during the #lrnchat and makes for a great reading. Lorelle says: "What you know is important, but how you use what you know, and plowing the path rather than following behind, makes the difference in defining an expert."

In this HBR podcast called 'Learning what wiser workers know', Dorothy Leonard, author of Critical Knowledge Transfer ​and Harvard Business School professor talks about retaining organizational expertise. While the focus of the conversation is about the need to transfer organizational knowledge and the tools and processes to do so, the definition of expertise is worth pondering about especially as it relates to an expert being open to sharing, being humble, and being a lifelong learner. 

She calls this organizational expertise ‘deep smarts’. She says, “One of the reasons that we focus on deep smarts and not just any kind of expertise, is that by definition, we’re talking about business critical, experience-based knowledge. And the managers who select or nominate experts whose knowledge is business critical and experience-based do have some sense of what’s important to keep things running or to innovate.” 

She goes on to say, “So one of the wonderful things about getting newcomers to work with experts is that you have a terrific opportunity for innovation. That does mean that the experts and the learners alike have to have a certain amount of humility to listen to each other and observe each other. But we have seen terrific instances where an expert with 30 years of experience learns from someone who comes in with a different set of skills, and vice versa. And it’s that two-way transfer. That’s why it’s a push-pull, not just a push.”

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as one would understand to be, is a world of experts. So, how do they define expertise? In a book published by Center for the Study of Intelligence, 'Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community', the author, Dr. Rob Johnston, says: "Expertise is commitment coupled with creativity. By this, I mean the commitment of time, energy, and resources to a relatively narrow field of study and the creative energy necessary to generate new knowledge in that field. It takes a great deal of time and regular exposure to a large number of cases to become an expert."

He goes on to say, "Experts are individuals with specialized knowledge suited to perform the specific tasks for which they are trained, but that expertise does not necessarily transfer to other domains." 

There are other paradoxes to expertise and sometimes being an expert can be a weakness. From the same book, "Although one would expect experts to be good forecasters, they are not particularly good at it. Researchers have been testing the ability of experts to make forecasts since the 1930s. The performance of experts has been tested against Bayesian probabilities to determine if they are better at making predictions than simple statistical models. Seventy years later, after more than 200 hundred experiments in different domains, it is clear that the answer is no."

Perhaps, this is where establishing teams of experts that offer more balanced expertise comes into play. But good teamwork and establishing collective intelligence is a challenge for another day. 

It seems that my study on this topic has just started. And in the journey of exploring various perspectives, I have taken the recommendation by George Siemens and got myself a copy of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance".  

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. ~ Socrates