What is Expertise?

Hiring an expert is a pretty much everyday occurrence. There’s accountants and lawyers, bankers and insurers, butchers and burger flippers, gardeners and mechanics. Sometimes we hire people not for their expertise, but simply to save us time, for example dog walkers or housekeepers.

For those folks we hire for their expertise, what does that actually mean? In the Antimatter frame, we might choose to say that experts possess – and can apply – more effective strategies for getting (some of) our needs met than we possess ourselves.

We’d not often tell our accountant how to calculate our tax liabilities. Nor our lawyer how to prepare and present our legal case. That’s because, with their more effective strategies, they’re likely to achieve a more effective outcome than we, with our relatively ineffective strategies, could. So we’re more likely to see our needs (in the round) get met.

Where’s this Going, You Might be Asking

Well, let’s turn our attention to hiring people – be that employees, contractors or consultants. Sometimes we’ll hire people to save us time. We could do the job that we’re hiring them to do, but we have more valuable things we can be spending our time on, so we hire them to do the less valuable things.

But sometimes, we’ll hire folks for their expertise. There’s some needs for which we accept our own strategies for getting those needs met are relatively ineffective. Like, running a software team or department, for example. So we find someone who appears to possess – and can apply – relatively more effective strategies.

So far, so good. If we choose our experts well, we’ll see our needs met more effectively – sometimes very much more effectively – than if we chose to attempt to meet those needs ourselves.

However. What happens when the effective strategies employed by our experts seem inexplicable to us? When we just can’t understand how applying their preferred strategies can achieve getting our needs met? We rarely quiz our accountants and bankers on their strategies. But we do quiz our new hires. As if we’d understand.

The Credibility Barrier

We have crashed headlong into the “credibility barrier”. Where it’s our own incredulity that blocks us from hiring those very folks possessing the most effective strategies for getting our needs met. And the most likely outcome being, we’ll reject the expert and their expertise, rather than recalibrate our assumptions and beliefs about what’s credible.

– Bob