| 10/02/09 | | Leveraging and Valuing Expertise Workshop in Canberra |
Canberra has an interesting event this month! actKM has invited Patrick Lambe to conduct a workshop on Leveraging and Valuing Expertise. This workshop is part of the open research project "Leveraging and Valuing Expertise" (http://usingexpertise.com). Log in to share your stories!
When: 9:00 am to 3:30 pm on Friday, 13 February
Where: University House Common Room, ANU
Costs: $50, includes morning tea
Registration forms
Workshop outline:
* Introduction: the nature of expertise and experience
* Grounding: Anecdote circles with participants exchanging their stories of how expertise is leveraged and used (or misused) in their organisations
* Sensemaking: we work with the stories to identify patterns and key issues in the participants' situations
* Planning: we work with an expertise transfer framework and the Straits Knowledge KM Method Cards to build outline plans for some of the participants' situations
* Close: closing discussion looking at general patterns and sharing any relevant case examples
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| 23/05/08 | | Expertise: talk the talk vs walk the talk |
Social scientist, Harry Collins, has spent his career hanging out with gravitational wave physicists and learning to talk like one. Harry's research is on expertise and working out whether someone who can talk like a physicist can be indistinguishable from some who can do physics if you only talk to them.
The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can't express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.
Harry did a simple test to work out whether we can sound just like an expert.
The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group—but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group—you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
If that's the case, then you're going to speak as fluently as someone who has been engaged in the practices. And if you can speak as fluently, then you're indistinguishable from an expert. It's what I like to call "walking the talk" [I think he means talk the walk because in my book walking the talk means you can do what you say]. You still can't do the stuff, but you can make judgments, inferences and so on, which are on a par. We picked color-blind people because they've spent their whole lives immersed in a community talking about color. So we thought color-blind people should be indistinguishable from color-perceivers when asked questions by a color-perceiver who knew what was going on. And we demonstrated that that was in fact the case.
I guess this means that the only way to determine someone has real expertise is to see them in action. This simple point is particularly important in light of the problems Australia is facing when some overseas doctors are gaining their Australian credentials and then patients discover their incompetence [the latest example from Melbourne]. But this approach is not going to be easy for every type of job. Think about those jobs that involve the application of subtle judgement where the outcome remains unknown for years (and tracing the outcome to the decision is impossible)—I'm thinking of policy makers, engineers, leaders. In these cases we have to rely on stories of experience told by people we trust.
Interview from Scientific American
via Mind Hacks
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| 12/05/08 | | Rating your own expertise |
Last week I was running an open space to kick off a new community of practice for engineers. While I was wandering around the room I overheard one of the participants make this point about self rating your expertise.
The guy who has done this job for 20 years rates himself as good. But the guy doing it for two years rates themselves as expert. They don't know what they don't know.
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| 20/05/07 | | 10,000 hours to mastery |
Just watched Malcolm Gladwell give a talk to the New Yorker Conference—2012: Stories From the Near Future (lots of interesting videos to watch). The topic of Malcolm's talk is 'genius' and he contrasts two extraordinary men: Michael Ventris, who deciphered the ancient Mycenaean script know as Linear B, and Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who developed a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem (If you are interested to learn about the story of how Wiles accomplished his proof I recommend you read Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem).
Gladwell makes two good points in his talk:
- persistence and collaboration might be more important personal traits than lone genius in a complex and changing world; and
- a person needs to invest 10,000 hours of concentrated and reflective practice to achieve mastery—this amounts to about 10 years.
I was also impressed with how Gladwell told his stories from the point of view of the level of detail he provides—i.e., lots. He's not an emotional storyteller but one who is effective in sparking interest in an intellectual idea.
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| 15/05/07 | | Last.fm - social software for music |
I've been having a blast the last couple of days. I signed up for last.fm after hearing Euan and Johnnie Moore talk about it. Last.fm keeps a track of the music you listen to (Here you can play the music I've been listening to, http://www.last.fm/user/Unorder/) and then you can hear a bunch of recommendations streamed directly to you. It's just like listening to the radio without commercials or radio announcers. There is a heap of other connections you can make, such as finding the people who listen to similar music etc.
Technorati Tags: last.fm
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| 16/01/07 | | A new conceptualisation of expertise, advice and knowledge |
This looks really interesting:
Expertise is about more than evidence. It is also about judgement and wisdom. Our argument is not that we should reject the received wisdom in favour of the wisdom of crowds. But we need to go beyond a simple model of ‘evidence-based policy.’ Drawing on recent case studies and research with ‘lay members’ of expert committees, this pamphlet looks to a new model of expertise which is more diverse, takes better account of uncertainty, is aware of its context and trusts the public.
The pamphlet is 87 pages (down-loadable pdf) in the style, I guess, of the polemics of the 18th and 19th century. But perhaps less controversial. The work is available under a creative commons licence and I will be having a good read.
You can find the background to the pamphlet here, which says “The good folk of Defra have asked Demos and Liverpool University to consider how lay people can play a part in expert scientific advice.”
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| 17/08/06 | | Being an Expert on Anything |
Stephen Colbert, the comedian who brought us the devastating roast of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, has outlined how you can be an expert in anything. Good advice for people wishing to fine tune their bullshit detectors. Here are Stephen’s 6 headings. Check out his article in Wired for the detail instructions.
- Pick a field that can't be verified.
- Choose a subject that’s actually secret.
- Get your own entry in an encyclopedia.
- Use the word zeitgeist as often as possible.
- Be sure to use lots of abbreviations and acronyms.
- Speak from the balls, not from the diaphragm.
[thanks to Les Posen for the link]
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| 26/07/06 | | Relationships create resilience |
I remember a great story told by Margaret Wheatley about how the US Federal Aviation Authority successfully landed all the planes in US airspace on September 11. I was searching around for it today and found it. Here is it:
On September 11th, as we all know, every plane was grounded. It took four hours for them to clear the skies, and during that time, they had to continue to assess whether terrorists were controlling any other plane. There was one incident in Alaska where the pilot was Korean and was giving the wrong code, so they thought he was in trouble, but he wasn't. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) had to land 5,000 planes. Never been done before. No preparation, no simulations, no training. The person who was head of the FAA, was new to the job; it was his first day on the job, and I remember that he said, “In the interview for this job I asked, ”Will I have complete authority to make decisions?” and they said, “Yes.” He never thought that his very first day would be one where he was going to buy the farm on if it didn't work. He gave the order. Several airlines, like Delta, had already asked all their planes to land. Many of the planes had to land at small airports. Small airports have air traffic controllers, rulebooks, and well-trained people, but there was no rulebook that covered this kind of circumstance, so they had to invent or disregard procedures. Everyone was being asked to be courageous by going against the book. And they all did it very well. It was a monumental task.
Later, they realized that the reason they succeeded was the strength of their relationships. They trusted each other as they were communicating across the country. There was a real esprit décor; they were smart. They could make new policies. They could make up rules that worked in the moment. So after Sept. 11, as any good organization would do, the FAA wanted to learn why this had worked so well. But of course, being a federal agency, they wanted to learn what worked so they could put it into a rulebook. After its research, the FAA did something extraordinarily brave. They decided not to write a rulebook about the incident; they understood that what had made it work was people's intelligence, dedication, and relationships. That's a lesson we all need to learn right now. The only way through an uncertain time is to have a certainty about your values, your purpose, and a certainty about each other. We call it trust, but it's even more than that. It's knowing, as my friend's daughter who plays rugby says, “When you're moving a ball down the field, you can’t see the people right behind you, but you may need to pass the ball to them, so they just keep signaling to you and they just keep staying with you, with you, with you.”
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| 10/07/06 | | Expertise location anecdote |
Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap tell the story of how Jack Hanley, the CEO of Monsanto, hired Howard Schneiderman, the Dean of Biological Sciences at the University of California, to head up Monsanto’s new life sciences business. As part of the job interview Hanley asked a question which was deliberately outside Schneiderman’s area of expertise:
“We’re about to make a big investment in a silicon plant in the United States. Is silicon the material of choice for the semiconductors of the future?”
Schneiderman replied:
“Well, if I had one day [to answer the question], I would call up the top biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whom I know, and would ask to be introduced in a telephone conference call to the top materials scientist at MIT. Then I’d pose the question to that person and ask him to think about. I’d tell him: ‘I’d be happy to give you $2,000 for an answer, and I’ll call you back tomorrow.’ I figured that guy would get on the telephone, and he would ask colleagues and in twenty-four hours, I could give Hanley a reasonable answer, although it wouldn’t be perfect.
He got the job.
This story illustrates a number of interesting expertise location features:
- Effective expertise locators often make the first connection geographically close to where the expertise might reside. In this case Schneiderman guessed that great material scientists worked at MIT so he chose to contact his biologist friend there. Dodds et. al. proved this tactic while re-running the 6 degrees of separation experiment.
- He then asked for a personal introduction and intuitively knew that the motivation to assist someone you’ve met for the first time might be low so he offers an incentive. Diminishing motivation as the seeker moves away from their personal network is another characteristic borne out by Dodds et. al. study.
- Within 24 hours he would hopefully have a trustworthy answer.
Dodds, P. S., Muhamad, R., & Watts, D. J. 2003. An experimental study of search in global social networks. Science, 301: 827-829.
Leonard, D. & Swap, W. 2005. Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
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| 7/07/06 | | Challenging two assumptions in expertise location |
There are two common assumptions made in expertise location approaches which we should not be taken for granted:
- expertise resides with an individual; and
- once you’ve found the right person or group, that a conversation will elicit what you need to know.
Individual expertise is a concept deeply embedded in how we think about experts. It’s the lone genius who makes the breakthroughs, the stellar performer, the exceptional leader. Of course people do have individual expertise and this concept of expertise matters most in individual pursuits. But what about expertise that arises as the result of a group of people working together? Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins, for example, describes how navigators on a US Navy ship had developed a distributed expertise.
“The larger system has cognitive properties very different from those of any individual. In fact the cognitive properties of the navigation team are at least twice removed from the cognitive properties of the individual members of the team.” (p. 226)
So in seeking expertise we need to aware that it might reside as an emergent property of a group. A couple of questions come to mind: how do you identify and learn from group expertise? How do you know you should be seeking group expertise?
If conversation was all we needed to elicit expertise the world’s journalists would be the most skilled and talented individuals on the planet. Bill Bryson provides a neat example. The Reverend Robert Evans lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia. He’s also one of the world’s most successful super novae spotters. Bill devotes a whole chapter to how Robert spots these tiny specks of light in the sky. I can imagine Bill spending a couple of days with Robert talking about his techniques and experience. After interviewing Reverend Evans Bill can write an entertaining chapter but at best would be a novice super novae spotter.
Don’t get me wrong, these two assumptions are useful when the expertise you are seeking resides with an individual and the type of knowledge you need could be called ‘know what’ rather than ‘know how’. But the assumptions are not universally applicable. When thinking about developing approaches to finding expertise people would benefit from starting with an awareness that expertise can be contained in groups and expert knowledge is ‘sticky,’ especially if you are attempting to transfer know how (knowledge transfer is another large and complex topic).
Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bryson, B. 2004. A Short History of Nearly Everything. London: Black Swan.
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| 2/07/06 | | Bring the bulletin board back - find out who knows what, who and how |
It’s hard to know what your colleagues know unless you ask them. A simple method is to erect a pin board in your department, section or team where people can post questions. Include your name on your question and wait for an answer. You’ll be amazed of who knows what. Sounds simple so why don’t we do it?
In 1978 Ward Christensen and Randy Suess created the first computerised bulletin board and when the computerised version became popular in organisation the physical version seems to disappear. I say we bring them back. And if you want them to be used get the boss to post and answer questions. People need to know that posting is not seen as wasting time.
Ensure you place the pin board somewhere where people loiter a bit such as where you get your morning brew. And a new study suggests that if you place a big picture of two eyes at the top of the pin board people will be less likely to fool around and post inappropriately (perhaps a stretch but I found the idea amusing).
Related post:
[Photo via Flickr]
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| 26/06/06 | | Expertise location without technology |
Some of my favourite bloggers are talking about expertise location recently. Jack Vinson provides a good summary. Luis Suarez riffs off Dennis McDonald, who has a couple of posts on the topic (here and here). All these posts make good points about expertise location and each is written from the perspective that an organisation can enhance its expertise locating capabilities with the use of technology. I agree with their ideas but just for a moment I would like to explore an alternative perspective: what if we put effort in helping individuals find relevant expertise when they need it and without the use of technology? What would people need to learn? Imagine the increased effectiveness of an organisation if the individuals could do this well.
My first suggestion to an expertise hunter is let the expertise find you. It’s easy. Just talk about your need. Have you ever needed to find a new dentist? Did you go silently looking through the yellow pages and were confronted with hundreds of names and had no idea which one to choose? Or did you mention your need in passing at every opportunity; “actually I’m looking for a new dentist at the moment. It’s a killer to find a good one.” I’ll bet the latter strategy resulted in more useful recommendations—of course this technique assumes you are talking to people.
The next expertise locating skill I’d help people develop is what I call pre-emptive expertise location. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Yesterday the family and I took a ride into the countryside and visited Dromkeen, a children’s literature museum. It was illustrator day and Katie Byrne was talking to the kids about the illustrations she has done for a new set of books. I thought, “Wow, what a talent!” and asked for her contact details. I didn’t exactly know how I might need this talent in the future but knew it might be hard to find her again when I did. Gathering potential expertise around you is an effective technique.
We all know that social networks are important for locating expertise. The sense I get, however, from people writing on this topic is that effort in building the connection is only needed at the time when the expertise is sought. This couldn’t be further than the truth. To be good at finding expertise you need to be connected before you need the expertise. If you are not the social butterfly you need to get out your butterfly net and find yourself one (or a whole collection). Join communities, know the connectors (here are some ways to finding connectors) and get good at noticing expertise.
Hmmm, how do you notice expertise? Firstly we need an idea of what we think expertise is. Gary Klein says this of experts:
“Experts see the world differently. They see things the rest of us cannot. Often experts do not realise that the rest of us are unable to detect what seems obvious to them.”
This is one of the reasons why finding expertise can be tough and perhaps explains why the expertise location software industry has been less than stellar. That is, expertise is more than simply possessing a skill. Klein describes eight aspects of expertise which I’ve summarised but would recommend you read Klein.
- Patterns: with experience experts can discern patterns that are invisible to novices. They have a good sense of what’s typical and can therefore detect the extraordinary.
- Anomalies: experts are surprised when a key event is absent while novices don’t know what is supposed to happen and therefore don’t pick up on the anomaly.
- The way things work: experts have mental models of how things work—how teams are supposed to work, equipment is supposed to function, power and politics is normally wielded.
- Opportunities and improvisations: Experts can imagine possibilities that contradict the prevailing viewpoint and data. They can also apply patterns from one context to a new situation creating new approaches and techniques.
- Past and future: experts can predict what might happen in the future. Just ask a grade 5 teacher about what the kids will be like at the beginning and the end of the year.
- Fine discriminations: experts can see differences which remain invisible to novices. Just think of expert wine tasters.
- Self aware: experts are aware of their own thought processes.
- Decision makers: experts can make decisions under time pressure.
OK, so how do we notice all these characteristics? Gossip. Yes, gossip. Now it’s important to remember that gossip is simply when we talk about someone when they are not present at the conversation—that is, gossip is not always negative. So gossip is when people tell stories about others that retell what happened. Hearing stories about the performance of others is the second best way to notice expertise. The best way is to work with them. Consequently to become an expert in locating expertise you need a variety of experiences with a range of people. With an amount of self reflection and a preponderance for asking questions you can develop your expertise-locating capability.
OK, you probably can tell that these are very preliminary thoughts. I wonder what else you might do to help people develop their individual capability to find expertise.
Some related posts:
Klein, G. 1998. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
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| 18/06/06 | | How Bill Gates evaluates expertise |
Joel Spolsky is a software developer who used to work for Microsoft as the Excel Program Manager in the early 90’s. One of his big tasks was to enhance Excel’s programming language. Here Joel relates the story of presenting his Visual Basic for Excel specification for review by Bill Gates. It would seem that Bill is a bit of a swearer because one person on the team is allocated the role or expletive counter—the lower the number, the better.
For the purposes of this post the crucial part of the story is when Bill is asking a series of questions about the software specification , each one a little more difficult than the last.
Finally the killer question.
“I don't know, you guys,” Bill said, “Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is Basic going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?”
“Yes,” I said, “except for January and February, 1900.”
Silence.
The f*** counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that? January and February WHAT?
“OK. Well, good work,” said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec
...wait! I wanted that...
and left.
“Four,” announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, “wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, you know, 36.
Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
Joel’s depth of knowledge was being tested here but I would also imagine that Joel’s demeanour on the day (level of comfort), the quality of the software spec and the stories already told to Bill about Joel were important factors in putting Bill’s mind at rest that the project was in good hands.
How is expertise judged in your organisation?
[via Seth Godin]
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| 13/12/04 | | Social network analysis redefines expertise location systems |
When I joined Lotus in 1999 I was whisked off to Boston to attend pre-release training for a new software product code named 'Raven'. Raven later became ‘Lotus Discovery Server’, and joined a new breed of products called ‘expertise-location software’. These systems trawled through an organisation’s documents and emails to create a directory of topics associated with the people who wrote, read, or referred to these topics.
The software vendors were, in part, responding to valid criticism--that previous attempts to store knowledge in databases had misunderstood the complex and highly contextual nature of knowledge. In response to this valid criticism, companies such as Lotus, Tacit, and AskMe had developed expertise-location systems to help people find other real, live, flesh-and-blood people with whom they could talk in tackling current issues.
However, it seems that these systems have not lived up to expectations, and the level of adoption is relatively low. As with many business initiatives in the broad field of knowledge management, the idea of expertise location was created by software companies that perceived a market in helping organisations to uncover their (often hidden) expertise. However, the software companies understandably emphasised the technological aspects of their solutions. As a result of this perceived technological bias, expertise location struggled to gain acceptance as a valid initiative. Gartner Group reinforced this perception by defining expertise location in narrow terms as: 'Identifying experts and their expertise to make these people and their knowledge more easily and broadly accessible. Expertise management is a class of technologies that enable this functionality.'1
Given this background, it is pleasing to note that there is a new management practice that goes beyond expertise location and that is not dominated by a technological solution looking for a problem. Social network analysis (SNA) is a technique designed to understand the informal connections among employees. It has been developed in response to a growing understanding that organisational performance and the ability of employees to get things done are largely based on the informal relationships that exist within and between organisations. SNA reveals the number, structure, and types of these (mostly ‘invisible’) social networks using charts that show who is connected to whom. These charts are based on surveys that seek information such as: ‘Please indicate the frequency with which you typically turn to each person below for information on work-related topics’.
Technologically driven, indiscriminate implementations that are designed to improve an organisation’s ability to identify and access expertise fail to take into account the wide variety of ways in which employees can be informally connected. Expertise-location systems fell into this trap by attempting to offer a single solution to a multi-faceted phenomenon. SNA helps organisation to understand these dynamic social networks better--before interventions are designed. Starting with SNA makes sense, and it is to be hoped that it will pave the way for organisations to develop effective methods of tapping into this largely hidden resource.
1. Harris, K. & Berg, T. 2003, One More Time: What is Knowledge Management? Gartner Group, , pp 1-14.