Accessing Experts

I definitely believe in experts. They’re not fairies.

But probably not where we think they are.

Experts are everywhere. Probably more so in today's society than ever before, as information has become so widely accessible. A plethora of information is available on any given topic. We don’t rely on schooling for the basis of information like we used to.

But there is definitely still an issue with experts- they exist, but we can’t always access them. 

There is always someone who has the answer. It’s just a matter of finding them. We assume that the answer for everything lies in someone at the top, someone’s boss has all the information that they have. 

We look at a company, and we think about expertise at the top. The CEO, CFO, and COO are probably the people we associate with expertise in the company. They understand how everything in the company operates. 

But like we often see on the show Undercover Boss, the people at the top often have far inferior actual expertise in the business than the people working on the group, in the trenches. 

The people at the top form their expertise in overseeing the people who execute the task.

The issue that I see is structurally in how we use experts. We focus on moving experts out of their positions of expertise.

People who are seen as most capable at their jobs are promoted, and given a new set of responsibilities and skills to complete in their job. Often, people are asked to overlook people who perform the task that they used to create.

We look at the bosses as experts, but maybe it's their subordinates who hold the true wisdom. 

Managing people is pretty easy. As long as you treat them with basic respect, typically, people will take a liking to you and listen to you. 

American society has placed so much value in overseeing people. CEO’s often make more than what the bottom 50% of their company makes, combined. If you manage someone in America, chances are you make more than them. But just to sit over them and watch them do it?

What if we lived in a society that valued the product of the worker over their task master?

We would remove the value in moving up the work hierarchy. We would reassign value in executing your specific job to the best extent possible, because your only goal is to do that one job. We wouldn’t focus on who is managing who. But what would we lose?

I’ll admit, it sounds very boring to do the same job every day, never aspiring for anything more than to do your exact job. The upward ascension and money incentivize competition and hard work, which lead to eventual progress.

And if there was no upward movement, how would we find experts?

If we assume that experts exist in the trenches, they are the store managers, rather the CEO of the national franchise, then how do we access them when we need them?

What CEO’s have that the average employee doesn’t have is recognition. On a national scale, that is who is perceived to have the information. They are the faces who show up on the homepage of the company's website. They are the names we know- Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk. But Elon Musk isn’t writing code to program a Tesla drive; he manages the people, who manage the people, who manage the people, who do that.

CNN did not interview local nurses on how to deal with Covid-19, they all wanted the advice of Anthony Fauci, who spent more time talking to TV cameras than Covid-19 patients. 

There were nurses, doctors, and frontline workers who had more experience, on the first day, than Fauci. But as a country, we maintained our commitment to Facui’s guidance- as the head disease expert in the country, we perceived him to have all the answers. 

The issue is not a lack of experts. In such an oversaturated market, becoming an expert seems so difficult because the average baseline knowledge on anything today is so much more advanced than pretty much ever before.

Although it might not ever be a perfect finish line, understanding how to use expertise as a measuring stick for progress is strongly valuable. 

There are experts for nearing everything in the world. The difficulty is just finding them.

Lastly, I leave a few questions unanswered. I encourage you to ponder.

1. Who are the peak experts of society when we remove money (salary) and esteem?

2. What is the optimal level of specialization?

3. Is the 21st century to blame for our desire for expertise?