On Expertise

The wrapper for all industrial applications is performance. Only through performance do organizations accomplish their goals.

• Capabilities or competencies can exist, but people can choose not to apply them to performance.
• Or people can, for whatever reason, not be allowed to use their capabilities or competencies and hence these cannot be applied to performance.
• Or people can not have the capability or competency to start with and hence it is never applied to performance.
• Or the capability or competency a person has is not needed or required to meet performance objectives, so they are not applied to performance. – etc. (other performance gaps)

In other words, performance is often found struggling against things like apathy, politics, a lack of acceptance, a lack of free flow for ideas, ignorance, or lack of focus. Capability and competency are dormant performance. You could also say that they represent the potential to perform. This potential is not always realized, and in all of these scenarios, motivation is a key factor in shoring up performance gaps.

The other key is cooperation. If individuals do not apply knowledge (perform) cooperatively, then its objectives are hindered. In knowledge working outside of industry, society suffers for the same reason. In terms of industry, only one thing matters, and that is performance. If a discipline like knowledge management, or a component, or a department, or even a person, is disconnected from this aim then there are performance gaps within the organization, and all organizations have these gaps. The goal is to minimize them.
I like to talk about the term expert because I think it contains a conundrum that represents most of the problems with knowledge working today.

• If a person is deemed an expert strictly by social recognition or solely because they are published, then logic can become irrelevant.
• If a person is deemed an expert by position, then logic can become irrelevant.
• If being an expert is more important than knowledge itself, then we have given up knowledge for position power. – If a person is deemed an expert by their knowledge, but without regard to social recognition, then their knowledge will likely not be valued or used.
• If a person is deemed an expert by knowledge context, then they may sit down in that context and never advance it (intelligence without knowledge creation).
• If a person is deemed an expert because they advance a knowledge context, then knowledge context is being confused with knowledge creation, which is a separate and distinct process and skill with that process.
• If a person is deemed an expert because they perform in a given situation, then expertise is a synonym with performance, so why use the term at all?

The term ‘expert’ encapsulates all of the confusion in knowledge working today. In short, we’ve confused all kinds of concepts like intellect, knowledge creation, social acceptance, and knowledge context. All of these are interactions that work together cooperatively in a single, cohesive system of knowledge working. They are not individual concepts that stand alone or can be interpretted outside of the context of the other knowledge interactions. Knowledge is one and questions are one–and the sum of interactions associated with these two is the whole of knowledge working.