What's Wrong with Experts?

What's wrong with experts?

Nothing, as long as they don't monopolize control over decisions, resources, and information. Experts -- people with special skills, a lot of experience, and/or who have thought a lot about an issue -- should be an important part of any decision-making or resource-allocation process.

Experts are especially critical in technical fields, where there is a clear link between their expertise and outcomes. For example, if you are going in for heart surgery, you want the best expert you can find. Ditto if you want to fly in a jet, build a high-rise building or dam. Even in these areas, however, you want competition among experts, because that competition drives innovation and efficiency over time. Competition also allows best practices in these fields to adapt to changing technologies and socio-economic circumstances.

But there are many areas where there is no clear right answer or no clear best practice. And it is precisely in these fields that we must be careful of a "tyranny of the experts." Economic and social development pose many challenges for which there are no clearly demonstrated productive solutions. The low returns to the $2 trillion spent on development aid to date are testimony to this.

The relatively small number of aid agencies controlling the bulk of official aid means that a small number of experts control decisions over the allocation of most of the resources. This raises multiple problems. Let me demonstrate by describing a time in my career most people don't know about.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked in the World Bank's Jakarta office, where a group of two or three of us were in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars of rubber, palm oil, and coconut projects. For a period, we had more knowledge than any of our Bank colleagues about the financing, planting, and processing of these tree crops in Indonesia. As a result, any decisions about the design or implementation of projects had to come through us. Looking back, there were several problems with this:

• We knew a lot, but we didn't know everything -- in fact I realize now that we were wrong about some fundamental things.
• Bandwidth: Managing projects in the Bank bureaucracy was exceptionally challenging, so we had to work many, many hours per day just to keep our own ideas and projects moving; there were not enough hours in the day for us to listen to a lot of new or opposing ideas.
• We had little incentive to listen to different views about what should be done, because we had all the power.
• Our rewards came from pleasing our colleagues and boss, not from the on-the-ground success of our projects. We would therefore respond to our colleagues' concerns first, and those of beneficiaries second (and in any case, we had to spend much more time at headquarters than in the field.)
• In an expert-driven culture, we was expected to come up with the right answer, and then implement it -- not to launch of bunch of experiments with different approaches to see what worked best.

The bottom line is that, for what we were doing, there was no single right answer. But our opinions, biases and time constraints prohibited us from considering, allowing, or evaluating a variety of approaches to see what worked best. I also realize now that what might have worked best in 1985, before I began working on these projects, was not the same thing that would work best in 1990. But our various constraints (and power) inhibited our ability to adapt our thinking to the ongoing technical, social and financial changes in the environment.

In retrospect, I still believe that our expertise was valuable. But we did not leverage that expertise in the right way. Instead of our centrally planned, top-down design and administration of these massive projects, we should have been convening a conversation among all the stakeholders, promoting a series of different approaches, and helping everyone learn from the different outcomes so they could iterate toward ever better results.

The secret is that few "experts" like the current system. They know deep down that it is inefficient and ineffective. When given the opportunity to play more of a convening and coaching role, most of my colleagues at the Bank loved it because they knew they were adding more value. The challenge for the future is for us to enable experts to play this role to a much greater degree in the future.

[GlobalGiving]

Follow Dennis Whittle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DennisWhittle

Comments

[Dennis Whittle - Huffpost Blogger]

Iridium,

Thanks for your insightful comments. I particularly agree with your point that "Any organization will be only as successful as those at the bottom are willing to make it." Sometimes the bottom can be coerced or bribed, but more often those at the bottom have to be genuinely motivated by the strategy because they believe in it.

Redapes,

Thanks for the pointer to the site about orangutans. I have been to several of the places mentioned there and can testify to how magnificent orangutans are. It would be a complete tragedy to reduce their habitat further and/or drive them to virtual extinction. Your note reminded me of that.

KillTheMessenger,

Thanks for the advice - I will see a priest immediately!

[KillTheMessenger]

Sorry... I can't give absolution. You will have to ask a Catholic priest.

:-)

[redapes]

As a result of economic policies designed and implemented by a handful of 'experts' in Jakarta, the islands of Borneo and Sumatra were effectively carved up and divided amongst a handful of timber and palm oil interests. Only now are people finally coming to realize and feel the effect of this wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems as prescribed by a cabal of 'experts'. The result can be summed up in two words: Global Warming.

Around 90% of the global supply of palm oil now comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, and this has come at a tremendous cost. The forests of Borneo and Sumatra are being razed to the ground-- releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere that Indonesia now ranks only behind China and US in carbon emissions-- and it is barely industrialized. The UNEP estimates that the forests of Indonesia are being cleared at a rate of 6 football fields per minute every minute of every day.

The palm oil industry is guilty of the most heinous ecological atrocities imaginable, including but by no means limited to the systematic genocide of orangutans, who share approximately 97% of our DNA. The forests of Borneo and Sumatra are the only place where these gentle, intelligent creatures live, and the cultivation of oil palms has directly led to the brutal deaths of thousands of individuals as the industry has expanded into previously undisturbed areas of rainforest.

Visit the Orangutan Outreach website to learn more: www.redapes.org

[iridium53]

I have worked in Information Technology a long time in different roles. I've been a college professor, a lawyer and, for the past dozen years, a consultant. Actually quite a few similarities amongst the professions.

The issues you observe are challenges that seem to occur in all organizations. Drucker, Kotter, Gandhi, Lincoln, Deming, Heraclitis and so many others wrote about it. A favorite quote is from Peter Block, ""Change from the top down happens at the will and whim of those below." And, General Creech's, "Any organization will be only as successful as those at the bottom are willing to make it."

In our practice, right now, we see that organizations are under great pressure to change. But, at a price that makes that difficult. Some two-thirds of IT projects fail to meet expectations. Yet, change from the top down seems to be the order of the day. Management from top down, not leadership.

Your point of facilitating change through fair process discussion is ideal. Some clients, the ones more likely to succeed, heed Blaise Pascal's advice, “ People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.”