What makes an expert?
Have you noticed that everyone’s an expert? Whether you’re at a family braai or around the boardroom table, there’s always someone willing to offer up an expert opinion on topics ranging from the covid vaccine to raising children to how to effectively convert business leads. So in a sea of so-called experts, how can you tell the real from the self-appointed? Let’s take a look…
Becoming an expert takes more than just studying or above-average dedication; to become an expert, you need to be able to arrange information in a particular way.
Physicist and filmmaker Dr Derek Muller, Professor of Educational Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Education Daniel Schwartz, and Professor of Physics and Education at Stanford University Carl Wieman all agree that how experts handle and categorise information is what earns them the expert title.
Muller believes that experts can commit learning patterns and recognisable configurations to memory, something he calls “chunking”, which allows them to recognise complex stimuli – like a chess, music or engineering problem: “At its core, expertise is about recognition…and recognition leads directly to intuition” which means an expert is better able to (accurately) make their next move and have a successful outcome. They recognise patterns and in doing so can solve problems or execute at a far greater speed and accuracy than a newbie can.
Practice makes perfect
Much like Muller’s chunking philosophy, Schwartz believes that experts see “precise categories and more specific things” where novices see basic categories and more general things. An expert car salesman can tell you the make, model and year of a car just by looking at an image, but the average Joe might only be able to tell you the make. This is a simple example to demonstrate how the organisation of information in an expert’s brain is geared towards precision.
For Wieman, experts quite obviously need factual knowledge about a subject but, he says, what’s less obvious is what he calls an expert’s “mental organisational framework” which allows them to be highly efficient in solving problems. Can you see the pattern? The way knowledge and understanding are chunked, categorised or organised in an expert’s brain is what sets them apart from the beginner.
And, just for good measure, let’s bust open the old adage that expertise is something ‘you’re just born with’. Professor of education at the University of Chicago Benjamin Bloom dispelled this myth as long ago as 1985. In his book Developing Talent in Young People he studied experts across various fields and found having a mentor or coach was fundamental to success, as was the amount and quality of practice. And practice is what experts do…all.the.time. They don’t just practice what they know, but consistently put themselves in more complex, perplexing and difficult scenarios to push the boundaries of their knowledge in order to grow and therefore know more. The chunking, categorisation and mental frameworks? They’re all honed through practice.
How to become an expert
So, can you become an expert? The simple answer is yes. How far you get is up to the four factors Dr Muller mentions below (which is not an exhaustive list), and how much time you have to dedicate to your craft. The popular-held belief is that 10 000 hours is what’s needed to master something (according to author Malcolm Gladwell), but some skills are easier to master than others and certain variables can also drive those hours up or down. But it’s a good benchmark as a start. Here are those four factors…
1 -Make repeat attempts with feedback.
If you’re throwing a dart at a dart board for the first time, feedback is immediate – the dart either hits the board or it doesn’t. And with each throw, you can see how near or far you are to hitting a bull’s eye. The more you practice, the better you’ll get, and the more refined your approach – your stance, the flick of your wrist, where your eyes are trained etc all become part of your feedback loop. But, sometimes your own feedback or the feedback you get from the activity you’re doing isn’t enough and you need some input.
Future experts need different kinds of teachers at different stages of their development according to research. The feedback you get from a teacher, mentor or coach is crucial to sparking greater determination, improving skills, and pushing you to think critically about your progress.
So, to start your journey towards expertise make sure you’re getting instant feedback from whatever you’re doing or have someone who can give you input on your progress quickly and regularly.
2 – You need a valid environment that makes things more predictable.
A casino is a great example of an unpredictable environment, as are political events. There is not enough sameness in either environment to be able to apply knowledge with any precision or identify any fixed patterns – randomness reins. But in something like sports, your environment is inherently more predictable – the size of the playing field, the scoring system, the equipment used, what constitutes a win and so on. The more predictable the events, the better you can apply “chunking” and those organisational frameworks to execute at a higher level, and the easier it is to study past greats and compare your on performance.
If your environment is unpredictable, it’s worth seeing what you can do to bring some order into the mix and remove some of the uncertainty. You can do this by creating your own standards, timelines and probabilities based on previous experiences to give yourself increased predictability. An example quoted in The Power of Predictability references how restaurateurs buy supplies and staff their kitchen based on the probability of diner numbers, taking into account the day of the week and the season. They have created predictability in a fairly unpredictable environment. And you can do the same.
3 – You need timely feedback after each attempt.
Feedback is essential if you want to improve and the more immediate it is, the better. That’s where yearly performance reviews in business often fall short. What good does it do giving an employee feedback on their core KPIs or sales performance at the end of the year? They’ve spent 364 days unaware of what they could be doing differently, and without the mentorship and intervention needed to improve their skills.
Better is to provide more regular feedback and stage interventions sooner. Now this will obviously depend on the nature of an employee’s role, but feedback can be given in a bi-weekly coffee session and include things like sales reports, productivity tracking reports and a snapshot of billable hours worked. This gives the employee a clear sense of how they’re performing and where they can improve or invest more time. There are of course softer metrics one can include like how they treat colleagues or their general attitude at work.
4 – Practice at the edge of your ability and attempt things you aren’t good at.
This is called deliberate practice and it’s the one thing that can really set you up to become an expert. Deliberate practice focuses on “tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort” according to researchers, and involves “considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well or even at all”. In this way, you’re constantly challenging yourself and pushing the boundaries of your capabilities to achieve a greater level of skill and precision.
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We’ve taken what what can often be an unpredictable environment – dealing with remote project teams in diverse locations – and made it predictable so we can monitor how we’re doing at all times, both for you as a client and versus our competitors. We’re constantly adapting and improving to deliver the best possible project team and client experience. This, combined with unparalleled industry knowledge and the immediate feedback we get from teams and clients (which we manage through our 24/7 contact centre), means we’re experts through and through.
