Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Experts are overrated.

Just wanted to share this except from Tom Friedman's NYT post from last month:
The least important attribute they [Google] look for is “expertise.” Said [Laszlo] Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.
I'll admit to something that bothers a lot of people I know:

I fully understand how to accomplish a particular task in AutoCad, e.g. a wall section and enlarged details, in the same way that 95% of all people have been taught and have been practicing for years.  But I continue to experiment with new ways of completing the same task but with different methods.  It bothers a lot of people because they prefer predictability over novelty and would rather not have to learn more than what is minimally necessary to complete the task.

So, when someone asks me for help on how to do something, I have to take a moment and think it through, because they might be asking me what's the preferred method rather than the coolest method, the fastest method or the best-practices method towards achieving their goal.  If you ask me the same question every few months, my answer might be different every single time and that drives some folks nuts.

Being liberally open-minded, I believe, is very important, regardless of how much experience you've built up.

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