The Danger of Expertise

Escaping the Organizational Tragedy of the Commons

Companies kill their ability to deliver value by organizing around their expertise.

Here’s a real world story that shows the dangers of purely optimizing for exploiting your area of expertise.

I recently experienced an IT problem which made it impossible to have calls without significant lag. Video calling felt like I was talking using a walkie talkie. I opened a ticket to get my issue resolved.

The first person I talked asked some questions revolving around their area of expertise and concluded it was not ‘their problem’. They moved it along to someone else. So did the second, the third, the fifth and the ninth person (!!!).

We could visualize it as follows:

We started with an unsolved problem and we end with an unsolved problem, because nobody knew what to do with the problem.

They don’t know which the expertise bucket the problem belongs to, so everyone passes it along to someone else, which means you ultimately end up with the same as with which you started: an unsolved problem.

To make matters worse, with every expert I had to start from scratch and explain the same problem again. Only to hear afterwards: it’s not my problem but someone else’s.

In short, nobody really cared about my problem, they only cared about the problem if it fits with their expertise. If the problem does not fit within their area of expertise in a nice and clean-cut way, then they will struggle to resolve the problem.

The problem is not that they lacked expertise: they had all the expertise necessary to fix my problem. The problem is that they are so highly specialized that they lack the big picture and didn’t leverage all their expertise to fix my problem.

When I did talk to someone who had an understanding across the different areas of expertise, my problem was quickly resolved in less than 10 minutes after wasting at least 8 hours of my time.

Individual Competence Vs. Collective Competence

The organization valued individual competence over collective competence.

The departments prioritized optimized for the utilization of specialized expertise, rather than to optimize for resolving problems regardless of the expertise necessary.

The problem with problems is that they don’t respect the boundaries of your expertise.

This example perfectly illustrates how your expertise can create bottlenecks if you organize around your specialization, instead of the kind of problems your resolving. But these challenges are not limited to support issues only, they are extremely common at all sizes of companies and all kinds of problems.

The Era Before Expertise

When your company grows and does well, at some point you get enough money so you can hire real experts. You know, not the kind that are working at your company, but the kind that are working at much bigger and much more prestigious companies. The kind of smarty pants who have the privilege of putting ex-something on their LinkedIn (YUCK!).

When you interview a CMO, your conversation mostly focuses on marketing. When a CFO applies for a job, you mostly talk finance. When you’re looking for that CTO, you discuss technical topics. You probably also talk about culture, leadership, and other things, but the primary pillar you’re going to assess them by is their expertise in their respective area of interest.

Sounds logical right? That’s precisely what you do if you want to set your organization up for failure.

The Problem with Departments Organized Around Expertise

After the job interviews, the finance expert is heading the finance department, the marketing guru heads up the marketing department and the tech messiah is our new Chief Technology Officer.

They all begin to organize their departments within their realm of understanding: around their expertise. And as a consequence, every department is now left chasing a local optimum: doing what’s best for their department. They value their individual area of expertise more than creating collective competence regardless of department.

Experts are hired for their depth. The expertise they have in their respective field. This is disastrous, because having depth doesn’t mean you have aperture.

Ever worked at an organization that, despite having extremely smart and talented people, you struggled to collaborate and to get anything done?

I’ve even worked at organizations that started to perform worse after they hired people that were stronger (on paper). Because they simply lacked understanding of the big picture, and they began to optimize based on the tunnel vision of their expertise.

Yes, we need experts, no you don’t need to organize around pockets of their expertise. A good example is the security departments within companies. Often they create brilliant solutions that work extremely well from the perspective of security, but everyone else in the company suffers from their solutions.

They make simple things extremely difficult, and as a consequence, they reduce and increase risk. People will actually work around their terrible solutions to get things done, and as a consequence, on paper it looks more secure but in practice it will be less secure.

Problems don’t respect the boundaries of your expertise. You must create an environment where you have collective competence and people collaborate to overcome the boundaries of their respective areas of expertise.

The smartest room is the room where everyone is able to contribute based on their area of competence, not the one that looks the best on your org chart.

Forget boundaries of expertise and build bridges of collective competence.