"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Arthur C. Clarke
For people afflicted with component focus , "wholes are not the 'sum of their parts,' they are a function of one part." The deeper a person's expertise, the worse this narrow focus gets. ... "the curse of knowledge" accentuates coordination troubles.
From The Friction Project - by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao
I venture to say that my audience is likely to be split between those who will readily accept my thesis and those who will dismiss it outright. How could the pairing of intelligence and expertise ever be considered a liability? Isn't that ridiculous?
When I say half of my audience is likely to accept my thesis, it’s because I’ve reviewed my demographics. About half of my connections are in corporate IT. How many of us have sat in project meetings, looking across the conference room table (or more likely these days, at a Teams screen), at a person who is both highly intelligent and experienced in a particular area of the organization or technological platform, only to wonder how they cannot perceive how counterproductive or at least how "far-afield" they are being?
What is intelligence? As a former educator, I learned about the brain’s schema, the hangers of information, the incremental building of knowledge in areas where we already possess expertise. In some sense, intelligence enables expertise. With curiosity and a ready mind, one can build a rich neurobiological network of synapses that map out a domain, allowing navigation through the myriad demands and complexities of a corporate IT role.
However, as beautiful, magnificent, and invaluable as that knowledge may be—a living ode to the history of the organization’s processes and needs—it can also represent rigid thinking. Recent research in neurobiology shows that ingrained neural pathways are habituated through reuse. That’s how we learn. As a language learner, I try to spend as much time as possible absorbing and retracing the ground I want to imprint upon my brain. These valuable assets within the organization have done just that—they’ve spent years ingraining the current state of the systems into their brains. That’s why they speak like that in meetings. They’re retracing the familiar pathways of expertise that have previously led to success.
Here’s the problem: when we leave the domain of what already exists within the organization, especially when we encounter a blind alley where past forms and processes will no longer serve, those old ways of thinking become a liability. They represent neural inflexibility.
As a consultant, my credibility would be low if I claimed consultants are some kind of panacea that will always save the day. Luckily, that’s not my message. The expertise of in-house subject matter experts is critically important and truly indispensable. However, what they need is a flexibility facilitator, an outside change agent to sometimes painfully challenge them to consider new solutions. We humans aren’t good at change, and we’re demonstrably terrible (according to research) at considering subtractive solutions that simplify and dismantle what we’ve worked so hard to construct. But sometimes, change is inevitable and absolutely necessary. A good consultant can tactfully ask annoying questions like, “Why do you do it that way?” “What benefit does that provide?” “Is that solution still needed?”
A good consultant will ask those hard questions, challenge your assumptions, and may even rub you the wrong way sometimes. They won’t simply make a mad dash for the deadline stipulated by the statement of work to quote, dump, and run. It's a qualitative thing, but any experienced IT leader can intuitively sense it. Another way of saying this is that a good consultant cares about the long-term outcome of their work.
Hopefully, this consultant also brings intelligence and experience (representing both a valuable asset and a potential hindrance). But an excellent consultant is self-aware. They fore-arm themselves in the art of remaining open-minded and pursuing flexibility as an imperative discipline.
When I learned a few years ago that acquiring languages and playing instruments correlate highly with enhanced problem-solving abilities, with enhanced neural plasticity, I adopted the habit of spending about 15 minutes daily on language acquisition and another 15 minutes playing an instrument. Has it helped? Without a control, we can't prove anything, but it serves as a valuable daily reminder: Flexibility and Adaptability lead to golden solutions. Listen first. Solve and check. Don't jump to conclusions. You could be wrong.
Whenever I enter a new organization, my focus is on listening and understanding, with the goal of figuring out the right questions to ask. I am deeply convinced that if you can arrive at that genius simplicity in the solution before ever laying hands on a keyboard, the likelihood of success in the technical phase of delivering the solution increases dramatically.
I don’t want to demean or devalue the incredible experts we rely on to arrive at solutions. Without them, we would have no chance of success. But the beautiful value of a healthy and productive relationship with a world-class consultant is that they can draw out the best from those in-house experts, break you out of ruts you’d otherwise be stuck in, and by asking challenging questions, effect change by provoking consideration of new ideas. By fulfilling the essential role as facilitator of careful self-examination of the process value chain, a consultant can help achieve excellent outcomes, gleaning all the benefits of intelligence and expertise while avoiding the pitfalls of rigid thinking.
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