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July 19, 2009

The Smarts about Experts

In the article Your help with the new expertise By David Weinberger posted Jul 3, 2009 at KM World, three things stand out in his "arc" of thought as factors of "expertise" -- credence, confidence, and communication. How they are blended for consumption is the matter that is under observation.

In effect, he describes that using a network to access a healthy debate is like watching the sausage getting made instead of just heating up the product already in its skin by buying the expert book or the expert consultant.

Or to be fair, he indicates that when it comes to "managed" knowledge, participation is more compelling than mere consumption.

What is really at stake here though, I'd say, is the ability to accept the quality of the production as being good enough for the issue at hand. In this analogy, the production is not the knowledge itself; the production is the communication experienced. But communication and expertise are not the same thing at all.

Of course, communication can provide very high quality knowledge, but it might instead just provide very high confidence in something that is not very high quality knowledge.

So where is the value, actually? We are *not* necessarily smarter than me; instead, a network hosts collaboration -- and from that, we might be way more productive than me. Unfortunately, ad hoc collaboration is often unpredictable: you don't know whether you're going to get a committee or a team, and you don't know whether the practical impact of the group fest is likely to cover the opportunity cost.

Nonetheless, thanks to networks, collaboration is a more usable path to effective knowledge now than it has been in the past; but counter to David's hypothesis, I suggest that it does not change the nature of expertise.

For example, the difference between an edited book and a networked interaction is about the same as the difference between an authoritative critic and a peer review. They presume different kinds of credibility but it is not a given that either one of them is credible until they prove it. And they *can* come to the exact same conclusions.

So, what happens next? Someone who needs to make decisions will go back to whichever party has the best proofs. Someone who is just thinking about stuff can go with whichever party is most convenient. The latter is much more sensitive to culture than is the former. I think this will be borne out by truthful stories of how people are pursuing expertise so far in networks.

Those of us who are cheerleaders for innovation might confess that we'd prefer to invest in making the new convenience cough up the better results. Given the latitude to have that attitude, the real burden on us is to establish that "convenient" is better, not that the product is better.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at July 19, 2009 10:44 PM

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