CHAPTER 6

Don’t Rely on Experts

Doveryai, no proveryai (trust, but verify).

—OLD RUSSIAN PROVERB,
MADE FAMOUS BY PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

Experts are wonderful people to have around. I know that’s probably not what you’re expecting to read at the beginning of this chapter. But it’s true, and I mean it sincerely. Just don’t rely on them.

When solving hard problems, you’re going to come up against something you don’t know or understand. I have read some manuals in my time and found spots where I wasn’t able to make heads or tails of what I was looking at. Sometimes the science is hard enough that it’s just too far out of your training or smarts to absorb quickly. These are moments where it’s critical to utilize experts to help you solve hard problems. Asking the right person a few great questions can also save you hours reading boring technical manuals or dry science books. You’ll want to work with people familiar with whatever you’re trying to fix (a physical asset, a management procedure, a piece of software, etc.), and you may need someone who has spent years researching a particular science that you haven’t, from chemical engineering to psychology.

Specifically, these expert folks are called subject-matter experts, or SMEs. They are highly experienced in a certain field, and have earned their status by understanding something very deeply and demonstrating that consistently. These experts are operators and mechanics of a certain asset, such as accountants, IT experts, lawyers, equipment suppliers, political polling consultants, personal trainers, psychologists, and therapists. These experts are likely to know much more than you do about a specific topic and have a lot to teach you. They deserve your respect and attention.

My dad is one of these people. He worked for over 30 years as a university professor teaching metallurgy. During my childhood, we’d walk through Hong Kong and he’d point at rusty things and tell me how they were corroding. Now it’s hard for me to walk around a city and not see all of the corrosion happening. I learned a lot from him and deeply appreciate the wealth of knowledge he has, and the value he brings.

My dad has frequently been asked to help in situations in which something broke catastrophically, and the insurance company was trying to figure out what went wrong. This might be figuring out why an elevator cable snapped or why a crane fell off a building. He’d study the situation, perhaps inspect components under a high-powered microscope, clarify the way in which it broke, what stresses were put on it, and why it didn’t handle those stresses.

My dad is not just an SME; he is also a great problem-solver. It’s very handy when both come in one package, but that is not always the case. Your SME may or may not be a great problem-solver, and you need to be very careful with confusing the two.

For easier problems, experts can make some faster experience-based guesses than you probably can. They’ll be able to spot some patterns you may have missed, or may have just seen an almost-identical problem before, and if they’re right in their educated guess, they can save you a lot of time.

When solving hard problems, experts may or may not help you progress. You can end up in a blind alley, or they can simply say it’s impossible, and kill progress altogether. It all depends on how you work with them to get the best out of them and avoid some of the potential pitfalls. You should utilize experts, but not rely on them.

The difference is a subtle one, but very important. Utilizing an expert means asking them questions that will help you understand a science, process, or asset; it means getting their help in clarifying information you’re seeing, or knowing where to find information you need. Relying on an expert means handing them the reins; it means giving them responsibility for solving the problem or declaring it impossible; it means giving them authority so their guess or conclusion is what you or your organization blindly follow.

WHY PEOPLE RELY ON EXPERTS

People often rely on experts when they’re not confident that they can make rapid progress to solve a hard problem. Typically, they believe it will be a quicker, easier, safer path. They’ve had experiences where SMEs have solved some easier problems, and are assuming they’re facing the same set of circumstances with harder ones. And indeed, if your only problem-solving tool available is guessing, a good expert might be the best guesser you have available, as they can guess with experience.

But with hard problems, the circumstances are very different. When getting help, you need to understand if you’re hiring a great problem-solver who happens to know that subject, or if you’re hiring a subject-matter expert who may well help you.

People also hope that the expert will give them political cover. This cover can protect a team or leader from outside regulators, internal scrutiny, or your boss. Bringing in an expert demonstrates that you’re taking action, and if they declare that a problem needs money thrown at it to be resolved, the heat is off your back. Even in situations where political cover is required, good problem-solvers will focus on getting to the root cause of the problem and implementing the actual solution. They will happily utilize the SMEs in this pursuit.

THE PITFALLS OF RELYING ON EXPERTS

Once an expert decides something, it can be very difficult to challenge the decision. If they’re right, and you’re not a very good problem-solver anyway, that’s fine. You have certainty and comfort, and it happens to be the right solution. The problem is when they get things wrong or set off on an unproductive path, which is much more likely when working on hard problems. An expert is often positioned so that their opinion is worth more than yours. To challenge that, even with the right facts, can be quite frightening for them. When you ask an SME to solve the problem for you rather than help you understand specifics, you become wholly reliant on them.

You might get lucky: Your SME might happen to be a good problem-solver. But more often than not, they just guess like everyone else, because they’ve solved a lot of easy problems this way in the past. Asking them to just solve your hard problem for you is unlikely to lead to an elegant solution.

There are three particular factors that can put SMEs in a particularly bad position to be great problem-solvers for you or your organization. The expert may:

• Feel they need to have a rapid answer.

• Be misaligned.

• Have the “curse of knowledge.”

RAPID ANSWERS

The first danger to relying on an expert is their reputational need to have a rapid answer. “Hey, we brought you in: You’re the expert in the field, what’s the answer!?” This puts pressure on an expert to guess at a solution right away.

An SME is valuable because they know things, and know them very thoroughly. Demonstrating that value means demonstrating that they know something very deeply, and whether this is helpful or not, it often means avoiding showing that they don’t know something. The implicit belief for many SMEs is that admitting their ignorance of a detail will damage others’ confidence in them. When you ask them for an answer, they are much more likely to give you an answer than say, “I don’t know.”

In the case of my friend’s mom’s car, the dealer experts had guessed that “there might be a software bug” or “maybe there was a short-circuit,” and so passed the buck to the shop, which found nothing. Others told her that nothing was wrong, because they couldn’t just say, “I don’t know.” It wasted an incredible amount of time, and she considered using the lemon law to swap out her car.

MISALIGNMENT

Second, there is often a basic conflict of interest between an SME and you or your team, regardless of whether the SME is internal or external to your organization. A good example is a vendor. How they get paid may color their view of the solution they think you need. This doesn’t have to be a matter of dishonesty or moustache-twisting villainy, but simply a subconscious bias.

If you bring in a supplier of hardware or software to look at a problem you’re having with an older model, you have to keep in mind that not only is it their job to sell you a newer model, but they’ve probably already sold themselves on why that newer model is going to be the best thing for you. If you have a new product and can’t make enough of it, a supplier that you call in for help may quite naturally and honestly suggest you buy a new or parallel bottleneck asset, and show you that the ROI (return on investment) for the purchase is positive.

A more interesting kind of misalignment is the risk-reward calculus for the expert and your organization. Often, SMEs are fundamentally conservative: Their reputation depends on not screwing something up. A hundred happy customers lead to referrals, but a single very irate one can kill a career. It is critical to avoid the risk of being blamed if anything goes wrong.

Isn’t some risk-aversion a good thing? Yes, if the risk and reward are all in the same place. But most SMEs are positioned to be conservative by spending your money.

A few years back, I was investing in a couple of single-family homes for rent. It’s quite common in this situation to set up a limited liability company (LLC) to protect your other assets in case something goes wrong with these investments. Someone might trip and fall down the stairs in one of your rental homes and then sue you, wiping out everything you own. Often, people set up separate LLCs for each property they own, so if there’s a problem in one, it doesn’t impact any of the other rental homes.

When I was structuring my investment, I instructed my lawyer to set up one LLC for both rental properties. The reason is that I hate paperwork, and two LLCs sounds like twice as much paperwork as one! I also did my research on the likelihood of being sued, and it turned out to be very small. As it happens, I did this research by talking to a friend who is an industry expert. The calculations we did showed I was over 1,000 times better off on average just having both in one LLC.

The lawyer was of course very insistent that I create two LLCs, and it took a lot of fortitude to prevent that from happening. Luckily, I’ve had some experience at effectively managing experts. The lawyer would have been paid twice as much for two LLCs, but I don’t think this was the motivation. It’s a more conservative move, but no business person should make the decision to have two LLC’s in this situation. You can imagine that if the lawyer sets up 10,000 of these and one goes wrong, that’s the story that gets reported: He might have gotten “burned” had he recommended a single LLC for multiple houses, and his client lost both houses in a lawsuit rather than one. It’s easy to be conservative with other people’s money: Don’t ask SMEs to make business decisions for you without stepping back and considering a possible conflict of interest.

CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

One danger of relying on subject matter experts is that their extensive experience can be a mental hindrance to solving a unique, hard problem. The “curse of knowledge” is a cognitive bias that leads people highly informed about a topic to be unable to think about it in a fresh way, with a fresh pair of eyes.

SMEs are good at quickly finding patterns in familiar territory. This can be very powerful for solving easier problems, but for harder problems this can be their downfall. As with other prejudices, they can miss or ignore data that doesn’t fit their previous conceptions. This tendency can cause them to jump to conclusions, and those can be very hard to challenge. Going back to my lawyer setting up the LLC, this could be a simpler explanation of what happened. He was so accustomed to providing separate LLCs for houses that it may have been hard for him to even consider an alternative.

HOW GREAT PROBLEM-SOLVERS UTILIZE EXPERTS

When you encounter the harder problems that typically occur in more complex processes and systems, subject-matter experts can speed you on your way. They can give you answers to questions, help you build out what variables control the problem, and point you to the parts of the system that will yield insight.

So how do you utilize experts properly? The first rule is stop asking them to solve your problem. Don’t ask them, “what’s causing this?” Ask them questions such as, “help me understand how this piece works” (see Table 6.1) Get them to point you in the right direction for the resources you need to understand the system. When you are dealing with them, focus on the specific variable that you’re working on: how to measure it, and what variables control it. A well-positioned SME will be invaluable in helping you more quickly find the answers to the right questions. And when you have them on board, they’ll help you come up with a very elegant solution if it requires their technical skill.

Remember that SMEs are humans, too, and might not be as good a problem-solver as you are. You need to use your skills and capability you’ve developed as a strong problem-solver to guide them. If they start guessing and brainstorming, bring them back to a more rigorous approach. If they state something as a fact and you don’t see the evidence for it, help them dig deeper.

Get their help in handling technical terminology and jargon, which are often littered through the lexicon around any complex system. They can help you to understand how a system is supposed to work, what a data stream means, or what is scientifically going on. Asking them to help you understand a technical detail or phenomenon positions them and you to succeed.

There are times when people are so devoted to not relying on experts, that the pendulum swings too far the other way. This can lead to a “do it on your own, regardless of the outcome” attitude. I must confess this is a mistake I’ve personally made many times, in business and at home.

I remember a particularly embarrassing example when I decided to redo the drywall on part of a wall in my house, on my own. I figured, “I can do this! How hard can it be? It’ll be quicker than contacting a skilled person to do it.” Cutting the drywall and taping it wasn’t too hard, but when it came to spreading the joint compound, I discovered I lacked the skill and patience for the job. So despite burning lots of time in rework, I ended up with a fairly bumpy, ugly wall. I should have gotten some help and training from someone who knew what they were doing.

We can imagine our relationship with an SME as something that exists along a spectrum, between radical self-reliance—in which we shut experts out—and total expert reliance—in which we give them responsibility to solve the problem. Finding the right position along this spectrum will accelerate the problem-solving process and achieve the simplest, most economical solution.

As you work with SMEs going forward, remember that they may not be better problem-solvers than you are. Regardless of this, if you want to become a better problem-solver, you need to learn how to work effectively with them, and not rely on them.

NOW: DON’T RELY ON EXPERTS

Before you engage your next expert, decide what questions you want to ask them. Each of these questions should:

1. Be related to smelling the problem or digging into the fundamentals.

2. Not be asking for an opinion or solution, but instead for simple facts.

Set expectations with the expert up-front that you aren’t asking them to solve the problem, but that you’ll be frequently asking for clarifications of unclear terms that they use.