The Emperors Have No Clothes

Sometimes the Emperor has no clothes. I have seen cases where experts draft complex solutions and show off their expertise, and an outsider notices an obvious flaw. Is the expert always an expert?

The Wrong Expertise

Here’s a story of how a non-expert screwed it up. The assignment was to create a KM system. It was assigned to a non-expert because they had some taxonomy background. The result: we got a “good” taxonomy outcome, but an unusable KM outcome and $1m down the drain.

More Than a Job Title

Expertise is more than a name. Job titles in organisations don’t describe or indicate expertise, though people assume they do. We need to think more broadly than title.