In Praise of Experts

Yesterday the last of twelve young football players and their coach were extracted from a small ledge four kilometres into a flooded cave system in Northern Thailand. The dramatic rescue involved hundreds of people working to a common cause but it was made possible by a small number of highly skilled cave divers including Rick Stanton and John Volanthen. Like many people watching on television around the world I was in complete awe of the skill and courage of these two and the team of over 90 other cave divers they led to ultimate success. I also mourned the death of Saman Kunont, the Thai diver who gave his life as part of the effort.

Sadly, being the person I am, a small part of my response to these dramatic events was to recall the words of Michael Gove who, at the time of writing, is the last remaining Brexiter in the UK Cabinet. In June 2016 during the campaign ahead of the referendum on UK membership of the European Union, Gove said in an interview that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. 

Well here’s the thing Michael. This person in this country has not had enough of experts.

What is an expert after all? There are many and various areas of expertise to which a person may aspire. To achieve expertise requires aptitude, enhanced by training or education and followed by long practice. In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell proposed that 10,000 hours of practice was the magic number that would elevate a practitioner to the status of expert. Gladwell’s hypothesis has been widely criticised but whether the number is 10,000 hours or 100,000 is not really the point. It needs to be a big number.

I have encountered experts in many fields during my life and career.

In the halcyon days before 9/11 I sometimes managed to travel in the jump seat of an airliner. This was both fascinating and humbling. To see and hear two pilots work together in harmony to operate an immensely complex machine and navigate it safely through the crowded skies of southern England was an experience I still treasure. I have done a little flying myself so I could follow a lot of the conversation and appreciate the complexity of what was going on, all in the measured, confident tones of real experts. Neither I nor the hundred people in the passenger seats behind ever had enough of these experts.

One day in the 1980s I was working as a project manager for a company supplying message handling systems to the financial institutions in the City of London. One of my customers was having an upgrade to its systems and I had done all the planning and paperwork ahead of the work that was to be done on a Saturday. In those days the City was a completely dead zone on a Saturday and special arrangements had been made to give us access to the offices until seven pm. I had organised two engineers to be on site with me. One of them was vastly experienced with the system in question and the other a very good engineer but without expertise in this particular system. In a long and sorry story that I may tell another time, the experienced engineer managed to get himself stranded in Amsterdam. I arrived on site at 8 am to find the client representative and the second engineer and an old system that needed to be stripped down and put back together. Have I ever mentioned that I am a software guy? I was basically fit for fetching and carrying and bringing the coffees. A long day followed during which the system was stripped down and laid out very carefully on the floor. The engineer, Lee, was getting guidance by phone from a couple of his colleagues who were on site at a similar job nearby. The upgraded parts were fitted and then Lee tried to put everything back together again which is where things went a bit pear-shaped. Basically he didn’t have the expertise to do the job. By now time was getting tight. We were going to get thrown out of the office at seven pm whether the job was done or not. If the system wasn’t back together again and working, a major insurance company would start its new week with no communications available. This would potentially cost it millions and probably lead to my employer facing a huge bill for compensation. Lee and I were on the phone looking for help from anywhere but not finding any. By 6.30 I was convinced that I was getting fired on Monday. Then at 6.40 a miracle happened. I heard the chime of the lift arriving at the floor we were on and a few seconds later in walked the two engineers Lee had been talking to earlier in the day. They had finished their job and come over to help out. Unlike Lee and me, these two were experts. They knew this complex system inside out. The next 18 minutes passed in a haze as two people assessed the situation, determined what needed to be done and just went ahead and did it, scarcely saying a word as they worked. They didn’t need to. They knew the job and they knew each other. The system that took hours to take apart went back together and booted up in 18 minutes flat. We all got out of the door just as the security people were locking down the building.

I could quote many more examples of experts I have encountered. They operate in different fields but they have many things in common. Almost every expert I have ever met has been not only skilled but also willing to share his or her expertise. Real experts are not threatened by others gaining skills. They know that development of expertise is not a zero sum game. And just like the cave divers in Thailand most experts I have known have been willing to share their expertise with others for the greater good.

So, Mr Gove, I must profoundly disagree with your assessment that British people have had enough of experts. Experts are the exact opposite of the political chancers who pass laws to set the value of Pi to exactly 3.0 or who write easily demonstrable lies on the side of a bus to ride populist sentiment for their own gain. Experts deal with the world as it actually is and not how they just wish it to be.  If anything I think we need more experts and an economic system that encourages more people to grow expertise. I suppose that in some great yin and yang endeavour to find balance in the universe we might also need some idiots. Fortunately the career of Michael Gove assures us that there is unlikely to be any shortage of those.