Expertise is sometimes respected at operational level, but is it often at the organizational level?
It appears the answer is no, not really.
As an analogy: we’d still hire a plumber or electrician to fix respective issues at home and listen to their advice, but they don’t get to decide what else we might want to fix beyond what we can see as the immediate problem. They might be kind enough to make a few suggestions here and there, but it’s up to you to decide whether to take it. A plumber would never dictate how you decorate your bathroom.
Similarly, an organization’s operation requires expertise to get things done, but it doesn’t need expertise to enact its influence anywhere beyond the most immediate “solution space”. In organizations, the solution space is primarily operation, and only occassionally strategy and beyond.
That’s not a problem to traditional expertises like medecine, carpentry, or eletrical work. As much as carpentry is an art, its strategy is one and the same as its technology – with all the evolutions of the materials it utlizes and the methods it applies, there’s still a well-defined boundary of what it can and is meant to achieve. That’s the case for most traditional expertises and even disciplines.
However, that’s a huge problem to newer and emerging expertises or disciplines like “design”, “programming” or “analytics” because they are more “horizontal” or “seamless” than the the old ones.
The way a piece of software is designed can definitively shape the boundary of the business around it as a product. In the digital space, code is the law. Where does data analytics end and sales/marketing begin? Where is the cut-off line between service design and its business operation? Is a product design decision also a business strategy one? To what extent can we tell them apart?
In other words, many new expertises and disciplines don’t have well-defined boundaries either due to their inherent (and mostly digital) connectivity or due to the nature of their coverage, or both. For example, UX Design is not even an expertise and it’s barely a proper discipline – you ask ten practitioners and you’d get eleven definitions with varying boundaries for how they practice it.
Because those expertises’ solution space is much wider than traditional ones, they are more open, complex, dynamic and networked than traditional expertises. They came into being mostly because the problem space they are used for has also become more open, complex, dynamic and networked.
In the past, expertise management was one and the same as the division of labour. How we managed the expertises was implicitly how we divided up the respective labour. It was a divide-and-conquer approach that relies on analysis.
Nowadays, that approach no longer suffices. A more open, complex, dynamic and networked problem space requires the kind of explicit expertise management that connects rather than divides. It demands an adaptive approach that relies more on synthesis than analysis.
To complicate the challenge, those new expertises carry a lot more political power due to their synthetic and often digital nature. More often than not, what the laws of physics are to the physical world is what code and its architecture (design) are to the digital world. Nowadays, the laws of the digital shape the feasible boundary of political power just as much as the laws of physics do. No wonder they are not very well-respected at the organizational level: the political authority inherent in the organizational design is now being challenged by new powers – expertises and disciplines that can shape what kind of governance or domination is possible.
Good medecine carries power because it cures more people. Good engineering carries power because it’s safer. Good plumbing carries power because it solves problems. Good coding carries power because it creates a new order in the digital world. Good design carries power because it’s all of the above. As far as operation goes, that’s perfect. But few organization wouldn’t keep them at the opreational level by surpressing them at the organizational level – just to make sure political authority is never surpassed by the power of expertise.
That’s the fundamental crisis of expertise: its legitimacy lies more in its surpression by the organizational power structure than in its merit.
{END}
Noah Fang 