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Showing posts from December, 2011

Expertise as a limiting agent - The Paradox

Expertise [ˌɛkspɜːˈtiːz] n Special skill, knowledge, or judgment; expertness We have often experienced the rigidity that comes with experience and knowledge. When it comes to people with "work experience", an important question to ask is it's effectiveness ( or ineffectiveness ) in influencing the future of an organization. Bill Taylor has highlighted this in a very well articulated blog post . He quotes the work ( The innovation killer ) of Cynthia Barton Rabe to explain the paradox of expertise and Vuja De' (The flip side of déjà vu). Paradox of Expertise Many organizations, she argues, struggle with a "paradox of expertise" in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace or a product category makes it harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions. "When it comes to innovation," she writes, "the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organizatio