It seems that there is a bout of soul-searching underway as we search for certainty in a changing and tumultuous world. The authority and legitimacy of the ‘expert’ is being questioned and routinely dismissed in a way that seems to suggest that anyone with a modicum of freemium reading believes they are empowered to refute or ignore the arguments of subject experts.
The issue surfaced substantively following the crash of 2008. People questioned why experts hadn’t foreseen it and. Even the Queen asked a gathering at the LSE why nobody had noticed it coming. More recently during the Brexit referendum politicians of both sides were not seen as credible by the people they were trying to scare. The ex-justice secretary Michael Gove in an interview in 2016 said that “people have had enough of experts. More recently the UK government criticised The Bank of England governor Mark Carney for running dubious monetary experiments an argument subsequently endorsed by William Hague. Lately the theme was picked up by the Bank of England’s chief economist Andrew Haldane who argued that people had lost faith in the theoretical models used by economists and that economists were guilty of talking mainly to themselves and failing to reflect on the gap between theatrical models and real outcomes.
At a time when information is both cheap and must be served in easy to digest lightweight chunks and meaning is up for debate, making business decisions without critical thinking and the expertise of the expert runs the risk of succumbing to the cult of the individual. Indeed, the cult of the individual over substance is a trend that Alain Sylvain, founder of strategy and planning consultancy Sylvain Labs believes has been developing since the financial crash and dotcom bust.
Dismissing the opinions of experts in both business and society is a simple way of avoiding a change of opinion or use evidence based analysis to form a decision. Indeed, such refutation is a repudiation of both critical thinking and of fallibility.
What are the implications for marketing? The risk for the discipline lies in the rejection of craft and deep understanding that is expertise for the gloss of the web guru state of marketing. Here the latest list of must do things to ‘win’ in online marketing is the first thing management turns to. Who needs a marketer when the answers are just a click away? Superficial list based marketing promises that the answers to your marketing problems lie on the page. That all you need to do is keep reading, subscribe and bookmark. But such an approach has real dangers. First of all everyone has access to the same list. But more seriously real expertise and results that flow from it come from deep understanding of principles and their application in the world. In other words, expertise understands that performance is contextual to situation and is an amalgamation of different types of knowledge often referred to as tacit and explicit. This offers a level of subtlety that no list based promise can match
The message for companies is that in a discipline which so easily succumbs to the new and shiny, the lure of succumbing to the cult of the self-promoting proselytizer can obscure true expertise. Companies should therefore be careful to ensure they understand the difference between expertise and self-promotion and develop means to propagate the emergence of expertise. Nonaka demonstrated how the potential to create performative knowledge which has real traction in the world is accomplished. It is through challenging existing knowledge, bringing in new knowledge but adapting it. It is through a dialogue between theory and practice that enables new knowledge capable of creating epistemic work beyond that provided by following explicit instructions or some pundit. It is through the creation of genuine expertise and a commitment to creating a culture of knowledge creation. This is a storey that the most successful companies already understand
Dr Malcolm Ash, EdD, MSc, MBA, DMS