158. More and more about less and less (Condition #7: Expertise)

In the previous episode we talked about technical skills, and the potential need for expertise in a bunch of technical areas. Expertise is weird – for a good summary of exactly how weird, check out Range by David Epstein. Expertise also has a strange relationship with overconfidence, including that people with *deep* expertise tend to have way too much confidence in their ability to make predictions in their area of expertise. So, we have to be careful about balancing technical skill with diversity – including maybe having non experts or even naivete in the room. Someone who’s naïve also needs to be brave enough to slow the experts down and say “I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’d rather not move ahead until I understand.” That’s pretty hard, especially in an intimidating place like a boardroom. Anyway, it’s already clear why expertise is one of the conditions that matter for good governance, in part because we clearly have control over who’s in the room. We have at least *some* control over who our executives and board members are. We have a lot of control over whether we engage specialized consultants and who they are. We can think about exactly who we will engage at different stages of our decisions and how we’ll do it. Will we ask our experts to make crappy predictions? Maybe we can ask them to ask *us* questions instead like we talked about back in episode 119. It’s not rocket science. Unless it is, in which case you probably want a rocket scientist in the room, and maybe also a Rocket League expert just to balance things out.