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Much of what experts do in reaching strategic judgements or advising, is invisible, even to them.
ECENTLY I’ve been thinking about invisible fish… Do you know where your invisible fish are, or how to find them?
I’m currently reading Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery by Roger Kneebone1
Early in Chapter One Kneebone relates a story about a day’s fishing with a keen angler-friend. At one point in their walk, the angler says he has spotted “loads” of fish in a bend in the river. Kneebone, a non-angler, finds it impossible to see any of them. His friend coaches him on where to look and how to look, and eventually he sees vast numbers of fish, just below the surface. His angler-friend, with many years of experience, had put together a myriad of tiny clues to spot the fish easily, but Kneebone couldn’t even see them when they were pointed out, distracted by the sparkling water and the ripples on the surface. It was only after he was further coached by his friend that he saw any of them. Kneebone suggests that experts inside organisations are like those “invisible fish”: they are all around us, but they hide in plain sight. As knowledge managers, we should, amongst other tasks, ensure that (1) expertise is uncovered, understood, and shared, and (2) new experts are trained up, recognised, and appreciated, for the benefit of our organisations and aligned to their business strategies. And in a perfect world we would be doing this all throughout people’s careers, not just when we know they are leaving us. But we can only do this when we understand who, in our organisation, is an expert. If we can’t find the invisible fish, we can’t support the sharing of their knowledge. How many of those “invisible fish”
April-May 2022
are you aware of in your organisation? How good are you at spotting experts and getting their knowledge shared with others?
Kneebone defines an expert as someone who can get to the heart of a problem and fix it with skill, judgement and care. He suggests that there are two primary reasons that experts may appear hidden in organisations: the expert’s modesty or failure to appreciate the complexity of their knowledge, and society’s hierarchy of value, which is probably related to familiarity.
Much of what experts do in reaching strategic judgements or advising, is invisible, even to them. In knowledge management circles we sometimes call this “the paradox of knowledge”. Once you “know” something, it becomes quite difficult to imagine not knowing it. It feels like the knowledge you have assimilated into your body of experience and which you use frequently, must be “common sense” that everyone knows, not something special. Experts often assume that novices are more knowledgeable than they are and can struggle to explain their reasoning or value it appropriately. It tends to be those who have only recently learned something or perhaps have quite a tenuous grasp of something, who recognise its specialness.
The hierarchy of value in expertise, which Kneebone thinks is related to our familiarity with things, can also lead to the failure to identify experts. The knowledge and skills of concert pianists, brain surgeons or rocket scientists tend to be objectively clear to most people. We cannot imagine ever being able to do what those experts do. However, the expertise of car mechanics, receptionists or cashiers may be less obvious, as their fields of expertise are more familiar
Hélène Russell (
helenerussell@theknowledgebusiness.co.uk) runs The Knowledge Business and is Chair of CILIP’s K&IM Group.
and we assume (wrongly) that we could recreate their expertise quite easily - until we actually try to and realise the level of their skill.
What does this mean for knowledge managers?
Knowledge is power, of course, and being aware of these two issues is an excellent initial step forward in improving knowledge sharing inside your organisation.
We must all try not to overlook the expertise of those lower down in your organisation’s hierarchy of value and not to take an expert’s comment that “their team knows all that they do” at face value.
How do you overcome these twin problems and find your invisible fish? I’d love to learn more about your tactics in your organisation. Email me on
helenerussell@theknowledgebusiness.co.uk. IP
Reference
1 Kneebone, R. (2020), Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery, Penguin Random House
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