What If Expertise Gets in the Way of Learning?

I have spent a great deal of my life becoming knowledgeable about things. Degrees, trainings, certifications, and decades of professional experience.

I value expertise, but the older I become, the more suspicious I am of expertise that never allows itself to be surprised. Knowing a great deal can help us recognize what we're looking at. It can also make us remarkably quick to decide that we already know what we're looking at.

Once we've named something, categorized it and connected it to what we already know, we may stop looking.

That is where expertise can become an obstacle to learning.

Knowing what usually happens

Expertise is largely built through accumulated experience, through development of core competencies: knowledge, skills, and attitude. We've encountered enough situations to recognize patterns. We know which questions to ask and we can often anticipate what comes next. That's enormously useful.

If I consult a physician, I certainly don't want her approaching my symptoms as though she's encountering the human body for the first time, but pattern recognition comes with a risk. Once something resembles a pattern we already know, we tend to see the pattern, and we sometimes see it before we see the particular thing in front of us.

We think: I've seen this before. I know what this is. I know how this goes. And often we're right, but learning tends to happen in the space where the familiar pattern doesn't quite account for what we're seeing.

Surprise is information

Surprise tells us that something has violated an expectation.

For example, we thought the conversation would go one way. It didn't. Or we thought we understood someone. Then she said something we couldn't reconcile with our understanding. Perhaps we made a mistake and discovered that the result was more interesting than what we'd intended. Maybe a child asked a question our sophisticated explanation couldn't answer, or a novel, song or image disturbed an idea we'd considered settled.

Even an ordinary object can interrupt a familiar train of thought simply because we encounter it differently.

None of these things is inherently wise.

A stranger isn't automatically profound. A dream isn't necessarily a message. A mistake isn't secretly a gift. But our surprise is worth examining. Something happened that our existing understanding didn't predict. That creates an opening.

The unexpected teacher

We tend to think of teachers as people who know something we don't, but perhaps a teacher can also be anything that makes our existing knowledge temporarily inadequate: a person, a book, a conversation, a mistake, a piece of music, or a stone picked up on a walk.

The teaching isn't necessarily contained in the thing itself. It can arise in the encounter between what we expected and what happened. That's what I mean when I say meaning often travels sideways.

We set out looking for an answer in one direction and encounter something useful somewhere else entirely. The difficulty is that we have to remain teachable enough to notice.

Certainty is efficient

There is something wonderfully efficient about certainty. Once we know what something means, we can stop investigating it. Once we know what kind of person someone is, we don't have to keep revising our understanding of her. Once we know what we believe, contradictory information becomes something to refute rather than something to consider. Once we become the expert, questions can begin to feel more threatening than useful. But certainty has a cost when we reach it too soon. It closes the inquiry.

Sometimes the thing that could teach us something is precisely the thing that doesn't fit what we already know.

Staying teachable

Being teachable doesn't require pretending we know less than we do, nor does it mean treating every opinion as equally informed or abandoning expertise in favor of perpetual uncertainty. It means holding our knowledge firmly enough to use it and lightly enough to revise it.

It means noticing the moment when something makes us think: That's odd. I didn't expect that. That doesn't fit. I hadn't thought of it that way. And instead of immediately making the anomaly fit what we already know, allowing ourselves one more question: What might I be missing?

The older I become, the less impressed I am by certainty for its own sake. I'm much more interested in whether what I know has left enough room for what I don't.