Experts on assignment in the real world cease in part to be experts. Just consider computer experts who create a computer system for the tax authorities, or for a bank, or for a hospital.
In order for these systems to work on location, the computer experts need to be open to what they don’t know much about: the unique activities at the tax authorities, or at the bank, or at the hospital.
Computer experts who aren’t open to their non-expertise on the site where they are on assignment perform worse as experts and will deliver inferior systems.
Experts can therefore not in practice be only experts. If one exaggerates one’s role as an expert, one fails on assignment in the real world.
This should apply also to other forms of expertise. My guess is that legal experts almost always find themselves in this precarious situation of being experts in a reality that constantly forces them to open themselves to their non-expertise. In fact, law appears to be an occupation that to an unusually high degree develops this openness systematically. I admire how legal experts constantly learn about the multifarious realities they act in.
Jurists should be a role model for computer experts and economic experts: because they methodically manage their inevitable non-expertise.
This post indicates the spirit in which I (as legal non-expert) took the liberty to question the Swedish Data Inspection Board’s shutting down of LifeGene and more recent rejection of a proposed law on research databases.
Can one be an expert “purely” on data protection? I think not. My impression is that the Data Inspection Board, on assignment in the world of research, didn’t open itself to its non-expertise in this reality. They acted (it seems to me) as if data protection issues could be handled as a separate field of expertise, without carefully considering the unique conditions of contemporary research and the kinds of aims that research initiatives can have.
Perhaps the temptation resides in the Board’s role as a public body: as an authority with a seemingly “pure” mission.
Very true! As one becomes more expert in part of a problem, it’s possible to lose sight of the larger picture. It’s thinking in a silo–what is in front of you becomes the whole world.
Your assumption about lawyers is exactly correct. Any competent business lawyer needs to be as knowledgeable as possible about the firm he or she is advising.
Simon
Thanks, beware of “silo” experts!