Going The Distance
“It seems I’ve come a great distance but yet have still not arrived.” Rebecca said this in as they were looking down the valley at Cherry Creek (what would become Denver, Colorado) in Book 3 of Threads West An American Saga: Uncompahgre: Where Water Turns Rock Red by Reid Lance Rosenthal. Considering she had started in England; taken a ship to New York; a train to St. Louis; and the a wagon train to Cherry Creek, she really had traveled a great distance, but there was still so much to explore, do, and experience. Sound familiar?
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” ~ from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot
The quote above from T.S. Eliot says a lot. I believe all the characters in the great Threads West novel series that headed west knew themselves and where they came from better, the further they explored. Only after extensive exploration and experiences, in other words, living, do we fully understand the beauty or all that we gained from where we grew up and the people that have been part of our lives. We cannot see who we are and where we are until we go through the process. The process of searching for something outside of ourselves reveals the truth within ourselves. All the characters in this book, like us, are searching for something, and in the process all are finding themselves. What we should all aspire to do is to continually question, to seek, to “not cease from exploration,” and ultimately, the result of our quest will be to see our original experiences and encounters in new and enlightened ways, to see now what we could not see then (whether due to lack of maturity, contemplation or experience) and to have a full understanding of our experience’s meaning.
Arguing With A Specialist
The trigger for this post was a quote from Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. Here’s the quote: “I learned a long time ago not to argue with specialist. But, history has a long line of specialists.” I have never liked the terms specialist and expert. Those are both relative terms. Both expertise and specialized should be viewed as processes instead of something you can achieve. If we keep doing something long enough, we’re bound to keep improving. Where I get worried is when we quit arguing with the experts and specialists. Actually, I was amazed as I went back through past blog posts how many times I have touched on this subject.
If we shift to a position of expertise and specializing as a process, we keep learning. Our mindset shifts to: I’m here to learn. Most of the people I know and respect who are considered experts and specialists are continuously learning, reading, practicing, trying. Each one of them is striving towards expertise. Anyone who calls themselves an expert is no expert. We need to be very careful of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Overestimating or underestimating our ability can both be disastrous. In one of my top five reads in 2021, Alien Thinking: The Unconventional Path To Breakthrough Ideas, we were reminded to “Approach things not as an expert, but as an explorer.” I’ve always been a critic of so called experts and this was a warning of the problem of acting like an expert. Authors Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade also posited that expert status can serve as blinders keeping us from exploring for the next way of doing what we are doing well now better or differently. I blogged about this in Be An Explorer, Not An Expert.
Let us not forget that expertise and specialization is a never-ending process where we keep striving to be better. Keep questioning and exploring for better ways.
Be An Explorer, Not An Expert
I am so glad I read the book, Alien Thinking: The Unconventional Path To Breakthrough Ideas. This book helped me further hone the alien that has always been in me for wild and creative thinking and innovation. In the book, authors Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade presented an incredible framework using ALIEN as an acronym. I highlighted the framework in What Will You Regret When You Are 80 Years Old? Another comment the authors made in the book that caused me to do further thinking was that we need to “Approach things not as an expert, but as an explorer.” I’ve always been a critic of so called experts and this was a warning of the problem of acting like an expert.
The problem of overconfidence and closed-mindedness in areas we believe we have expertise is all the more troubling because we so generally tend to credit ourselves and many times others with having more expertise than we really do. In Alien Thinking we were taught that discoverers know what they are looking for and then go out and find it, but explorers take chances by creating new things, and looking for what they don’t even know is there. The expert status can serve as blinders keeping us from exploring for the next way of doing what we are doing well now better or differently.
Those that know me well know that I love intersectional learning and learning from outside my own industry. Bouquet et al. argued there is great value in this as well. They posited that “Leaders thus need to think like explorers, become more adventurous and steal the essence of ideas from outside their industries…” Taking an expert frame of reference keeps us from looking for what is next. We need to be looking at industries outside our own and “stealing” ideas. I believe this is an issue particularly in education. There is not enough exploration happening in other industries to learn how to best educate. We can rely on our “outsider status” and being “adjacent outsiders” to learn and discover from others.
Byron's Babbles 
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