I’m thrilled to be involved in an upcoming “Discovery Summit” on the Future of Expertise (June 29, 8-11am PDT -- join us!) I’m reading and contributing to the backgrounder ISSIP co-founder and board member, Dr. Jim Spohrer, is preparing. This pushes me to offer the following thoughts and hope you will comment below on areas you are most interested in seeing here and perhaps at the Discovery Summit. Know that this is the first of two Summits on the Future of Expertise; the second is scheduled for Sep 28, 2022. Some of the links below are to my colleagues’ and my prior work. Other links are to background research from other experts that I’m happy to have found.

Our Knowledge and Our Tools

In 2008, I took a look at BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device). This left me with a variety of questions. “How does this change our relationship with our employers?  Do we then become more valuable the better our technology?”

Video-Mediation of Expertise

In 2012 I wrote a piece wondering how we would value expertise shared from afar. It was triggered by a Polycom demo of new mobile video capabilities and an increased ability to partner across software and hardware. Use cases included medical experts being more accessible in smaller communities. 

Augmenting our Expertise with AI

My questions today focus on expertise either directly from artificial intelligence (AI) or as an augmentation of our human skills. Nitish Gupta and I track AI-supported tools for personal automation in an effort to help people with the bottom-up application of AI in their work. Utpal Mangla and I did a series of posts focused on gaining value from AI in our work.

Systems Savvy

My colleagues and I are preparing a deep review of the use, attitudes, and outcomes related to AI applications at the team level. An early observation is that systems savvy, “the capacity to see the interdependence of technological and social/organizational systems and to construct synergies between them,” is a critical human capability both for technology and work designers… so all of us. All of us need to be involved in the design of our work. We need to participate in work crafting.

Guilds

But where does the responsibility (and capability) lie for developing our expertise in our field of choice and, more specifically, expertise in how to design our work? As the precariousness of work (e.g., gig and contract work) gains attention, I often think about the value of a guild system. In 2015, Nathan Schneider wrote a New Yorker piece, The New Guilded Age. He describes guilds as, “associations of independent craftspeople, setting standards for their lines of work and cultivating lively subcultures around their labor.” He cites Wage Labor in Medieval Europe by Steven A. Epstein: “The members also swore an oath of loyalty to each other” - to include mutual protection and vengeance against non-payment.

Speaking of the gig economy, John Hagel (author of The Power of Pull and the forward to my book, The Plugged-In Manager) writes:

We’re going to begin to see impact groups forming and coming together into broader networks that will help them to learn even faster.

That’s where guilds come in. In Medieval times, guilds were a prominent way of organizing in urban areas to bring people together who were seeking to earn a living from a particular craft or trade. These guilds had many different roles, but a key one was to help their participants become better at their craft or trade. They were powerful learning organizations where participants learned through practice, rather than sitting in classrooms….

These guilds can play many different roles over time. One major role would be to provide the participants in their guilds with access to a variety of benefit programs like health care and life insurance that would be much more difficult to obtain as individuals. These guilds can also help to define and manage reputation systems that will help their participants to build a broader range of trust-based relationships. They can become rich environments for mutual aid among participants. [Perhaps including vengeance for non-payment?]

Tools

In some cases, apprentices would make their own tools as part of their education. This brings us back to human expertise and augmentation via automation/artificial intelligence. Are guilds a model in support of our learning to design our work and develop our tools? Are there generalizable skills (like systems savvy, though perhaps using my hopefully more catchy phrase, Thinking in 5T) that are better suited to general education? Is expertise a combination of our knowledge and our tools?

Some scholars think so. From Nicolini, D., Mørk, B. E., Masovic, J., & Hanseth, O. (2017): 

Human expertise always implies and presupposes some form of material or symbolic mediation (language being the mediatory tool par excellence). Through mediation, history, culture, institutions, and power are all concretely manifested in human action. Artifacts are thus not only integral in the accomplishment of expert activity, they are constitutive of expertise itself as they have the capacity to mediate onto the scene of action the history of achievements and learning, tracing and shaping their creation and refinement. In short, mediatory “tools” can be seen as accumulations of expertise that are then brought to bear on the activity that they help make possible.

Your Thoughts?

Thank you for pointing us in new directions and helping us focus on the topics above that are of most use to you. As Nicolini et al. (2017) say, “...we suggest that one would have good reasons for attributing expertise to the master and the center of excellence—as a collective entity.” I won’t claim to be a master in the study of expertise, but I know that collectively we’ll get further toward finding excellent applications in our work.

Post-Script: Guilds versus Unions

I’m early in my own thinking and I’m not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV). So I’ll only offer a link to an interesting piece describing modern guilds and unions in the entertainment industry.