The four kinds of experts and why you shouldn’t trust them

Social media is full of experts. They all have opinions. But should you hire them for their expertise, and should you trust them to help you make decisions?

The 2×2 shown here is a good way to think about them and their strengths and weaknesses. In the descriptions below, I refer to their “space”: the domain in which you’d like to tap their expertise, such as AI, customer experience, or low-code.

Start with the Wannabes. They’re unknown and invisible and don’t yet know what they’re doing. Some of them are junior members of consultant teams, but you shouldn’t hire them on their own until they have studied the thing for which you need expertise for at least five years.

The Thoughtfluencer is a professional blabbermouth. Right now they’re opining about AI, but they have very little practical experience with how the technology is used in actual practices. These same people were posting about blockchain a few years back, and mobile a few years before that. They are expert at creating debate and noise and might actually give a good speech, but you’d be making a mistake hiring them to advise you; they started learning about the field you need help with around the same time you did.

The Quiet Expert has been beavering away in this field for a decade or more. They spent their time learning and working on challenges like the one that faces you, and you could learn a lot from them. The problem is finding them. Because they focus on their work, not on their visibility, they cast a very small shadow. If you know somebody who worked with one of these folks, consider hiring them on your buddy’s recommendation. They do tend to have a weakness, though; since they have very little exposure to the general (ignorant) population in their space, their thinking may have become outdated.

The Thought Leader (yeah, I know, but what else should we call them) has been working in this space for many years and is highly visible. They tend to be the ones giving keynote speeches at major conferences, publishing influential articles in places like Harvard Business Review Online, and making the occasional long post on LinkedIn. They’re the real deal. But you’d be remiss is you didn’t ask, “How did they get the time to do all that?” The answer is, they likely have helpers who are either ghostwriting the public posts and articles that you see, or helping them do the consulting work. In other words, they’re part of a thought leadership team. And that means if you hire them, you may be working with their junior partners, because the highly visible thought leader is busy doing other things — and charging you an insane hourly rate if you do get to work with them.

Take another approach: challenge yourself

One of the biggest challenges with everyone on this chart is they’re often wrong. If they’re visible, they’re biased towards writing about the latest fashions, even if the actual change based on those trends isn’t nearly hear yet. If they’re not visible, they’re likely not keeping up.

You’d like the expert to tell you what to do. But that’s the wrong approach.

The expert is going to help you decide what to do.

Tap their expertise to inform your decisions. Tap into their resources and data. Allow them to make you smarter. Then make the decisions and take the action yourself.

You might think experts who don’t tell you what to do are expensive waste. Nope. Experts who help you decide what to do are an incredible resource.

So what matters most is not the degree of their expertise, nor the degree of their visibility, but their ability to bring knowledge and expertise to the decision you are considering.

That’s a different mindset. And it tells you what’s worth paying for.