Discover | Reflection

Persky and Robinson talk about the downside of expertise. Other writers call this the “curse of knowledge.” Can you think of a time when you as expert tried to explain a topic or process to a novice and struggled with how to break down the multiple parts that make up your understanding? How did you address that challenge?

I spent five years at a legal tech company (Everlaw) and by the end, I knew the platform backwards and forwards, I was an expert. When I spoke to clients or developed material, I easily understood the broader implications of their questions and was always able to diagnose and correct the errors they were experiencing, even if they didn't give me the full details of what was happening technically. I felt like I instinctively knew the content. 

I now understand that experts construct patterns of thinking which allow them to more easily scaffold new information, thereby processing it faster than novices. In that regard, there are a lot of barriers removed when you're an expert; it feels like an organic understanding that arises when a new situation comes up where knowledge needs to be applied. I found this easily in my work with more experienced and complex clients.

But over time, in my client-facing interactions, I found myself less able to relate to novice learners who were brand new to the industry and/or product. In early days of working at Everlaw I had my own experience as a novice clearly in mind, and I used it to empathetically relate to clients, demonstrate certain areas or mechanisms of the software with more detail, and skip over certain topics that I knew were too complex to include in an introductory training.

In the course of my studies at HES I created learner profiles about Everlaw’s client base. One thing that kept coming up was that these learners were extremely competitive in their work, and therefore very reluctant to talk about mistakes or misunderstandings. I had to re-evaluate my approach to training with a fresh emphasis on empathy and scaffolding. What did it mean for a user to be a novice- what were they able to do? What about someone with a mid-tier level of experience? How did the way I talked about document review and production tools differ for these groups? And what did I know that was so different from the other users- how was my expertise helping me?

On my team at Everlaw, there were several strategies we used to communicate with new users- we kept a living document of the best ways to approach different topics, we had a new user page, we created several short videos for them specifically. We had many questions we asked at the outset of our meetings to gauge where our learners were (because they were on-demand requested meetings, and we didn’t have the same learners day by day). We had to be comfortable adjusting on the fly.

As far as communicating the knowledge schemas I held as an expert, I ended up creating several PDF resources for clients that translated the ways I thought about a number of focuses: what the best way to decide how to use the production tool was going to be, how to choose what kind of upload the user had and what that meant, etc.

It was haphazard, our approaches to dealing with the differences between ourselves as experts and clients as novices. It’s a big reason why I’m at HGSE- I want to better understand how to be more deliberate in my learning design so that it’s effective and efficient.