Food for Thought - is Expertise an Illusion (or even a DE-LUSION?)

In the most recent edition of IREM's Journal of Property Management, a thought provoking article "Expertise and the Illusion of Knowledge" took the position that a person's Expertise, and in our case specifically Property Management Expertise, can REDUCE the quality of your decision making and the accuracy of your work.  How, you may ask?  The article defend its thesis by citing a book published in the last few years by Dr. Atul Gawande called The Checklist Manifesto.  Dr. Gawande argued that the same concepts that prevent errors by pilots, the extensive pre-flight checklist, should be adopted by medical professionals, specifically surgeons, as a way to reduce medical errors that have the potential to ruin lives.  Surgeons pushed back hard.  Look at their long training, their cumulative skill, their EXPERTISE!!! they said.  Who could question that they know what they're doing???  Yet Dr. Gawande provided lots of research that supported his checklist argument, not the surgeons expertise argument...sorry about that.

So if it's good enough for pilots, and if eventually medical practitioners begin to implement checklists to improve the accuracy of their life saving work, why on earth wouldn't  real estate professionals, and again, specifically Property Managers, also buy into the idea of improving our work through checklists?  I can't think of a single reason why not.  I completely agree that we consider ourselves "experts" at our peril, that we should always question what we think we know.  Only by doing that can we truly grow our expertise.

I can also think of times when sometimes there is no right answer, and when we have to find a creative solution.  In that case, expertise may carry us through.  In addition, those of us who are in the property management trenches every day know that it's hard to find time to work "ON" the business (i.e. create the checklists), not just "IN" the business.  I can just hear our customer's saying:  "So what, do it anyway."  And I agree, and so we do, through our huddles, our ongoing training, and yes, the checklists we have so far.  Are we perfect?  Hardly.  Are we perfectly committed to improvement?  Absolutely.

The Checklist Manifesto:  How to Get Things Right is available here at Amazon