If you know of other books that should be on this list, I would love to hear from you.

/Joel

Reaching back in my memory, I remembered having a similar discussion about ‘virtual organizations‘ when I was doing a workshop for the Association for Creative Change in Organizational Renewal and Development (ACCORD) a number of years ago.  My observation at the time was that the participants attending the workshop came in two groups — small organizations wanting to understand how to use virtual organization structures to look big and big organizations wanting to understand how to use virtual organization frameworks to look small. An interesting contrast.

With this in mind, I thought about the same kind of contrast we see in expertise networking. Large organizations embrace some of the concepts associated with expertise networks and expertise management primarily from an internal point of view. But small / medium organizations (like ours) use expertise networks to expand their reach and to embrace expertise that may be external and to assemble capabilities on a project basis to help when needed. We use our expertise network to allow us to reach out to many different associates to assemble project teams for client work.

In sum, any organization can use these concepts effectively.

First, and on the cover, was a story about Ted Kennedy’s recent encounter with cancer titled “The Story Behind Kennedy’s Surgery“. Given his grave situation, Kennedy did what most of us cannot do – he convened a panel of experts from across the US (May 30th, 2008) and sought input (expertise) from the best experts he could assemble who had access to the latest research and treatments (knowledge). Here is a real life social example and application of expertise networking and expertise location. It turns out (or so the article alleges) that this approach to problems is a standard approach for the powerful Kennedy and illustrative of how he approached similar problems in the past.

Second, “Climate Experts Tussle Over Details. Public Gets Whiplash“  the author writes: “Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change.“. What interested me about this story was the notion that experts don’t always agree and the challenge we have as individual consumers of the knowledge-products they produce is how best to discern who to trust and what positions to adopt or follow.

Third, “Doctor and Patient, Now at Odds” deals head on with issues of trust. In the article, they point out that: “About one in four patients feel that their physicians sometimes expose them to unnecessary risk, according to data from a Johns Hopkins study published this year in the journal Medicine. And two recent studies show that whether patients trust a doctor strongly influences whether they take their medication.“. The short story:- when we trust physicians, we are more likely to follow their advice. Trust and credibility are paramount to the determination of whether an expert’s advice will be adopted and followed.

In some ways, this snapshot on one day of major newspaper shows the ubiquitous role of experts and expertise networks in our everyday lives. I would be interested to receive stories and case studies from anyone out there that are illustrative of expertise-in-action.