Couple of lunchtimes ago, I got soaked. My thin summer shirt clinging to me like an orphaned monkey.
In the morning I’d had a look at Metcheck, the online weather forecast. No rain for the whole week it said. Stupid thing.
When I got back to my computer, water dripping off the end of my nose and onto the keyboard, I had another look at Metcheck.
Cheltenham 2pm: 0.0mm rain. Stupid thing.
Not only couldn’t it get the future weather right, it couldn’t even get the current weather right. My shirt was a more accurate barometer than all the sophisticated trickery of Metcheck.
So you can’t always rely on computer expertise. How about human expertise?
Well, to choose a subject even more miserable than the weather, look at the global recession. Before, during and after, we turned to the brightest and best economists to tell us what was going on.
And they told us. Wrongly. In fact they made woefully inaccurate predictions over and over again. A child playing with alphabetti spaghetti would have made more sense.
Not that their blunders stopped the economists. They didn’t throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘To be honest, we haven’t a scooby’.
No, they just carried on getting it wrong. Job losses, economy shrinkage, size of debt, speed of recovery, interest rates, changes in stock markets – everything they could put a number to, they did. The wrong number.
In fact, there’s plenty of hard scientific evidence showing that experts in any field can make bad decisions precisely because they’re experts. Or rather, because being expert makes them over-confident in their own judgement.
You’ve probably seen it yourself: people who get to a level of experience and expertise, they really believe they know it all.
They stop learning. They stop questioning. Because they’ve seen it all, done it all.
But in rapidly-changing areas like marketing, communications and fundraising, that’s a big mistake.
Of course, the benefit of calling upon an expert – someone who’s spent many years specialising in their field – should be that they know more than you about that subject.
I, for example, probably know more about charity copywriting than you do. Because I’ve spent the last 15 years working at it, learning as much as I can about it, striving to get better and better at it.
Whereas you, presumably, have done something far more interesting with your time.
But the best experts are those who know they don’t know everything.
People who are willing to take a leap of faith and try something new. To challenge conventional wisdom once in a while. Because they’re the people who make the big breakthroughs and, once in a while, create new wisdom.
Don’t rely on the ones who always think they know best, whose views are utterly entrenched and who aren’t willing to try something new.
Or you’re likely to get drenched.
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