"With the benefit of hindsight, political scientists say they were not all that surprised by the result of today's election."
[from The New York Times]
Ah. Yes. Exactly! With the benefit of hindsight, everything is predictable. For example, with that tiny little crutch of hindsight, I successfully predicted not only the exact date on which the Berlin Wall fell, but also the rise, fall, and rise again of several important computer companies - and I promise to keep you abreast of further developments by predicting new events immediately after they happen.
You'll also be pleased to know that I plan to pay particular attention to the contest between Netscape and Microsoft, and will be making an astonishing prediction on that subject - as soon as the news breaks and I find out what it is.
In expert prediction as in the well-lived life, timing is everything. Events first, predictions second. It is not important to be first with a prediction, it's only important to be "right" so that you can demonstrate your expertise.
But demonstrating your expertise nowadays is easier said than done, because the nature of expertise has been evolving exponentially (to use a word of which experts are fond). For example, Nicholas Murray Butler's famous adage - that an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less - is Old Think. Don't try to know more and more about less and less - unless you want to end up on the garbage heap of Consultantdom. The current trend in punditry is to know less and less about less and less. (You can test this by asking an expert for some expert advice. Let me know what you learn from that experiment.)
In any event, the main thing to understand about successful punditry is that there are three different levels of Expertise.
The first is the rather mundane "Nicholas Murray Butler" level, at which the subject matter has shrunk but not the energy of the expert studying it. The expert is still flailing absurdly to know more and more about some little twit of a subject, fit only for a Ph.D. dissertation. Usually an absurd waste of time, as everyone (everyone!) knows.
At the second - or "post-modern" - level, the expert has finally (duh!) begun to realize that nobody in the universe knows or cares what the expert knows, so it doesn't matter a fig whether the expert knows more and more - or less and less; and so the expert, whose foolishness is not total, opts wisely for the latter strategy. It's good work, and carries prestige. So why not?
Yet it is no resting place for the truly ambitious: for visionaries who want to change the world. Or if not the world, at least the language. One successful consultant based in the management school of a prestigious American university boasts of having created "a new lexicon" for talking about change. Well, as I'm sure you'll agree, that is an extremely impressive accomplishment. Yes, indeed. Creating new words for change is hard, dirty, thankless work, and takes somebody with grit to just roll up his sleeves and get the job done, damn it! The more pedestrian chores - e.g., creation of successful new organizations - can be deferred to the non-experts of the world, who lack the imagination and sheer, gutsy drive to create new lexicons!
But it is only at the third level of expertise that the expert reaches a condition approaching the sublime. That is when the expert knows less and less about - nothing at all. When you get to this stage, you are ready to write that best seller on management that's bottled up inside you. You may call your book Management By Taking Charge, or Management By Letting Go, or Management By The Ten Commandments, or Management By The Seven Deadly Sins. It doesn't matter what you call it and doesn't matter what you say in it, because on level 3 you have entered consultancy at its sweetest level, where the head is cool and spiritual and entirely empty. At this level, you are talking about nothing whatsoever. You are spouting gibberish. And you are well-paid. And you are laughing, laughing, laughing.
As you may suspect, this is the level that I have recently achieved, after having finally purged myself of all the intellectual baggage I accumulated from too many years of schooling, working and hanging out. Having replaced every fact I ever knew with an opinion, I can now speak easily and expertly about computers, history, politics, education, or anything at all. I am now completely cool. Way cool. I'm so cool, I can even (like all the people in the technology elite!) speak using the way cool lexicon of nine-year-old boys.
In fact, my only serious problem is that I still know a bit too much (that awful word "know"!) about various completely useless, obsolete things - such as how to write complete sentences and where punctuation marks are supposed to go. What a drag. Literally. Oh, well, figuratively. You see what I mean? That kind of so-called "knowledge" does nothing but slow down the flow!
Which may be the right title for my new book on management theory: Management By Slowing The Flow (or, Taking Charge And Letting Go Using STF).
Oh, damn. I wish I hadn't told you that. Now some wannabe expert out there is going to take my STF management technique and run with it right onto the speaker circuit and make the bundle that should have been mine. I just wish I could completely erase that last sentence. However, I can't find the delete key, and my technical support specialist (a Level 2 Expert) has no specific knowledge of, training on, or interest in this particular keyboard I'm using, and refuses to answer questions about it. Maybe instead of getting an expert or visionary I need to look for someone who actually knows something - someone like a good administrative assistant.
And maybe we should conduct a national survey to determine whether people actually know more than they're letting on. I promise you this: with the benefit of hindsight, I won't be surprised by the results.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. gehl@educom.edu