The disturbing yet inspiring statistics of expertise

Here’s a quick story about what landscaping can teach us about expertise. Quick, because it’s not possible to make a landscaping story interesting.

A few years ago, we redid our yard. A landscape designer with over 10 years of experience drew up a design, picked out all the species of plants that would go everywhere, and had a team of great and incredibly hard-working people install everything.

Fast forward 6 months later… Patches of grass and several plants are dead.

We walk around the yard together one afternoon and I ask them what happened.

“Yeah, this species can’t really grow here with all of these tree roots. And that grass can’t grow in the shade. And that plant over there can’t tolerate all of the direct sunlight it gets.”

“Well,” I said as kindly as I could, “these tree roots have been here for 15 years, that shade is coming from a hundred year old oak tree that I am pretty sure was here 6 months ago, and the spot with those plants that can’t tolerate sun has always been in the sun and always will be in the sun as it traces roughly the same arc it has for a few billion years.”

When you’re an expert in something, it means in practical terms that you increase the percentage of good decisions while also decreasing likelihood of mistakes. To pull that off, experts use the information the world gives them to tilt odds and increase the likelihood of a good outcome. This seems obvious, but what people rarely understand is just how big of a deal this is.

Nobody is perfect, including experts. All experts make mistakes. If you are a landscaping expert who gets 90% of your decisions right, that would be pretty good, right? But if you had to make 10 decisions, you statistically only have about a 35% chance of getting all 10 decisions right at that level of expertise.

These are the disturbing statistics of expertise. That people so good at something can be so prone to mistakes over the course of a complex set of decisions or a multifaceted project. But the inspiring statistics are what we see when we compare the expert to the amateur. If we were to take someone whose chances of making good decisions were closer to 50/50, what is their chance of getting all 10 decisions right?

0.0977%.

The amateur isn’t just a little worse than the expert. The amateur is a guaranteed failure. The expert is over 356 times more likely to succeed than the amateur.

We see the experts make mistakes and we think that makes them just like us. It makes us believe we are able to create plans and make decisions with similar ability. Unfortunately, when it comes to real life where getting something big right can only happen when you get lots of little things right, amateurs don’t have a prayer compared to the expert.

If I had designed my yard, it would have been a guaranteed disaster. I would have no clue what plants can handle shade, sun, roots, moisture, or anything else. I am a plant amateur. A coin flip would be a better way to pick plants than me, and that coin has practically zero chance of success.

Where mistakes come from

There are two kinds of mistakes we can make. First, you have mistakes that come from not properly using what you knew ahead of time. Second, there are mistakes that come from what you didn’t know or couldn’t know ahead of time.

Non-experts like landscaper Evan have two disadvantages. First, we are unable to properly use the information we know ahead of time. Second, non-experts don’t even know what to know ahead of time. We don’t even know that shade is something we should have taken note of and drawn on our plan. So when we learn something new from our mistakes, we are learning beginner’s fundamentals, not expert nuance. When experts learn from their mistakes, they are learning nuance, and their ability to refine their plans on the fly is hundreds of times better than the amateur’s.

Map making, or cartography, is what experts in all fields are great at, at least in a metaphorical sense. Non-experts don’t know how to draw good maps, and that’s why they don’t know how to make good plans. To create a good plan, you have to have a good map. To create a good map, you have to know what to look for and record about the world. The more detailed your map, the more likely your plan will fit and harmonize with reality. The more amateurish your map, the more likely your plan will miss or conflict with reality.

And it’s in the maps that the experts have an incalculable advantage over the amateur, even when it’s not obvious. They know what information to get, and they know how to use that information, even in deeply nuanced circumstances that only experience and wisdom can discern. Experts are vastly superior cartographers.

And here’s the last thing I’ll say about landscaping: this is why I (and you) should get pretty upset with an expert when the reason plants die is because an expert drew an amateurish map that did not capture obvious, knowable things.

In the real world…

…things are much more complex. Our business lives aren’t as clear cut as this example, but the same principles still apply. We still need to learn what we can about the world, draw maps, and then draw our plans on top of those maps.

When I’m not in my yard, I spend the rest of my time talking to businesses about how to design more successful products, more successful marketing campaigns, more successful sales strategies, more successful customer success strategies, and become great with all of their swirling tornadoes of data.

Product, marketing, sales, and customer success are all about drawing great maps, at their core. Great products are great because they understand and harmonize with the real world, leveraging reality in ways that make things easier, faster, or less error-prone for people. Great marketing is great because it understands the psychologies and needs of the customer base: messages are crafted to harmonize with the topography of a real audience, not a fantasy.

Sometimes, my work feels similar to my landscaping issues as we discuss dried up marketing campaigns, customers starving for sunlight, and products that are brown and lifeless. In the vast majority of these cases, plans were created on either amateurish maps missing loads of obvious detail. Even worse, plans were drawn on blank sheets (instead of maps) in an effort to draw plans that perfectly suit ourselves without any real attempt at understanding the world outside.

What you get from experts, whether you hire them internally or externally, are extraordinary cartographers and navigators. They know what to look for, and they know how to use information in ways that make you hundreds or thousands of times more likely to succeed.

Experts and Mistakes

Let’s be clear. Expert maps aren’t perfect. They’re just a lot better than amateur maps.

Experts will always have blank areas that represent the unknown and unknowable. The only people with perfect maps are frauds. Even though these unknowns might worry you at first, know that you’re 356 times better off sailing into uncharted territory with an expert than you would be if you were sailing using a map made by an amateur or a fraud.

Don’t underestimate the advantage you create for yourself when working with expert colleagues and partners. You need your odds of success to be 356 times higher in today’s complex world.

P.S.

Can anyone recommend a good landscaper?