Sternberg: Four Types of Experts

Whenever experts use, apply, implement, or put into practice, in any way, the knowledge or skills of their craft, they are being a Practical Experts.

This applies to all industries and disciplines. Whenever a programmer writes software, whenever a lawyer prepares a legal contract, and whenever a dermatologist treats a patient, they are being practical experts. The practical expert is the doer, the person who gets things done.

Practical experts can often be identified by the questions that are asked of them. If the questions start with “how” then it is likely a practical expert that is being sought. How do you set up this firewall? How can we migrate this system? How can I eliminate a medication through adjustments in my diet? Etc.

The practical expert is also judged by results—delivery.

Some organizations employ subject matter experts purely for the delivery of their complex solutions and systems. In these cases, the expert is often brought involved in meetings solely to help people understand how the organization will accomplish a task. In many instances, this is enough.

Many disasters have been averted by the practical expert. Their value is often immense, but the practical expert is often the starting place for corporate subject matter experts. When a professional is solely a practical expert they are often seen as the order taker, the stagehand. They do what other people need done, and often not much more.

The practical expert is not concerned with what solution will be implemented, nor why the solution is being implemented. What the practical expert does care about, however, is that a solution will be implemented at all.

If you want something done, and done right, then you want a practical expert. But if you don’t know what to do, in the first place, then you need a different type of expert altogether.

An Analytical Expert analyzes, judges, critiques and evaluates. The analytical expert is focused on taking an idea and operationalizing it. Art, music, and literary critics need to be powerfully analytical in their work. Athletic coaches, for example, need to figure out the strengths of their teams and they need to find the weaknesses of opposing teams.

A musical conductor needs to know why the sound of an orchestra is not what it should be, and how to change the sound as needed. In a situation involving finance or information systems the analytical expert is the one who defines the requirements. The analytical expert is a master at eliciting requirements, determining acceptance criteria, and defining testing thresholds.

An analytical expert seeks comprehensive details, filters relevant and irrelevant factors, interprets information and finds appropriate solutions.

The analytical expert is often the first to think about a problem through the lens of the scientific method. They form a hypothesis, define experimentation, perform observations, measure, and test. In short, the Analytical Expert is the expert with the critical eye. Frequently, they are also seen as the nay-sayer or pessimist. The role of the analytical expert is critically important, but when the role is accentuated, it can be interpreted as the opposite of creativity and vision.

Creative expertise is what one uses when one creates, invents, imagines, supposes, or discovers. Creativity involves the production of ideas, products, or services that are novel, new, surprising, compelling, and unique.

Creative Expertise is often a valued characteristic for SMEs who participate in the sales process because they thrive on the possibilities and on ingenuity. They fill the creative vacuum whenever it appears and they offer alternatives to problems, often multiple alternatives to problems.

The creative expert is highly curious and rarely constrained. The creative expert has a habit of combining disparate items, changing prevailing perspectives, and challenging long-held assumptions.

The creative expert exaggerates and deprecates, accelerates and decelerates, enlarges and minimizes. Sometimes simultaneously. The creative expert is not afraid of change.

With experience, patience, and perseverance an expert may become wisdom-based. Wisdom-based expertise transcends other types of expertise and seeks the common good.

Wisdom-based experts don’t just answer what is to be done, or how something should be done. They confront questions of why something is to be done at all. The wise expert is ethical and is able to balance his or her own interests with the interests of others, as well as with the interests of larger entities. The wise expert gives recommendations that benefit all parties for the long term. The wise expert sees things at the macro level and can relate to the Fortune 500 CEOs and the global heads of state. The wisdom-based expert understands context and anticipates the implications of actions and decisions.

Sternberg states that all four types of expertise have foundational pre-requisites. He points to two.

First, Sternberg indicates that knowledge is an essential ingredient to all four types of expertise, "You cannot think in any meaningful way” he says, “If you lack the knowledge to think with."

Second, Sternberg states that passion is important to the development of valuable expertise. "Past models, including my own, have underestimated the role of passion. Passion is what makes the expression of everything else even possible."