“Knowledge can be a double-edged sword when it comes to creativity. While knowledge in a domain facilitates action and work in the domain, it can also constrain from thinking outside the domain.” — Manu Kapur
I’ve just returned from speaking for Mastercard, who kindly invited me to join them for VIP access at Monza to celebrate their sponsorship of McLaren. As often happens when I’m prepping for The Innovation Show, serendipity struck. I was reading Manu Kapur’s work on productive failure for this week’s episode, during the episode, we spoke about the trap of expertise. It reminded me how expertise can sharpen vision in one area yet blind us in another. And standing at Monza, I thought of one of my favourite stories from Italian automotive history…
After WWII, Ferruccio Lamborghini turned deserted war machines into tractors and built a thriving business. Lamborghini was also a passionate Ferrari owner. However, after experiencing repeated problems with Ferrari clutches, he believed he had a way to improve them. He requested a meeting with Enzo Ferrari. The meeting didn’t go well. Enzo dismissed him with a sneer:
“You stick to making tractors, and I’ll make cars.” — Enzo Ferrari
Lamborghini with his Tractor: Image Public Domain
It was the classic expert’s blind spot. Ferrari assumed his mastery of racing cars put him beyond challenge. But overconfidence and expertise is a fragile shield. From that clash of perspectives was born one of the world’s most iconic automotive brands.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see what an insider cannot — or will not.
This is something Manu Kapur reminded me of in the latest episode of The Innovation Show. He shared work by Adriaan de Groot on chess grandmasters.
Brittle When the Board Changes
Simpsons
In 1946, Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot ran a simple but revealing experiment. He showed chess grandmasters and lesser-skilled players authentic mid-game chess positions for just a few seconds, then took the board away and asked them to reconstruct it from memory. The grandmasters were astonishing: they could reproduce the board almost perfectly. Lesser players, even though not novices, could not come close.
The secret wasn’t a superhuman memory. It was pattern recognition. Grandmasters don’t see 32 individual pieces; they see familiar shapes, clusters, and strategies drawn from thousands of hours of play. Their expertise allows them to see meaning where others see fragments.
But here’s the twist. When the board was randomised (pieces scattered in ways that could never happen in a real game) the grandmasters’ advantage disappeared. Their near-perfect recall collapsed. Faced with randomness, they performed no better than the rest. Their expertise was useless without familiar structure.
This is the curse of expertise. The very knowledge that makes you brilliant in a stable, well-defined system can blind you when the rules change. Experts don’t necessarily see more — they see differently. And when the familiar patterns vanish, so does their edge.
This blindness doesn’t just belong to chess masters. It shows up in medicine too.
The Gorilla in the Lung
Gorilla in the Scan
In my workshops, I share the fascinating work of Dr Trafton Drew. In 2013, he asked 24 expert radiologists to examine CT scans for signs of lung cancer. Without their knowledge, he inserted the image of a gorilla — forty-eight times larger than a tumour — into one of the scans.
Over 80% of the radiologists missed it, even though eye-tracking showed many had looked directly at the gorilla. Their expertise had tuned their vision so precisely to detect small, round nodules that something incongruous, even something as large as a gorilla, was invisible.
As Drew put it, “Part of the reason radiologists are so good at what they do is that they are very good at narrowly focusing their attention. The cost is that they’re subject to missing other things, even really obvious large things like a gorilla.”
Expertise sharpens vision — but it can also narrow it. Just as radiologists miss gorillas when focused on nodules, so too experts miss the future when locked into their theories.
The Dart-Throwing Chimpanzee
Dart Chimp
“The average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee”. — Philip Tetlock
Over a twenty-year study, psychologist Philip Tetlock collected 80,000 forecasts from experts in politics, economics, and technology. The results were blunt: “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee” .
But within that noise, Tetlock found a signal: a subset of people he called superforecasters. They weren’t the most famous pundits or narrow specialists. They were curious generalists who updated often, admitted mistakes, and treated their judgments as probabilities, not certainties.
Borrowing Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor, Tetlock distinguished the hedgehogs, who know “one big thing” and stick to it, from the foxes, who know “many little things” and adapt. His data was clear: “Foxes beat hedgehogs. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.”
And at the heart of this fox-like mindset was humility. As Tetlock put it, “The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt — the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes. This is true for fools and geniuses alike. So it’s quite possible to think highly of yourself and be intellectually humble. In fact, this combination can be wonderfully fruitful. Intellectual humility compels the careful reflection necessary for good judgment; confidence in one’s abilities inspires determined action..”
Only when expertise is paired with humility does foresight improve.
Outfoxing Your Expertise
Hedgehog Expert
“I have never had much use for specialists. They’re inclined to argue why you can’t do something while our emphasis has always been to make something out of nothing.” — Sony co-founder Masura Ibuka
When we become experts, our brains adapt to do certain tasks effortlessly. The tradeoff is that by strengthening some connections, we weaken others. What makes us skilled also makes us narrow like the hedgehog.
Japanese psychologists Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki captured this trade-off in their distinction between routine expertise and adaptive expertise. Routine experts thrive in stable, predictable environments. They are precise and efficient, but brittle when the context shifts. Adaptive experts, in contrast, can take knowledge into new domains. Their edge comes not from efficiency alone but from flexibility — forged through variation, struggle, and even failure.
Harvard’s Karim Lakhani found something similar in analysing InnoCentive’s open innovation contests. Problem-solvers whose expertise was six degrees removed from the challenge domain were three times more likely to solve it than insiders. Outsiders weren’t weighed down by the patterns of “what usually works.”
One striking case involved a famous potato chip company, known for its stacked crisps, that faced a challenge: how to remove excess oil from crisps without breaking them.
Experts tried every method they could imagine. All of them led to too much breakage. Then the problem was reframed and shared with a global crowd. The winning solution came from an unlikely source. A violinist from the New York Philharmonic! She suggested using sound waves to shake the oil off, noting that the frequencies of oil and crisps would differ, making it possible to separate the two without damage.
Her solution worked. By inviting outside perspectives, the company solved an inside problem that had previously seemed intractable.
That’s why platforms like Innocentive became so powerful: they brought adaptive perspectives to problems stuck in routine ruts. (And fittingly, InnoCentive itself was later acquired by Wazoku (thanks Simon Hill) — a former sponsor of The Innovation Show — who continue to champion the same ethos: innovation doesn’t emerge from defending the centre, but from empowering the edges.)
Being an expert is honourable. But when the board changes, survival belongs not to those who cling to patterns past, but to those who adapt, explore, and stay humble enough to see with new eyes.
Join us soon on the latest episode of The Innovation Show as I speak with Manu Kapur about his groundbreaking book Productive Failure and the trap of expertise.
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The Curse of Expertise: Why Experts Fail When Rules Change was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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