As I increasingly support my partner, and above all friend, Gilles, in his MVP SharePoint world, for all aspects of organizational transformation and management, particularly on Office365 (see Open Office365 Adoption), what strikes me is the importance of the blend between expertise and emergence. I knew it, but here, in this world of experts linked to large software solutions, it strikes me—the necessity of the dual approach is obvious.

However, one must understand that this dual approach mixes divergent or even opposing ways of doing things and therefore must be wielded appropriately.

Ferrari & mayonnaise

This calls upon the contexts of expertise and complexity. To take a telling example (from Edgar Morin? I’m not really sure anymore) we have on one side the Ferrari: we’ll know how to build it if we surround ourselves with the right person, the right people. Those who know how a Ferrari is built. We know that we’ll be able to do it if we find the right experts. The difficulty with experts is rather a) getting them to agree, making a decision at some point, and not too late b) not getting stuck in classic answers when the context has changed or expects different answers.

On the other side, it’s the emergent, complex side, it’s the mayonnaise. We’ll manage to make it, probably. Probably. At about this time, about. But nothing is certain and it will greatly depend on the context. In this complexity one must know how to wait for the right emergence and provoke lots of interactivity to enrich the collective reflection.

Office365, Atlassian, Liferay, etc

In all the large technical solutions that my colleagues at SmartView support, an adoption requires a clever blend of these different ingredients. In your adoptions it’s the same. If you leave the experts entirely in charge, and if I caricature: you’ll have a solution that works. As for knowing if it’s useful, adapted, that’s another story. Conversely if you leave emergence entirely in charge you’ll have a large capital of learning and adaptation. But often in these technical solutions errors or misunderstandings can lead to major limitations or major overhauls, if they’re not known at the right time (in advance = experience = expertise), it’s a shame, it costs.

Thus one must know how to marry the two worlds: an emergent adaptive approach that is framed by the experts. The experts are the constraints or the sources of information relating to the how, the container. You are the content. Naturally for this synergy to work it must advance at the same pace, in parallel. Thus again (and for many other reasons), adaptive cycles are necessary.

Expertise and emergence should not be opposed.

Expertise and emergence are complementary in many contexts.

Each of these worlds requires different responses and decisions (see for example this article on the different contexts).