When I encounter a "subject matter expert," I've now learned to assess if this person is a "knowledge holder," or a "learning individual." This is what informed that "learning." This came to my from a friend and neighbor who is a graduate of the University of Chicago in economics and spoke at this conference.
In our business - project and program management - there are lots of "knowledge" providers, assessors of knowledge, frameworks for measuring our knowledge. What is needed now is how to learn to make better decisions about our projects. This is not going to happen without a decision making framework for the core principles, practices, and processes for project management. The current Bodies of Knowledge, self-proclaimed providers of better BOKs and assessment tools, authors (I'm one of them), and experts in the field, all need to reassess what we are doing to increase the Learning abilities, beyond the just the possesion of knowledge and the dispensing of this knowledge to others.
How can we actually learn to improve our probability of succes. The Decision Scientist for project success - as suggested here - needs to have art, science, and the scale to provide actionable information for the decision makers for the project.
We have most of the data we need, what we don't do is make decisions on this data, or even know how to make decisions with this data. We report it, but don't use it to make decisions. Numbers matter, but leadership needs to use the numbers.
