When expertise becomes our achilles heel

Ruth Brown
Design Lead, ANZ Bank
Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Speaker bio:

Ruth loves people. She has spent much of her career understanding how people think, feel and behave. She cares a lot about making things that make people’s lives better. Her first love was engineering, until she realised that people were more interesting than maths. On a good day she gets to do both.

Ruth is a freelance researcher and design leader. She currently works in the design team at ANZ. In the past she has been GM of Design Research at Xero and Head of User Experience at Trade Me.

Talk description:

We all want to be experts in what we do right? We train, we practice, we keep learning. We even do 10,000 hours of something believing it will make us an expert.

But what if our ‘expertise’ actually comes with some pretty big downfalls. What if experts can be less creative and innovative than their less experienced counterparts? What if they lack flexibility and can be more prone to error?

In this talk, we talk about the paradox of expertise, how it shows up in design (and especially design research), and most importantly what we can do about it.