Why Experts Notice Things You Don’t with Michael Henderson

Most people think experience is about knowing more. But what if its greatest gift is something else entirely?

In this excerpt from On Experience, corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson explains why experts don’t necessarily see more than everyone else.

If you’ve ever wondered why experienced people seem to spot opportunities, problems or patterns before everyone else, this conversation offers a fascinating perspective.

Edited Transcript

Michael Henderson: There’s a notion in anthropology that anthropologists see exactly the same as everyone else, but think something radically different about it.

What that is sort of suggests is everyone else might walk around Paris, for example, as a tourist and see the amazing architecture and the beautiful layout of the city, and the cobbled streets and cafes, the croissants and coffees, et cetera. Whereas an anthropologist might pick up on what is the meaning of the croissant.

And so we see the same thing that everyone else sees, but we’re, we’re thinking at a, I guess a different logical level around it. Like what is the meaning behind that, or what is the belief that is associated with croissants?

Is eating a croissant just a custom? Is it a religious ceremony? Is it a superstition? Right. So, straight away, when you come out of uni (university) and you venture into an alternative culture that’s not your own, we automatically have been disciplined to broaden our aperture, if we can use a clumsy photography kind of analogy. We’re already looking for more than what’s just obviously on display.

But to answer your question, what’s changed from the beginning to now? I would say, and I’m sure a lot of anthropologists would say the same thing, in the early days, I had to go and look for it.

Geoff McDonald: Oh, okay.

Michael Henderson: Right? So you go look for something that caught your attention for whatever reason, and then investigate into it. So that could mean sitting with the person eating the croissant and go, ‘Wow, this looks amazing. Tell me about your croissant. How often do you do that? Why croissant? There was a perfectly good looking bun over there. Why the croissant?’

And, you’d investigate almost into some of those layers around… But having done it for decades now, you almost have the deeper layers or the more subtle layers almost present themselves to you now as the obvious layer.