6 February 2021 | New Scientist | 41>I
F ROGER KNEEBONE is an expert, he has
spread his expertise widely. Trained as
a medical doctor, he spent many years
working as a trauma surgeon in the township
of Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa, at
the height of apartheid, before returning to
the UK to become a general practitioner in
rural Wiltshire.
Now in his third career as a professor
of surgical education at Imperial College
London, he has been at the forefront of many
innovations aimed at widening the scope of
influences that students are exposed to. These
include setting up a Centre for Performance
Science with the neighbouring Royal College
of Music and helping to devise the Chemical
Kitchen project, which exposes chemistry
undergraduates to lab skills through the
“non-threatening” parallel of cooking.
Kneebone has also tried his hand at many
extracurricular activities, from flying light
aeroplanes and learning to juggle to building
harpsichords – with varying degrees of success,
he freely admits. He recently wrote a book,Expert: Understanding the path to mastery.
Drawing on the experiences of people from
musicians to magicians and tailors to
taxidermists – and some scientific and medical
experts for good measure – it examines the
ubiquitous, but understudied, process of
becoming an expert.Richard Webb: Experts are very much in the
public eye at the moment.
Roger Kneebone: I finished writing the book
just before the UK’s March covid-19 lockdown
began. But now more than ever we need to think
about how we make use of the most valuable
aspect of expertise – the wisdom based on
experience that allows people to give sensible
guidance about what to do and what not to do.
My motivations in writing the book were to ask
what does “being an expert” mean and where
does that expertise come from?So what does being an expert mean?
That’s actually a surprisingly tough one
RO to answer. Broadly, it means that you are
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demonstrably extremely good at what you do,
having spent a long time learning your craft;
that you can pass your knowledge on to other
people; and that you are recognised by other
people as being extremely good at what you do.
But there are complications. For a start,
people often underestimate their own level
of expertise and others might recognise you
as an expert in ways you don’t yourself. So you,
for example, have a background in physics,
right? You might be regarded by some as an
expert in physics, or you might be regarded
by others as an expert in putting together a
magazine. But there’s a chance you don’t
entirely see it that way.
Often there’s a social judgement involved,
too: we think of brain surgeons or fighter
pilots or concert pianists as having greater
expertise than mechanics or plasterers or
plumbers. We often overlook the experts
all around us who don’t occupy very high
positions in this hierarchy or whose area
of expertise isn’t regarded as “important”.
That’s a great mistake.