How do you check if your assumptions are true or not? Even the best experts in the most critical of situations can fail to check assumptions.

Take the incident at NASA, known as ‘the scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history.’ On July 16th, 2013, Luca Parmitano and his fellow astronaut Chris Cassady went out on their second spacewalk together. 45 minutes in, Parmitano felt water at the back of his head. He didn’t know where it was coming from. The command was given to terminate the spacewalk early.

When was the last time you questioned an expert’s view or opinion? The status that comes with being perceived as ‘an expert’ can lead to expertise never being questioned and blindly followed, even when it leads to life and death outcomes.

Expertise can’t always help us make wiser decisions. Sometimes, it actually gets in our way. This happens if we trip up on the details we’ve cherry picked out as being important, at the expense of the bigger picture.

Spotting what seems a little strange can be important. We are far better at spotting patterns than we are at spotting the little things that don’t fit the patterns. We can struggle to recognise the importance of inconsistencies, outliers and anomalies.

When we are an expert in something we can become trapped by our own expertise, entrenched in old routes and reassured by what we have known to be true in the past. It has been described by some as the ‘curse of knowledge’, and it can hinder us exploring new ways of doing things.

When we have expertise and face a situation we've seen before we often instantly spot what to do and how to do it. Experts are typically experts precisely because they spot relevant patterns that other people don’t, or are quicker than others to spot them.

However, this doesn't mean the expert, who is able to rapidly jump straight to the best solution, is good at sharing the rationale behind this or helping others learn from the situation.

Rubber ducking is a concept that is likely to be most familiar to those in the computer programming world as a way to help debug codes. The term comes from a story in the book ‘ The Pragmatic Programmer'* in which a programmer carries around a rubber duck and forces themselves to explain their code line-by-line to the duck, with the aim of helping find the bugs.

Even if we don’t write code, many of us will have had the experience of explaining a problem out loud, only to be hit by an idea for a solution part way through. Somehow, simply talking the problem out loud and in detail helps get to a new idea.

Ever been in the scenario where the opinion of most senior person in the room tramples over everything else regardless of what others think or what the evidence suggests? In this case you're at the mercy of the Hippo.

The Hippo is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Avinash Kaushik first coined the term in his book ‘Web Analytics: An Hour a Day', to describe how people respond when there’s a lack of data. His observation was that when the person with the highest status gives their view, what they say goes.

When asking others for their expert opinion and advice, be sure to sense-check what makes their experience relevant to your situation, NOT how confident they are in their view. 

If their expert intuitions are not based on relevant past experience, they may be drawing on assumptions which are out of date or misguided.