I used to assume expertise was mostly protective. More experience, sharper instincts, better reads on a situation — surely that adds up to fewer mistakes when a hard problem shows up.
Turns out expertise cuts the other way just as often. The sharper someone’s pattern recognition, the faster they substitute the actual, difficult question for an easier one they already know how to answer — and the more convincingly they execute the wrong answer once they’ve made the swap. Nobody’s watching for it, because it doesn’t look like a mistake. It looks like competence.
What actually surprised me wasn’t that finding. It was realizing why the swap happens in the first place. I’d assumed reframing a problem was just a discipline — a mental habit you build, like remembering to floss. It isn’t. It’s genuinely uncomfortable, in a way that’s wired into us rather than trained out of laziness. Facing a situation with no clear shape and no guaranteed outcome makes people nervous, full stop, and the fastest exit from that nervousness is deciding you already understand it. Framing isn’t hard because people are careless. It’s hard because it asks you to stay somewhere your biology wants you to leave immediately.
That’s the part that makes this fault line harder to teach than it looks.
Because here’s the uncomfortable implication: there’s no clean rule for when to frame and when to just act. Sometimes the fast, obvious answer is exactly right — the system’s well-designed, the problem’s genuinely simple, overthinking it wastes everyone’s time. Sometimes it’s a perfectly good IT infrastructure getting torn out and replaced at a cost of a couple of million dollars, solving nothing. There’s no formula that tells you, in the moment, which one you’re standing in front of. As someone who coaches people through exactly these situations, that “it depends” answer makes me nervous. I’d love to hand people a rule. I don’t have one.
Which leaves me sitting with something I can’t resolve: in the middle of actual chaos — not in hindsight, not in a case study, but live, with the clock running — how does anyone tell the real crux of a problem from a symptom that just looks like one? Is it a supply issue, or is it really a capacity issue wearing a supply issue’s clothes? I don’t know how you’d know that in real time. I’m not sure anyone fully does.