I really like people who know an extraordinary amount about one specific thing.
Give me someone who has spent twenty years understanding fibre networks, air-conditioning systems, finance, software architecture, industrial equipment, plumbing, trees, or some tiny piece of infrastructure most of us never think about, and I’m probably going to start asking them questions.
Fortunately, I’ve somehow built a career where sticking my nose into other people’s areas of expertise and asking them how things work is often part of my job.
It’s brilliant.
I started in bookkeeping and business services, which meant getting little windows into completely different businesses.
Cafés. Air-conditioning businesses. Churches. Nonprofits. Small businesses and organisations where one person seemed to know how absolutely everything worked.
Every business had its own little ecosystem, and I had the privilege of learning a bit about each one.
Then I moved into telecommunications and technology and discovered an entirely new collection of people who knew extraordinary amounts about very specific things.
Network engineers. Fibre specialists. VoIP specialists. Developers. Security people. Finance people. Commercial people.
People who could happily spend an hour discussing some tiny technical detail I hadn’t known existed that morning.
I loved it.
And project work gave me a perfectly legitimate reason to ask:
Wait. What’s that?
Why does it work like that?
What happens if that bit fails?
Why can’t we just do this?
And, my personal favourite:
Can you explain that to me again, but assume I know absolutely nothing about it?
The dad bods of industrial equipment#
Years ago, I was involved in a series of events around Australia with a company that made specialised technical equipment for industrial environments.
Think small but critical components within much larger industrial systems. The sort of equipment most of us would probably never notice, but which has a very important job to do.
I was chatting to one of their sales guys, and he was explaining some of their products to me.
What fascinated me was the expected lifespan.
Some of this equipment had to be installed into pretty unforgiving industrial environments — heat, cold, vibration, and all the other things machinery generally doesn’t appreciate — and then essentially just…
work.
For years.
Potentially decades.
He’d been explaining this to me when he said something along the lines of:
“Yeah, it’s pretty boring.”
Boring?!
I was genuinely blown away.
You’re telling me you can manufacture a technical component, put it into a harsh industrial environment, and potentially have the bloody thing still sitting there doing its job twenty years later?
That’s incredible.
And then, because apparently this is how I communicate admiration in professional settings, I told him:
“You guys make the dad bods of industrial equipment.”
There was a very brief moment after the words left my mouth where I wondered whether I’d just said something deeply inappropriate at a professional event.
Fortunately, he laughed.
I explained what I meant.
Not flashy. Not trying to be sexy. Dependable.
Built for the long haul.
The Toyota of industrial equipment.
Put it in. Leave it alone. It does its bloody job.
He worked with these products every day. Of course they’d become ordinary to him.
I’d known about them for about twenty minutes.
I still had the privilege of being impressed.
That’s one of my favourite things about working with SMEs#
Subject-matter experts get to lend me their eyes for a little while.
They show me a part of the world I might never otherwise have thought to explore.
And I genuinely consider that a privilege.
Someone has spent years — sometimes decades — learning this thing.
They’ve made mistakes in it. Solved problems in it. Learned all its strange little rules and exceptions. They know the difference between something that looks straightforward to me and something that makes them immediately go, “Oh, that’s a problem.”
And for a time, they’re willing to let me into that world.
I don’t need to become an expert in it.
I just get to ask questions.
And because I haven’t been looking at the same thing every day for ten or twenty years, sometimes I get to give them something back:
fresh eyes.
The thing that’s become completely ordinary to them can still be fascinating to me.
Sometimes you can actually see the moment someone realises you’re genuinely interested in their weird little corner of the world.
I love that moment.
It’s like a tiny professional inside hug:
Your thing is interesting. I want to understand it.
Curiosity isn’t a substitute for expertise#
It’s one of the ways I learn to work with expertise.
Over the years, the SMEs around me have changed.
Business services gave me access to people who understood completely different businesses and operating models.
Telecommunications and technology introduced me to network engineers, fibre specialists, VoIP people, developers, security specialists, finance people and commercial teams.
These days, I spend a lot of time talking to electricians, plumbers, roofers, arborists and other construction specialists.
I don’t leave those conversations thinking I can do their jobs.
I can’t.
That’s rather the point of having the SME.
But I can leave understanding their world a little better than I did before.
And that matters in project management.
A project manager doesn’t need to know more about fibre than the fibre specialist.
Or more about finance than the CFO.
Or more about software than the developer.
Or more about electrical systems than the electrician.
Frankly, if I’m the deepest expert on everything in the room, we’ve probably assembled the wrong room.
What I do need is enough curiosity to ask useful questions.
Why do you want to do it that way?
What happens if we don’t?
What does your part depend on?
What do you need from somebody else?
What’s essential, and what’s just really bloody cool?
Because specialists can all be completely correct from within their own area of expertise and still disagree about what the project should do.
The engineer can see what would make the best technical system.
The finance person can see what the organisation can actually afford.
Operations can see what they’ll have to support when everybody else has gone home.
The customer knows what problem they actually need solved.
None of those perspectives becomes unnecessary because another one exists.
My job is to be curious enough to understand them, find the connections between them, and help turn all that expertise into something that actually works.
I think that’s why I’ve always liked sitting somewhere in the middle.
I get to borrow everybody’s expertise without pretending it’s mine.
I don’t need to leave every project knowing how to do everybody’s job.
Usually I leave knowing something much more useful:
who I’d call if I ever needed to understand that problem again.
And I don’t think I’d enjoy a career where I eventually knew everything I needed to know.
One of the things I love about project work is knowing that somewhere in my future is another person who knows an extraordinary amount about something I’ve never thought about before.
Eventually we’ll end up in the same room.
They’ll use a word I’ve never heard before.
And I’ll have the privilege of saying:
“Wait. What’s that? Show me how it works.”
Originally published on LinkedIn.