The myth of expertise

One of the tensions I notice as I do diversity, equity, inclusion consulting and training in schools, colleges and universities is the tension between my expertise and leaders’ feelings of expertise. Perhaps this is better said as the gap between what leaders perceive my expertise to be and what they perceive their own expertise to be when it comes to dealing with the challenges that diversity, equity and inclusion seem to present in the education space.?

I have been a school leader who, across 15 years of senior and executive school leadership and even before that, in my time as a teacher in the classroom, wanted to work towards democratising the space and centralising the voices and experiences of people who would otherwise be pushed to the margins. This meant that when I was a Headteacher in a pupil referral setting and when I worked as an executive leader in a special school, I was unconsciously working towards diminishing the centrality of my ‘expertise’ and really decolonising that space; foregrounding the voices of families and young people to try and understand how we could do things better or differently.?

I wish I had known then what I know now about the need to decolonise the spaces, readjust the power balance and distribute the power differently. I wish that I had been following people who were already working in the area of decolonising areas like therapy or decolonising areas like coaching, where the existing paradigm is that somebody (the coachee) is at a deficit and in need of fixing and that the coach (or the coloniser if you like) is here to fix because they are the holder of expertise. I wasn’t aware of these frameworks back then. But I've certainly worked unconsciously towards enacting them.?

When I think back to when I was leading on special educational needs and disabilities, I really always felt that I should be trying to put myself and my department out of a job. The underlying thought I had was that there shouldn't be a special unit, there shouldn't need to be a special department, and there shouldn't need to be special teachers. Back then, I believed that everybody in the organisation should feel empowered, skilled and supported enough to work with young people who had special educational needs and disabilities, but more importantly that every child with special educational needs and disabilities shown feel able to demonstrate their agency in the organisation, should be able to navigate the organisation on their own steam.?

So I've carried this idea that it's the so-called experts that should be trying to put themselves out of a job because the consultancy can't be working if we consultants continue to be employed over and over again in the same institutions, right??

All of this makes me really committed to running a business and working in ways that shift the expertise, or rather the so-called expertise from me and into organisations. In fact, as I write this, even that idea worries me somewhat because it suggests that I am giving clients expertise that wasn't there before. Yet, actually, when we think about decolonising practice, we recognise that there is always something there before us. So, perhaps a better way of saying it is that I help organisations and leaders uncover their existing expertise; I help them frame their expertise or help them articulate their expertise. What I hope is that I help leaders to gain confidence in their expertise, and that becomes practice that, hopefully, they can model as they work with the people in their own institutions who have protected characteristics or marginalised identities.

Oooof, a somewhat rambling post today but hopefully, a way of understanding what being luminary really means to me, which is that organisations and leaders themselves can signal that they are safe harbour by signalling that they have the capability and the capacity to look after everybody who clambers out of those rough seas and towards your organisation.