Nader K. Rad

minimalist project management architect

Real experts may seem old-fashioned


Real experts in any field may seem old-fashioned to hype-chasing non-experts. That's true of IT, project management, and many other fields.

Hype-chasing non-experts get overly excited about the latest trend and try to replace everything older with it. This causes two problems:

We can visualize the non-expert usage pattern like this:

Non-experts' usage patternThis diagram shows time on the horizontal axis, and each idea or concept as a bar on this timeline. Each bar has a different height, shown in faded green, which demonstrates its potential utility. The unlocked utility is shown as light green on top of the faded one. Only a few of the old bars have a light green section for non-experts, and the one before last, which is the trend, is completely green. below the light green bars are light red bars, which demonstrate uselessness and harm. The red bar is very long for the trend (longer than its green bar).TRENDpotential utilityunlocked utilityuselessness and harm

Real experts, on the other hand, rely on their knowledge and analysis instead of following trends and, therefore, have a usage pattern like this:

Real experts' usage patternThis diagram is similar to the previous one, but shows the bar colors for real experts instead of non-experts. About 80% to 100% of most bars are light green, meaning that they use most of the available potential regardless of how old or new the concept is. There are still red bars underneath, but they are not very long, especially the ones for the older concepts are shorter.

When a non-expert compares these two patterns of use, real experts may seem old-fashioned to them. This is not because the real expert is not adaptable enough to use the new things as much as the non-experts do, but because they want to benefit from everything with potential.

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