Expect and Respect Expertise
Your team meetings follow the same pattern: the senior folk speak, the department heads contribute, and everyone else listens politely. You've hired diverse talent and invested in team development, but somehow the most innovative ideas aren't emerging. You suspect there's untapped potential in your organization, but you can't figure out how to access it.
The problem might be that you're only recognizing certain types of expertise while missing breakthrough insights hiding in plain sight.
Learning from Happy Meals
The Happy Meal. Uniformly loved by kids, perhaps earning mixed reviews from parents, but undeniably a money-maker for McDonald's. Was the Happy Meal a central component to the launch and growth of McDonald's? Not exactly.
In 1975, more than two decades after McDonald's started appearing everywhere, Bob Bernstein had an idea while watching his kids read cereal boxes every morning. "I thought," Bob later recounted, "why don't we make a box for McDonald's that holds a meal and gives kids something to do?"
Bob wasn't in the food industry—he worked for the advertising agency that handled McDonald's restaurants. But he started developing the idea immediately. The Happy Meal launched nationwide in 1979 and, according to industry studies, was earning McDonald's $10 million daily by the 1990s.
The Pattern We're Missing
Stories like this are ubiquitous, under-appreciated, and increasingly rare. In our current era of hierarchical thinking, bureaucratic processes, and emphasis on credentials over insights, countless innovative ideas get lost.
This represents a systematic exclusion of expertise that doesn't fit traditional patterns.
The Personal Connection
We've all had ideas entirely unrelated to our profession or academic experience that we believed could make a real difference. When I started doing DEI consulting, I was shocked that people in this field wasn't familiar with Universal Design. But coming from a disability studies background, I immediately saw connections. And I build what is now Organizational Culture Design. My "outsider" perspective on accessibility revealed solutions that improves organizational culture—not because I went to business school or led a Fortune 500 team, but because I brought different analytical tools to familiar problems.
My PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies taught me something crucial: expertise comes from everywhere and innovation emerges when we combine knowledge from unexpected sources.
The Systems Problem
When we reduce people to their resumes, we systematically exclude human creativity and insight. Instead of recognizing that everyone brings valuable perspectives, we create organizational cultures that only amplify certain types of knowledge.
What if we expected expertise to emerge from anywhere and respected people's diverse knowledge sources? We then have an openness to breakthrough thinking that could genuinely transform outcomes.
When we respect hidden talents and unconventional expertise, people become more willing to contribute game-changing ideas.
In organizations, these alternative perspectives can come from:
Frontline workers who see daily operational realities
Administrative staff who understand cross-departmental patterns
Interns who bring fresh eyes to entrenched problems
Managers from completely different departments who apply diverse frameworks
We don't know where the next breakthrough idea will originate. Will every suggestion be a Happy Meal-level success? Of course not. But if we don't create systems to collect and evaluate ideas inspired by diverse experiences, we'll never discover our collective innovative potential.
The Healthcare and Science Connection
This principle becomes particularly powerful in healthcare and research environments. Collaboration across disciplines drives both safety improvements and breakthrough discoveries. For example, The Moffitt Cancer Center puts clinical researchers, evolutionary biologists, and mathematicians together to develop new drug regimens that counter drug resistance issues. Each discipline brings essential insights that others would miss.
When teams in health and science systematically expect and respect diverse expertise, they don't just get more ideas—they get better solutions. Different knowledge backgrounds reveal different aspects of complex problems and generate more comprehensive approaches to challenges.
Your Reflection Question
Think about the most innovative solution your organization has implemented recently. What diverse sources of knowledge contributed to that breakthrough? If you systematically invited input from people whose expertise isn't traditionally recognized in your field, what overlooked insights might emerge?