Valuing others' expertise spaciously

Whenever others' expertise appears to us as a persistent object, we can make up our mind about it quickly. Their expertise will remain constant and the conclusion we jump to about its value to us will remain valid within our perspective. We may initially question the value of the expertise in terms of its use, timing, and/or accessibility. After that, we'll experience a clogged network with no further questions, mysteries or spaces to explore in this regard.

Whenever others' expertise appears to us as a changing process or a mystery, making up our mind about its value appears counter-productive. We've introduced spaciousness into our valuing of others' expertise. We've introduced processes like questioning, exploring, rethinking, relating, sharing and changing our minds. Some of those processes will seem recursive, iterative or spiraling. Others will seem straightforward like reliable procedures. Between those we'll experience processes which move forward with setbacks or make successful progress by failing often.

When viewing others' expertise spaciously, there are many ways to locate it. We can juxtapose it with our own expertise and notice the differences, commonalities and potential advantages. We can place it in a context of our immediate personal use for it as well as long term and vague alternative uses. We can relate to the expertise and consider possibilities of sharing it, enlarging it's "user group" or contributing to it's enhancement. We can contain the expertise in a place that gives rise to better questions to consider, more curiosity about it and additional discoveries to make by looking into it further.

There are also many places to go when we experience others' expertise spaciously. Virginia Yonkers explored many of these spaces on her blog recently.  We may go to a place of cognitive dissonance if the expertise disrupts our sense of confidence, composure and compatibility. We can enter common ground where it seems natural to take interest in others' interests and work with them at getting those interests served. We may combine others' expertise with our own and formulate a shared mental model.

With so much freedom in locating others' expertise and so many places for us to go with it, there's no way expertise can appear as a persistent object. We're free to make nothing of anything concrete and make something of our processing and wondering together.