UN Special No 541 Juin - June 2005

With reference to the recent “Mobility update” issued by the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management regarding the Organization’s new policy of staff mobility and aim of developing a “more multiskilled and versatile staff”, I am concerned by the impact of mandatory staff rotation on the development of professional expertise in specialized areas of work, and I would like to draw attention to the important contribution of accumulated experience to effective performance and
decision-making in posts where specialized knowledge is required.
Sharing information and “spreading the knowledge base” are indeed very important, but the acquisition of information by training, information sessions, guidelines and manuals, etc., does not replace the knowledge that is acquired by accumulated experience. How can “deliberate succession planning” be done if the successor does not remain in a post long enough to gain sufficient experience to ensure a smooth transition? The role of experience is addressed in an article by Sue M. Halpern in a recent issue of New York Review of Books, reviewing Elkhonen Goldberg’s «The wisdom paradox: how your mind can grow stronger as your brain gets older» (NYRB vol. 52, no. 7, Apr. 28 2005). I would like to share some pertinent extracts from Halpern’s review:
“Imagine two bird watchers, one experienced, one a beginner. The experienced one catches a glimpse of a large, yellowish bird flickering overhead and calls out ‘evening grosbeak’. Meanwhile the novice frantically flips through a field guide, shuttling between pages of yellow birds, birds with crowned heads, birds with large silhouettes, birds that undulate as they fly. The experienced bird watcher has synthesized all that data and internalized a signature pattern, while the novice must rely on an external device— the field guide—which can only provide information, not synthesis, and inefficiently at that. The experienced bird watcher responds quickly because she’s relying on the accumulated wisdom of ‘intuition.’...
One problem with the field guide approach to decision-making is that it provides too much information, allows for too many options. Call it ‘unbounded rationality.’Call it ‘thick-slicing.’ What enables thinslicing to work, by contrast, is not simply that it deals with a smaller universe, but that it homes in on the bits that are uniquely relevant to the problem at hand.”
“Experience matters. It lays down tracks in the brain, cognitive templates against which new information is compared. Herbert Simon called this pattern recognition and observed that it was one of the most common and efficient ways that we make sense of the world. In his latest book, The Wisdom Paradox, the neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg observes that exposure to similar, new things creates neural networks in the brain that attract each other and accumulate, networks that in some circumstances are expressed as expertise and in others as intuition (or both). The networks accrue with age—Goldberg ventures to call the result of this accumulation wisdom—and are, therefore, unavailable to young people. They enable the brain to recognize not only information that has been encountered before, but what may be encountered in the future, and to rapidly apprehend connections between what is and what was and what will be.
‘Intuition is often understood as an antithesis to analytic decisionmaking, as something inherently nonanalytic or preanalytic,’ Goldberg writes.
But in reality, intuition is the condensation of vast prior analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized.... It is the product of analytic processes being condensed to such a degree that its internal structure may elude even the person benefiting from it.... The intuitive decisionmaking of an expert bypasses orderly, logical steps precisely because it is a condensation of extensive use of such orderly logical steps in the past. “
In my view, the policy of mandatory staff rotation not only overlooks the important role of accumulated experience, but also fails to account for individual differences. Quite simply, some individuals may excel in a specialized area and reach their highest level of competence, performance, and job satisfaction in a specific post. I fail to understand the assumption that ongoing professional development and upgrading of skills and competencies can only take place by imposing time limits on the occupation of posts.
Encouraging voluntary staff mobility and versatility is fine, and promoting information sharing, competency building and career development are important goals, but applying time limits for post occupancy and implementing mandatory staff rotation without taking into consideration the need for long-term experience in specialized areas of work, and without allowing for individual differences, risks to diminish professionalism and quality of service and to generate frustration and dissatisfaction of staff.