Why we need fewer experts and more wise people

Have you noticed how everyone seems to be an expert these days — and how little clarity that actually brings?We are living in a time where expertise is everywhere, but something quieter and more essential is becoming harder to find - thinking and reasoning.It sometimes feels as though everyone is an expert now — not just in their field, but in any and everything: sleep, nutrition, leadership, parenting, hydration, morning routines. Confident voices are everywhere, all ready to tell you the correct way to live. And these experts are unknowingly breeding more of the so called ‘experts’ out to make a quick buck from the unsuspecting. The modern expert is easy to come across. Highly specific, extremely confident, and often armed with a framework, a system, or a short video that seems to replace years of lived experience. One tells you to wake up at 4.30am for success, another insists sleep before midnight is the real secret, another claims a diet will fix everything. The advice changes. The certainty does not - and no two experts ever give the same advice on a topic!Why do we stop asking questions as we grow up? The only constant is inconsistency — delivered with absolute conviction. And the result is not clarity, it is noise. Hence we have more advice than ever, yet less confidence in what actually works. Contested ideasAt some point, the obvious stopped being obvious. Simple decisions became contested ideas, and even ordinary choices now come with competing opinions attached. We are surrounded by answers — but increasingly unsure which questions matter.The issue is not just too many experts. It is that we have started to confuse expertise with logic and thinking.They are not the same thing.Let me attempt to clarify - Expertise is knowing a subject deeply — technical, precise, and often essential. Thinking is something else entirely. It is how you move through situations where the facts are incomplete, the picture is unclear, and the answer is not fully visible yet. It is less about having information, and more about how you deal with what remains unresolved.We’ve optimised everything. We’re not happier for it I grew up in a time when knowledge didn’t sit in silos but was spread across people.Relatives, neighbours, family, friends — each carried something different. An uncle who could fix almost anything without a manual. A neighbour who understood people better than most professionals. A family friend who had never studied medicine but somehow knew, just by looking, when something was not right. They were not experts in any formal sense, but they had lived enough life to recognise patterns others missed and due to this, advice came from lived experience, not from labels or titles. ExpertiseWhen I first began working, expertise carried a different weight. It came from time, repetition, and exposure. If someone had done something for twenty years, there was an assumption they had seen enough complexity to have developed perspective — and usually, they had. That is what experience produces: not just answers, but judgment.Today, expertise is more precise, more technical, more specialised. Surgeons operate with extraordinary accuracy. Engineers design systems of immense complexity. Analysts process vast amounts of data in seconds. All of this is necessary, but somewhere along the way, we began valuing correctness more than thinking, and with that becoming a habit where are we heading?Every child’s question deserves an answer In many situations today, the real challenge is knowing what to focus on, rather than quickly jumping to an answer. I see this often in meetings and everyday conversations. There is pressure to respond quickly, to sound decisive the moment a question is asked. Silence feels uncomfortable, so people move quickly toward conclusions even when the situation is still forming. But I am sure we all agree, that the best decisions rarely come from the first answer in the room. They emerge after a pause, a second question, sometimes even a change of direction when new information appears. That is where real thinking begins. This is becoming harder in a world that rewards speed over reflection. A search for wisdomWe now have tools that generate answers instantly, often with impressive accuracy. It is easy to accept them and move on. But AI does not live with uncertainty, and it does not carry consequence. It does not feel emotion. It does not see the unspoken context that often determines what matters but it’s brilliant at producing answers.How constant pressure and perfectionism are reshaping childhood Unfortunately, what it does not produce is wisdom.Wisdom is not loud. It does not compete for attention. It appears quietly — in people who slow things down when everything is speeding up, who listen longer than necessary, and who resist the pressure to decide too quickly.In a world that thrives on ‘now’, it is considered inconvenient because it delays certainty. It asks for patience in a world that prefers speed. But speed and wisdom are not the same thing.We still need experts — but expertise alone is not the point.The question is not how much we know, but how clearly we think when knowledge is incomplete and certainty is tempting.And in a world full of experts, the rarest skill is not more knowledge — but clearer thinking.Michael Guzder is Executive Vice-President, Education at GEMS