So why do so few managers get things right thesecond or third time?Let's consider one reason forfailure - placing too much trust in the people who arerunning the successful operation,the 'experts' shallwe say.Managers who want to apply existingknowledge typically start off by going to an expert -such as the person who designed and is running asuccessful department store - and picking theirbrains.Now,this approach can be used if you wantto gain a rough understanding of a particularsystem,or understand smaller,isolatedproblems.The trouble is,even the expert doesn't fullygrasp the whole thing because when it comes to complex systems,the individual componentsof the process are interwoven with one another.The expert never has complete access to thenecessary information.And the situation's complicated even further by the fact that expertsare usually not aware of their own ignorance.The ignorance can take various forms.Forinstance,a lot of details of the system are invisible to managers.Some may be difficult todescribe - learned on the job and well known by workers perhaps,but impossible to describein a way that's helpful.And there are some things that people know or do that they're not evenaware of.