I’m leaning into the glass partition, the cold surface of the office divider pressing against my forehead while I watch Marcus click through a spreadsheet that was clearly designed when the Motorola Razr was still the pinnacle of human achievement. It is 10:07 AM on a Tuesday, and I am watching 17 years of institutional inertia manifest as a series of nested ‘IF’ statements that make my teeth ache. Just twenty minutes ago, I watched a guy in a blue sedan slide into my reserved parking spot with a look of such casual entitlement that I actually stood there and blinked for 7 seconds, wondering if I had hallucinated my own existence. That same flavor of unearned ownership is currently vibrating off Marcus in waves.

I just presented him with a streamlined automation for our procurement cycle. It would reduce the turnaround from 37 days to 7. I’ve tested it. I’ve run the numbers through 27 different scenarios. Marcus hasn’t looked at the data yet. He’s staring at the 107-row master sheet he built in 2007.

‘We’ve always done it this way, Riley,’ he says, his voice thick with the kind of condescension that only grows in the dark corners of a middle-management office. ‘And it works just fine. You’re trying to build a spaceship when we just need a sturdy cart.’

The Plateau of Competence

This is the hallmark of the Expert Beginner. They are the most dangerous demographic in any organization because they have surpassed the ‘novice’ stage where they are afraid to break things, but they have reached a plateau of competence that they mistake for the summit. They have 17 years of experience, but in reality, they have one year of experience repeated 17 times. They have become ‘experts’ in their own specific, broken way of doing things, and because the organization has rewarded their tenure with authority, they now view any improvement as a personal insult to their legacy.

Fossilization and Load-Bearing Egos

There is a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that happens when you realize your boss is actively sabotaging the company’s future to preserve their own comfort. It’s the same feeling I had watching that blue sedan in the parking lot-the realization that some people view the world as a series of spots they’ve already claimed, regardless of who actually did the work to deserve them. Marcus has claimed the ‘expert’ spot. He’s parked his 2007 logic in a space that should belong to 2024 innovation, and he’s not moving for anyone.

This fossilization of process isn’t just an IT problem or a management problem; it’s an architectural failure. We build our offices and our workflows around these legacy figures, creating a labyrinth of ‘work-arounds’ just to avoid bruising an ego. We treat their outdated methods like load-bearing walls when they are actually just piles of clutter blocking the exits.

When we talk about light and space, we usually mean it metaphorically, but there’s a literal cost to working in a cave built by someone who fears the sun. Companies like

Sola Spaces understand that if you don’t update the bones of a room, you’re just living in a very expensive museum of 1990s mistakes. You can’t put a modern team in a space designed for 1980s hierarchies and expect them to breathe. Eventually, the lack of light kills the spirit of the work.

The Tragedy of Small Increments

I’ve seen 47 different projects die in this office because they weren’t ‘the way we do things.’ Each time, the Expert Beginner uses a series of technical-sounding jargon to explain why the new way is ‘unstable’ or ‘untested.’ They use their 17 years of weight to crush 7 days of progress. It’s a tragedy of small increments. It’s the death of a thousand ‘no’s’ from people who are too tired to say ‘yes.’

Mistaken Expertise

Riley J.-M. once described a client who had spent 27 years at a firm that finally folded. The man had become so specialized in a defunct software that he was effectively unemployable. He wasn’t grieving the job; he was grieving the fact that he had allowed himself to become a relic. He had mistaken his ‘expert’ status within those four walls for actual value in the outside world.

🗺️

‘He was a king of a country that no longer appeared on any maps,’ she said.

I look at Marcus now, and I see a man fiercely guarding a map of a world that ended in 2007. He’s checking the 87th tab of his spreadsheet with a grim sense of duty, unaware that the rest of the industry has already moved to a different continent.