How Not to Organize In-House Experts: Lessons From Boeing

In the race to recruit and deploy talent, organizations often focus on attracting highly skilled experts and then optimizing internal knowledge flow. But translating expertise into better business decisions and superior outcomes hinges on how well in-house experts are organized. Balancing specialization with collaboration, matching experts with the right tasks, promoting a broad spectrum of expertise, and embedding domain expertise into leadership are all factors that matter. The disasters involving Boeing’s 737 Max 8 airliner, which claimed hundreds of lives, and the company’s ongoing business struggles offer a stark lesson: Poor organization of expertise can have severe consequences. Only by thoughtfully placing and valuing experts can managers unlock their workforce’s full potential.

That insight was derived from my recently published research, which was based on interviews with engineers, technicians, and product managers specializing in dozens of expertise areas at another major aeronautical organization. The 15-month in-depth field study examined how experts are organized — staffed into job roles, grouped in departments and projects, and classified in specialty directories. My findings indicate that the design of organizational structures can reveal and enhance expertise — or devalue and obscure it. The research also informs guidance on how to improve your organization’s approach to organizing experts.

The Boeing Case: A Misorganization of Experts

At first glance, Boeing’s recent troubles may appear to stem from faulty strategies, incorrect priorities, or a shortage of expertise. For instance, a midflight door-plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 flight in January suggests that Boeing may have unintentionally sent critical expertise out of house when it outsourced aircraft production. However, investigations by various agencies, including the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), revealed a more significant issue: Boeing’s organizational structure did not properly place internal experts, which meant that some employees were unable to continue gaining knowledge in their specialization, and some key roles were assigned inappropriately. The company also undervalued some critical knowledge required for its operations, including the type of expertise needed to oversee entire Boeing processes end to end and the technical knowledge required for informed decision-making, the FAA investigations found.

Organizational structures define how roles and responsibilities are assembled, and serve as frameworks for individuals on how to navigate their work. A key function of these structures is to group and differentiate individuals based on their expertise, ideally enabling professionals in similar areas of expertise to exchange knowledge and collectively develop their skills. But Boeing dispersed people who were experts in critical areas like human factors — crucial for flight safety — across the organization. According to an FAA investigation, this left the experts “isolated in work and decision-making processes, [and] they reported feeling less supported, with little organized mentoring or knowledge sharing.”

Organizational structures also play a crucial role in aligning expertise with decision rights. For instance, individuals in higher-level roles are typically entrusted with more complex responsibilities due to their greater expertise. However, expertise is not static: Individuals learn (or forget) as they take up different tasks and as technology and industry standards evolve. The FAA investigation also found that Boeing’s workforce was not “consistently monitored for sufficiency in numbers, experience, [and] expertise.” This lack of monitoring likely created gaps in how leaders understood the available expertise, hampering them from making optimal task assignments and allowing underqualified individuals to fill critical safety-related roles, such as overseeing technical analyses on behalf of regulators.

It is also worth noting that organizational structures serve a symbolic role, signaling which expertise is most valued: Roles and units associated with specialties deemed more important tend to feature more prominently in the organizational chart. However, the breadth of knowledge required for an organization to function exceeds what is explicitly represented in these structures. While specialized expertise is inherent in specific roles or units, the ability to connect disparate specialists and systematically oversee technical processes is equally crucial. Yet, technical assessments during the design of the 737 Max series were “incremental and fragmented” instead of being performed “holistically at the aircraft level,” a joint authorities technical review led by the FAA found, suggesting a potential undervaluation of such expertise and an inability to organize for it.

How an organizational structure is staffed also affects the status of expertise. Although various types of expertise coexist in workplaces, the types most prevalent among leaders tend to carry greater weight — and influence critical decision-making and the company’s overall direction. Despite Boeing’s complex technical products, technical expertise appears to have played a minimal role in leadership selection. Industry commentators and journalists have noted that, following Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas, its leadership shifted away from prioritizing technical expertise. Whereas executives once “held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety,” the leadership ranks became filled with individuals with financial backgrounds, leading to a situation where “financial engineering took priority over aerospace engineering.” This affected how risks — including the risks of outsourcing, which caused Boeing to rely on external partners’ expertise — were discussed.

The Path Forward: How to Organize Better for Expertise

Organizational structures must be designed to effectively position and value expertise so that organizations can avoid pitfalls like those faced by Boeing — and make the most of in-house experts. Based on my research, I offer four recommendations for organizations to better organize their in-house experts.

1. Balance specialization with collaboration.

While organizations often prioritize exploring new areas of expertise and fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, maintaining specialized knowledge is equally crucial. Moreover, this requires deliberate management. Scattering experts who specialized in the same subject area, or overexposing them to colleagues from other areas of expertise, can limit their ability to regularly engage with peers and deepen their knowledge. Consequently, organizations should design structures that balance the development of specialized skills with opportunities for collaboration.

Traditionally, organizations have used functional structures to group specialists in the same area and keep leaders close to the technical details, but organizations often abandon this approach as they grow. (Apple seems to be an exception.) As specialists become increasingly dispersed across projects or locations, organizations can create communities of practice or broader networks to enable experts to share insights and maintain valuable relationships.

How experts are classified can also strengthen these connections and support specialized expertise-building. That’s why some large multinational companies use consistent labels in roles and specialties for experts. Such a shared vocabulary can facilitate easier identification of similar colleagues, promote relationship-building, and encourage knowledge sharing across the organization. Additionally, while new expert teams may organically form from existing skills within the workforce, intentionally creating specialized groups or uniting experts under a common label can foster a sense of belonging and stimulate the growth of new skills and specialties. In fact, my research suggests that this can ignite the development of expertise on new technologies, societal demands, and customer needs.

2. Recognize that expertise extends beyond a person’s job title.

Expertise is valuable when it’s applied to the right tasks. Organizations must assess their experts’ proficiency across various areas of expertise to allocate responsibilities effectively and plan strategically. This allows them to meet current operational needs while nurturing the expertise required to meet future challenges. Typically, organizational structures provide clues about in-house expertise, with job titles and department affiliations signaling specialties, and hierarchical positions indicating proficiency levels. Many technical organizations align departments’ scope and titles with products or subsystems to make navigating internal expertise more intuitive (similar to how some medical specialties indicate particular organs). Service organizations also often mirror their clients’ structures, making it easier for individuals to find the right expert.

However, expertise often extends beyond a person’s job title or department name. As employees increasingly develop skills outside of their primary roles, organizations need tools like skill directories and dashboards to map the evolving knowledge landscape. But even these tools can obscure certain types of expertise while highlighting others. Thus, managers must cultivate the ability to accurately assess skills and match them to appropriate tasks — an expertise in itself. This requires managers not only to stay aware of the available expertise, whether through daily interactions or database checks, but also to weigh the organization’s needs to make informed trade-offs. For example, a manager must balance the urgency of completing a task with the benefits of engaging the most qualified expert — thus deciding whether to prioritize speed or quality. The manager must also weigh short-term results against the advantages of long-term skill enhancement.

3. Promote a broader spectrum of expertise.

Well-designed organizational structures can elevate and nurture experts’ skills, while poorly conceived ones can undermine an expert’s status and diminish that person’s value. The criteria for how your organization groups and classifies experts reflect underlying assumptions about the importance of certain skills and knowledge. These decisions are crucial, as how experts fit — or don’t fit — into an organizational structure influences their ability to contribute, share knowledge, and help make key decisions. For instance, an expert may feel more comfortable sharing their unique skills if they occupy a role with a title that validates their specialty or works in a unit of peers where their skills are recognized. Additionally, the design of organizational structures influences the visibility of certain experts, which in turn affects how valued they feel. And the emotional toll of feeling undervalued can lead to frustration, disengagement, and increased turnover.

Embracing a broader range of expertise begins with recognizing the symbolic power of organizational structures. These structures influence not only the skills present within the workforce but also the workforce’s perception of them. Many organizations prioritize specialized technical knowledge while overlooking people who integrate or support efforts across various expertise areas and units. As collaboration becomes essential for delivering high-quality products and solutions, it is vital to formally recognize the value of experts who act as connectors — bridging silos and driving collaboration — such as liaisons, coordinators, or product managers. And yet these experts are often “ghosted” in organizational structures, and their contributions are undervalued because their ability to facilitate work across expertise areas does not fit into conventional classifications focused on narrowly defined skills or specific job functions. To remedy this, organizations should formally recognize such expert connectors and provide them with defined roles and career paths.

Some organizations also struggle to classify experts with holistic knowledge — people whose expertise spans multiple areas. As systemic challenges gain prominence, it is vital to recognize and reward experts who can propose solutions throughout a product’s life cycle or address cross-functional issues. Yet my research indicates that experts working in areas with a systemic focus (such as sustainability) or in support functions, or those who integrate abstract and practical knowledge (such as maintenance), often fall outside of expertise classifications and organizational charts or fit awkwardly within them. To fix this situation, leaders can redefine how expertise is organized and labeled within their organization. This might involve creating new job titles and adopting a more inclusive approach to classifying expertise.

4. Make domain expertise an element of leadership.

In some organizations, people in management roles are primarily generalists, while those on dedicated individual contributor career paths (as in Boeing’s technical fellows program) have specialized expertise. However, creating a separate pathway for expertise does not guarantee its integration into critical business processes. Ironically, this separation can disconnect technical expertise from management, resulting in more specialized domain experts and skilled managers — but poorer expertise-driven decision-making. Therefore, particularly in industries where technical knowledge is essential, organizations must embed some familiarity with this expertise within every level of leadership.

To do this, integrate domain expertise into your organization’s leadership development initiatives. Many organizations focus on equipping leaders with management skills as they advance their careers, but it is equally important to keep leaders abreast of domain expertise, given the pace of technological change and increasing specialization. Establish mentorship programs that connect technical experts with managers to foster synergies between specialized knowledge and business acumen. Additionally, you may need to strategically redeploy experts or cultivate leaders from within specific functions, depending on how critical specialized knowledge is to your organization’s core operations.

These strategies can strengthen the presence of expertise throughout the organization and ensure its influence when decisions are made. However, leaders — including those with substantial technical backgrounds — must also embody humility. In today’s landscape, mastering every facet of a specialty, business unit, or sector is an unattainable goal. Acknowledging one’s own gaps in expertise may be as vital as the expertise itself. This awareness fosters reflexivity and creates space for collaborative problem-solving. Moreover, as mentioned above, the emphasis on any particular type of expertise must be counterbalanced by an inclusive environment: Synergy across various specialties is essential for organizational performance.

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The effectiveness of experts — including engineers, scientists, lawyers, technicians, human resource analysts, software developers, and sustainability specialists — depends not only on their numbers in an organization but also on how their roles are structured. While many companies prioritize attracting top talent and investing in learning and development, the true measure of experts’ impact on operations lies in how they are positioned and valued.

As the case of Boeing illustrates, merely having a talent pool is insufficient. Organizations must design structures that nurture expertise, foster an environment that recognizes it, and provide clear pathways for its application. By organizing experts to enhance their specialized skills, matching them to tasks based on their skills, promoting a broader spectrum of expertise, and embedding domain expertise into leadership roles, companies can ensure that their in-house experts drive better decision-making and superior outcomes.