About RUTH

Ruth has spent much of her career understanding how people think, feel and behave. She cares a lot about making things that make people’s lives better. Her first love was engineering, until she realised that people were more interesting than maths. On a good day she gets to do both.

Ruth is a Principal Designer at ANZ. Her current career goals are to take 2025 off with her husband to do their OE (only about 20 years late to the party!), and achieve Marram lifetime membership iykyk. In the past Ruth has been a freelance researcher, design leader, and strategist. She has been GM of Design Research at Xero and Head of User Experience at Trade Me. 

Linkedin.

RUTH’S talk

When expertise becomes our achilles heel

We all want to be experts in what we do right? We train, we practice, we keep learning. We even do 10,000 hours of something believing it will make us an expert.

But what if our ‘expertise’ actually comes with some pretty big downfalls. What if experts can be less creative and innovative than their less experienced counterparts? What if they lack flexibility and can be more prone to error?

In this talk, we talk about the paradox of expertise, how it shows up in our work, and most importantly what we can do about it.