That engineer who spotted a problem that could have brought the entire system down? She calls it "just doing my job." That project manager who found a brilliant solution to a problem everyone else had given up on? He shrugs and says, "Anyone would've done the same."
They're probably wrong. And there's a well-documented reason why.
The Curse That Comes With Getting Good
Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge: once you know something deeply, it becomes difficult to imagine what it's like not to know it. Your expertise becomes so internalized that you start assuming other people see what you see.
This happens to subject-matter experts every day. They have years of experience behind the way they approach a problem, spot a risk or make a decision. But because that reasoning has become second nature, they often don't recognize it as expertise anymore.
The complicated customer situation they solved last Tuesday doesn't feel like a story. It's just… Tuesday.
And when they compare themselves with anyone, it's often with other people who know as much as they do. An engineer compares herself with other engineers. A cybersecurity specialist spends their time talking to other cybersecurity specialists. A product leader is surrounded by people who speak the same language.
From inside that world, their knowledge can feel completely ordinary. From outside it, it may be exactly what someone wants to understand.
Your Audience Wants the People Who Actually Know
This creates a strange situation for marketing teams.
The people with the deepest knowledge often don't think they have anything interesting to say. Meanwhile, the people you're trying to reach increasingly want to hear from people who actually know what they're talking about.
The 2021 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study found that 77% of B2B decision-makers preferred hearing from "deep subject-matter experts discussing specialized topics" over "senior executives talking about broad business issues."
That doesn't mean your audience wants every technical detail your experts can give them. It means useful specificity matters. The decisions, trade-offs, mistakes, lessons and observations that feel routine to an expert can be genuinely valuable to someone who hasn't spent the past ten years thinking about the same problem.
The difficulty is getting those things out.
Don't Ask Experts to Come Up With Content
One of the easiest ways to get nothing interesting from an expert is to ask:
What would you like to post about on LinkedIn?
Now you've given someone who doesn't necessarily recognize their own expertise, and who probably isn't a content creator, a content creation problem. You ask them to decide what's interesting, find the angle and figure out how to turn their expertise into something other people might want to read.
But that’s not expertise, that’s communication – and should be the communication team's job.
So, instead of asking experts for content ideas, ask them about their work.
What happened? What was difficult? What did you notice that other people missed? What alternatives did you consider? What nearly changed your mind? What do customers consistently misunderstand? What do people in your industry keep getting wrong?
The expert doesn't need to know which answer should become a LinkedIn post, an article or a video. They just need to answer the questions.
The interesting part often appears in the follow-up.
"Why?"
"Is that unusual?"
"What would most people have done instead?"
"Hang on — you said that as if it were obvious. Is it?"
This is where editorial skill matters. A good interviewer can recognize when an expert has casually said something interesting, stop them and dig deeper. They can distinguish a genuinely useful insight from something that's merely complicated. And they can find the angle that makes specialist knowledge relevant to someone outside the specialist's immediate world.
"I see this all the time with our own experts," says Jonna Ekman, Marketing Director at Storykit. "They often struggle to see what they could possibly have to say that anyone would find interesting. But give me 20 minutes to ask questions, and I'll have enough ideas for weeks of content. The things they take for granted are often the things I find most interesting."
Make It Easy to Contribute
None of this works if every piece of expert content requires three hours in a meeting room, a polished first draft and six rounds of feedback. Your experts already have jobs that are filling their calendars.
The easier you make it for them to contribute, the more likely you are to capture what they know. That might mean a 20-minute interview, a few written answers or simply working from material that already exists: a presentation, a webinar, meeting notes, an internal document or a customer conversation.
The expert shouldn't have to turn that material into finished content.
This is also where AI changes what's possible. Once the expertise has been captured, technology can do much more of the work involved in structuring, adapting and producing it. One conversation can provide angles for several social posts. A presentation can become a video. An interview can provide the basis for an article, a carousel and weeks of social communication.
That's increasingly how we think about the work at Storykit. As an AI-native content partner, we combine technology with human editorial expertise to turn the knowledge and ideas inside an organization into social content across formats. The expert brings what nobody else can: their experience, perspective and knowledge. They don't also need to become a writer, video producer or social media strategist.
Your Interesting People Are Waiting
Every project closeout, incident debrief and customer conversation contains things that someone outside your organization could learn from. But the people closest to those insights are often the least likely to recognize them as remarkable.
So the next time your best engineer says, "I don't really have anything interesting to share," don't ask them to think harder about content.
Ask what happened this week.
Ask what decision was difficult. What surprised them. What they disagreed with. What they know now that they didn't know a year ago.
Then listen for the moment when they say something fascinating and immediately dismiss it as obvious.
