I appreciate this post David, especially as a big fan of Robin's work but also because I hadn't realised he'd passed. I'm pondering though whether pitting NDM against “heuristics and biases” is too binary in it's framing? People struggle to navigate wicked environments not just because of heuristics and biases, but also because of the inherent complexity of those environments (eg. the emergent properties of complex adaptive systems make them inherently unpredictable).
As it relates to 'mastery', much of the literature (and popular writing) focuses on improvement in kind learning environments. So, I'm giving a lot of thought to what mastery in wicked environments looks like, particularly as it relates to business and investing, and I'm drawing on Robin's work for this. Futher thoughts here: https://www.richardhughesjones.com/accelerating-executive-mastery/
Richard, excellent comment. Indeed I think the binary (as is almost always the case with a binary), is too discrete. But I think it was a useful for construct for the very stimulating "adversarial collaboration." That said, I don't think that heuristics and biases and inherent complexity are separate either. Heuristics, as Herbert Simon showed (and Gerd Gigerenzer continues to show) are extremely useful, and necessary. The trouble is when we use the wrong heuristic for the situation, or use them to simplify a situation that should be simplified. As far as the literature focusing on improvement in kind learning environments, I wholeheartedly agree! A main reason I wanted to write my last book was that I felt it was popular to make unfair extrapolations from kind learning environments to everything else. Anyway, keep up the important work, and I highly recommend Tetlock's work if you aren't already using it.
It's such an important point that so much of the popsci literature and the people that read it miss, which is the extrapolation of improving performance in kind environments to wicked ones. I love Tetlock's work, it's hugely influenced me. Thank you.
Thanks David, kind and wicked learning environments is one of the key takeaways that stuck in my head from Range, I think it sums up very well the difference between areas where specialisation works best compared to areas where the generalist approach works best, wicked environments demanding much greater overlap of different ideas and usefulness of different experiences. On your take away from Hogarth's book, the last part about 'work to construct feedback mechanisms that extend beyond your own intuition' can you give a quick example of how you do this? I'm guessing it takes account of alternative views to the ones you started out with and being open minded about interpreting results?
Hi William, I think that's absolutely right. In fact, I think Kahneman had a sort of group of advisers he relied on to try to give him some perspective for decisions where he knew his intuition would be limited. For me, a lot of trying to make a wicked learning environment a little more kind has to do with trying to create bite-sized pieces (prototypes, so to speak) of larger projects, so that I can stop and evaluate things regularly...but even more than that I think it shows up in the specificity of my experiments. For example, with the book I'm working on now, for the first time ever I decided to create a macrostructure for the overall project before I started writing. I've never done that before, and I wanted to find out if it would help keep my from writing way over length as I have with my previous books, or change my workflow in any particular way. Thus far, the biggest change has been that it has sort of forced me to write in order (i.e. chapter 1, then chapter 2...) for the first time ever. So that's a huge change, and it came because I started out doing my usual thing of writing a chapter just after I researched it, and then fitting them together later. But I realized that, given the macrostructure that's meant to have chapters related to one another in a particular way, it was causing me to leave tons of blanks because I wasn't sure if I would have already mentioned some particular topic or not previously. That might be hard to follow, but bottom line is that it forced me into a new way of working. Will it be better? I'm not sure, but I set up my experiment very specifically, which I think makes it possible to do some evaluation that doesn't really happen when I'm proceeding more intuitively. At the end of the day, so much of writing comes to subjective taste, but I still think that deliberate experimentation can lead to types of feedback that otherwise don't exist, at least during the process, as opposed to once you're done. Does that make any sense at all? ...and, like Kahneman, I try to get more outside eyeballs than I would've in the past. That's a low bar, as I typically didn't show what I was doing to anyone, so I still need to improve, but I've made some progress there.
Hey David, that does make sense, having the macrostructure gives you a framework which you can review periodically, say after 3 chapters you might look at each area and assess from your research whether you've touched on all the key points in each of those areas and whether you're still happy with the structure moving forward to chapters 4-6 etc. It's interesting that you mention this approach as I'm currently reading Anatomy Of A Breakthrough and it touches on a couple of related points I think, one is that Adam mentions that imposing constraints can, paradoxically, be liberating, (which I think is a major theme of your new book?) another is regarding the outside view idea, he mentions cool research that shows even non expert inclusion can help improve performance as it brings diversity and shakes things up, through a broad range of research topics, so I guess even non expert outside eyes can probably help you in that respect. I'm sure that you are already very aware of most of this research and I know you put me onto Adam's book so you were obviously a big fan too. Hope the book project is coming along well 🙌
Wow, what an interesting read. Funny my daughter and I were talking about how long does it take to become truly good, or expert at a job, this would have been a great addition.
This is the first time I’ve run into the characterizations ‘kind’ and ‘wicked’ learning environments. From the description provided, it would seem that ‘straightforward’ vs. ‘complicated’ would more accurately describe the different environments, or perhaps even ‘simple’ vs. ‘complex’. You might even characterize it with a threshold. Say, 10 or fewer independent variables vs more than 10 independent variables. I certainly understand that mastering environments with more independent variables is more difficult than environments with fewer variables and that heuristics and biases will more likely trip you up in complex environments, but why call them wicked? That seems a very emotion/feelings based label for a learning environment that is simply harder to master because of the complexity. To my mind, mastering complexity is the central task of the current era. So, we shouldn’t be putting people off by labeling them with fear-inducing pejoratives like ‘wicked’. How common is the use of that term?
Hi Gordon, thanks for this comment. I tend to disagree about the "feelings based label," but I also see your point. The term "wicked problem" is used plenty in related literature (and has been for at least 50 years), and I think in the context it very clearly means something that is, as you say, not straightforward. (That said, "wicked problem" is not synonymous with wicked learning environment.) I have a hard time seeing any real confusion stemming from the labels, and I'm not sure that are quite as clean as "simple" and "complex," given that a major quality of wicked learning environments is the structure (or lack thereof) of feedback. But I do think it's important to note that this is a spectrum, not a binary (one reason that I think drawing a strict number-of-variables line might be tricky), and that may not come through in the labels. In any case, thanks for this food for thought.
Hey Josh, so glad you enjoyed. I find a lot of value just in doing a better job of defining the experiment I'm embarking on, honestly. I guess that gives me some benchmark for evaluation. Right now, my main experiment is that, for the first time, I'm writing a book where I have a clear (at least to me) macrostructure that consists of four sections of three linked chapters each, with a sort of interlude between them that relates to the introduction. The particulars don't matter, but I've never started with that before, and one of the really interesting outcomes so far is that it has led me to write in the order that the chapters will actually exist. I've never written in order before, even for long articles really. I think it is definitely making me more efficient, in that I'm not writing over length as much because I have a sense of what clearly won't fit the structure. (That said, "more efficient" is quite a low bar for me.) Whether or not this will translate into a good book, I'm not sure, but I think there are at least aspects of this approach that I will never abandon if I write more books.
Haha...I know I have to search "Csikszentmihalyi" every single time. ..That's a good question about Hogarth's work. I think I'd probably suggest Educating Intuition for starters.
Love this concept. It's something that seems so obviously true to me after having learned it that I'm almost jealous I didn't think of it. Also, the cover art is a great depiction of this! AI again? Also, I gotta ask: what are some ways you've designed experiments/constructed feedback loops for yourself?
Hey Matt! Yes indeed, the art is AI. Not Midjourney, this time, but DALL-E. One nice thing about AI art for me is that I don't have to worry about licensing issues. (Kind of funny, by relying on technology that probably violated every single creator's copyright, I now don't have to worry about licensing issues for images on a newsletter...hmmm.... ). In any case, regarding experiments, one thing Hogarth told me that really resonated was that people don't speculate nearly enough. I know that sounds odd, but what he meant was that people don't hypothesize enough in normal life. Even in personal interactions, he would say, you should have a hypothesis about, if I do X, this other person will do Y. Without a hypothesis, he felt, it's very hard to learn because you didn't set out a prediction, essentially, and are less likely to recognize a solution even if you stumble on it. So I like to do that. Right now, my main experiment is with my book (I know, surprising), where for the first time ever I started with a macrostructure for the project. This is completely new to me. I've never done that even with a long article before. My hypothesis was that this would help mitigate one of my major weaknesses, which is a tendency to pack everything I think is interesting into a chapter, because I have no idea where that chapter is actually going to go until later. And that has definitely been the case. So I can see very easily that I'm writing shorter in my drafts, by a lot, than either of my previous two books. So far the longest chapter is slightly less than an average length chapter from Range, and the Range chapters were much longer in drafts. Unexpectedly, it also has me writing in order for the first time. I started with what is going to be chapter five, but then realized I was leaving all of these blanks because it depended on what would come before that chapter in the macrostructure. So I started back at chapter one. I know that sounds small, but at this point with pretty significant experience for me to be working in a completely unfamiliar order actually feels quite novel and kinda scary. Whether it produces a good book, of course, I don't know. But I do think it is making me slightly more likely to consider writing another book at some point. In the middle of each book, I say: "never again." And I believe it. I'm saying it now, but with not as much force, and I think that's because I can now see a way to be a little more sane in the process, and not to have to write the length of two books in order to end up with one. In this case, my editor (who with previous books I didn't really speak with until I was done) is serving as useful feedback, but so are some objective measures like chapter lengths.
Huh what a neat reflection. I'm glad the process has felt more manageable, even if only a little, and it makes me even more excited for when it eventually comes out. Regarding self-experiments, I find them really helpful, but I also get frustrated when I feel that I can really only do one at a time. I find that if I try more than one change at once, I find it a bit hard to focus on both things, and they both suffer for it. Do you have the bandwidth to focus on more than one experiment at once? I think I'll try to implement some change for myself, but I have to balance my impatience with the reality that I can really only change one thing at a time.
Well, for me the writing one is actually a large experiment given that it's a real departure from a process I had kind of entrenched for more than a decade. So I think with something like that, one at a time works for me. But I have other things going on that don't intersect with that. Like, I'm also traditionally a night person for work, but that's a lot less fun now that I have a kid who is getting up early no matter when I go to sleep. So I've been trying different morning routines and then keeping track a bit of how I feel and how easy I find it to focus at various points in the day. So that sort of thing doesn't feel to me like it's drawing from the same bandwidth. (Not that the specifics matter, but I've found that running right after I wake up actually makes me feel really tired the rest of the morning, even though I love running. But doing high volume dumbbells where I'm switching between sets quickly seems to be working really well. So that's a totally separate experiment I have going right now, and it's simple stuff, but key for me was just defining what I'm going to try instead of playing it by ear, and then finding a consistent — even if subjective — way to evaluate.)
So is the conclusion that, if you're in a wicked environment, only stay for a short time? Or just don't expect to learn anything and be on your guard for getting worse? I'm sure the answer can be found in the book! Will have to check the library.
Hi Caroline, great question! For the most part, I don't think we have much choice about only staying for a short time. Robin has a bunch of suggestions in his book, Educating Intuition, but I think many of them amount to strategies to make sure that you recognize that you can't rely on your instincts, and have to find other mechanisms to learn in wicked environments. And also, it's simply never going to be as straightforward as in kind environments. That's kind of a bummer, but, at the same time, it also means that even small improvements can make a bid difference.
That is sad. Robin was kind enough to have a conversation with me in 2021 after I read your book. We discussed applying his work to a better measurement of experience when interviewing executives for jobs.
That anything of mine led you to be in contact with Robin is about the best compliment I can think of. Thank you so much for sharing that, and I'm delighted you had a chance to connect with him. ...(I'd be interested to hear more details of your conversation, but mostly just wanted to say 'thanks' for leaving this comment)
He was great and really interested in helping us apply wicked & kinds ideas to understanding which environments may lead to superior learning for leaders. It helped lead us to measuring the learning richness of the environment, not just the actions taken to measure the value of experience.
Here’s a shortened piece on it. Range was invaluable as a catalyst to my thinking at the time.
Celina, I think you're thinking along the same lines as Kahneman and Klein to some extent! And I think they did do a bit of melding in their "adversarial collaboration," but I also think there's more melding to be had, so I like your thinking;)
Having met with Gary a few times and explored his research, my (probably very simplified) understanding is that his argument is that intuition is only effective when two criteria are met: 1) it is a kind learning environment, and 2) one has significant experience to synthesize and recognize patterns. His classic study was with firefighters and NICU nurses. And this was important, because up until then, many assumed that decision making was how we do it on paper: lists of pros and cons of a particular decision, then coming to a rational conclusions. It seems obvious that can't be how it works in situations where one must make split second decisions, but it was radical at the time. And it ruffled feathers particularly because it was neither the rational decision making model people are familiar with but it also doesn't mean that all intuition is correct. Our biases and heuristics often lead us to think an environment is kind when it isn't or that our intuition is the result of enough experience to be relevant when it isn't.
This is a great description, Jen, thanks for putting it here and I hope others read it. You reminded me of a really neat story Klein shared (I think it was in his book Sources of Power, but I'm not positive) in which an officer aboard a British ship recognizes a radar blip instantly as a missile, not an American plane. One of the fascinating things (if I recall the account correctly) was that the officer explained how he was able to tell the difference, but Klein and colleagues decided his explanation was impossible, and that he had actually picked up on something else that differed from the typical pattern. And when they showed him, he agreed they were probably right. This gets at my "just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist" line I adopted at Sports Illustrated, when I realized that research often contradicted the explanations that athletes gave for how they do what they do. I digress...(what else is new?)
Haha! Love that "just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist" line. So true. This issue crops up all the time in psychological research. Some of my favorite examples are in Damon Centola's book Change, where researchers asked homeowners what would change their behavior to more climate friendly options. They pretty much all said hearing about the consequences of not acting and saving money by taking action would be most effective in getting them to change. But when they tested what actually changed behavior, it was overwhelmingly based on what their neighbors were doing, something homeowners had rated as not significant.
I appreciate this post David, especially as a big fan of Robin's work but also because I hadn't realised he'd passed. I'm pondering though whether pitting NDM against “heuristics and biases” is too binary in it's framing? People struggle to navigate wicked environments not just because of heuristics and biases, but also because of the inherent complexity of those environments (eg. the emergent properties of complex adaptive systems make them inherently unpredictable).
As it relates to 'mastery', much of the literature (and popular writing) focuses on improvement in kind learning environments. So, I'm giving a lot of thought to what mastery in wicked environments looks like, particularly as it relates to business and investing, and I'm drawing on Robin's work for this. Futher thoughts here: https://www.richardhughesjones.com/accelerating-executive-mastery/
Richard, excellent comment. Indeed I think the binary (as is almost always the case with a binary), is too discrete. But I think it was a useful for construct for the very stimulating "adversarial collaboration." That said, I don't think that heuristics and biases and inherent complexity are separate either. Heuristics, as Herbert Simon showed (and Gerd Gigerenzer continues to show) are extremely useful, and necessary. The trouble is when we use the wrong heuristic for the situation, or use them to simplify a situation that should be simplified. As far as the literature focusing on improvement in kind learning environments, I wholeheartedly agree! A main reason I wanted to write my last book was that I felt it was popular to make unfair extrapolations from kind learning environments to everything else. Anyway, keep up the important work, and I highly recommend Tetlock's work if you aren't already using it.
It's such an important point that so much of the popsci literature and the people that read it miss, which is the extrapolation of improving performance in kind environments to wicked ones. I love Tetlock's work, it's hugely influenced me. Thank you.
Thanks David, kind and wicked learning environments is one of the key takeaways that stuck in my head from Range, I think it sums up very well the difference between areas where specialisation works best compared to areas where the generalist approach works best, wicked environments demanding much greater overlap of different ideas and usefulness of different experiences. On your take away from Hogarth's book, the last part about 'work to construct feedback mechanisms that extend beyond your own intuition' can you give a quick example of how you do this? I'm guessing it takes account of alternative views to the ones you started out with and being open minded about interpreting results?
Thanks.
Hi William, I think that's absolutely right. In fact, I think Kahneman had a sort of group of advisers he relied on to try to give him some perspective for decisions where he knew his intuition would be limited. For me, a lot of trying to make a wicked learning environment a little more kind has to do with trying to create bite-sized pieces (prototypes, so to speak) of larger projects, so that I can stop and evaluate things regularly...but even more than that I think it shows up in the specificity of my experiments. For example, with the book I'm working on now, for the first time ever I decided to create a macrostructure for the overall project before I started writing. I've never done that before, and I wanted to find out if it would help keep my from writing way over length as I have with my previous books, or change my workflow in any particular way. Thus far, the biggest change has been that it has sort of forced me to write in order (i.e. chapter 1, then chapter 2...) for the first time ever. So that's a huge change, and it came because I started out doing my usual thing of writing a chapter just after I researched it, and then fitting them together later. But I realized that, given the macrostructure that's meant to have chapters related to one another in a particular way, it was causing me to leave tons of blanks because I wasn't sure if I would have already mentioned some particular topic or not previously. That might be hard to follow, but bottom line is that it forced me into a new way of working. Will it be better? I'm not sure, but I set up my experiment very specifically, which I think makes it possible to do some evaluation that doesn't really happen when I'm proceeding more intuitively. At the end of the day, so much of writing comes to subjective taste, but I still think that deliberate experimentation can lead to types of feedback that otherwise don't exist, at least during the process, as opposed to once you're done. Does that make any sense at all? ...and, like Kahneman, I try to get more outside eyeballs than I would've in the past. That's a low bar, as I typically didn't show what I was doing to anyone, so I still need to improve, but I've made some progress there.
Hey David, that does make sense, having the macrostructure gives you a framework which you can review periodically, say after 3 chapters you might look at each area and assess from your research whether you've touched on all the key points in each of those areas and whether you're still happy with the structure moving forward to chapters 4-6 etc. It's interesting that you mention this approach as I'm currently reading Anatomy Of A Breakthrough and it touches on a couple of related points I think, one is that Adam mentions that imposing constraints can, paradoxically, be liberating, (which I think is a major theme of your new book?) another is regarding the outside view idea, he mentions cool research that shows even non expert inclusion can help improve performance as it brings diversity and shakes things up, through a broad range of research topics, so I guess even non expert outside eyes can probably help you in that respect. I'm sure that you are already very aware of most of this research and I know you put me onto Adam's book so you were obviously a big fan too. Hope the book project is coming along well 🙌
Wow, what an interesting read. Funny my daughter and I were talking about how long does it take to become truly good, or expert at a job, this would have been a great addition.
Going to share. Thank you.
Thanks so much for reading, Julie, and very cool that you're having these conversations with your daughter!
This is the first time I’ve run into the characterizations ‘kind’ and ‘wicked’ learning environments. From the description provided, it would seem that ‘straightforward’ vs. ‘complicated’ would more accurately describe the different environments, or perhaps even ‘simple’ vs. ‘complex’. You might even characterize it with a threshold. Say, 10 or fewer independent variables vs more than 10 independent variables. I certainly understand that mastering environments with more independent variables is more difficult than environments with fewer variables and that heuristics and biases will more likely trip you up in complex environments, but why call them wicked? That seems a very emotion/feelings based label for a learning environment that is simply harder to master because of the complexity. To my mind, mastering complexity is the central task of the current era. So, we shouldn’t be putting people off by labeling them with fear-inducing pejoratives like ‘wicked’. How common is the use of that term?
Hi Gordon, thanks for this comment. I tend to disagree about the "feelings based label," but I also see your point. The term "wicked problem" is used plenty in related literature (and has been for at least 50 years), and I think in the context it very clearly means something that is, as you say, not straightforward. (That said, "wicked problem" is not synonymous with wicked learning environment.) I have a hard time seeing any real confusion stemming from the labels, and I'm not sure that are quite as clean as "simple" and "complex," given that a major quality of wicked learning environments is the structure (or lack thereof) of feedback. But I do think it's important to note that this is a spectrum, not a binary (one reason that I think drawing a strict number-of-variables line might be tricky), and that may not come through in the labels. In any case, thanks for this food for thought.
Love this "Define a question; find a way to test it; and work to construct feedback mechanisms that extend beyond your own intuition."
Curious to hear what experiments you're working on now in your writing. A good reminder for me to return to some more intentional prototyping.
Hey Josh, so glad you enjoyed. I find a lot of value just in doing a better job of defining the experiment I'm embarking on, honestly. I guess that gives me some benchmark for evaluation. Right now, my main experiment is that, for the first time, I'm writing a book where I have a clear (at least to me) macrostructure that consists of four sections of three linked chapters each, with a sort of interlude between them that relates to the introduction. The particulars don't matter, but I've never started with that before, and one of the really interesting outcomes so far is that it has led me to write in the order that the chapters will actually exist. I've never written in order before, even for long articles really. I think it is definitely making me more efficient, in that I'm not writing over length as much because I have a sense of what clearly won't fit the structure. (That said, "more efficient" is quite a low bar for me.) Whether or not this will translate into a good book, I'm not sure, but I think there are at least aspects of this approach that I will never abandon if I write more books.
That's something awesome to know. Thanks for sharing.
I've found more kind environments to learn and have intuitively work to build them for people I've had the opportunity to mentor.
Great to see there's science behind it and where to go to learn more.
Juan, I love that comment — that you've worked to build kinder environments for others. That's very much in the spirit of Hogarth.
David, thank you for introducing me to this concept and Hogarth's work.
I've geeked out a lot on Anders Ericsson work and the father of Flow (whose last name I don't want to butcher here).
So, I think it's my turn to geek out now Hogarth's work. Do you any recommendations on where to start from? Or just take a breadth first approach.
Haha...I know I have to search "Csikszentmihalyi" every single time. ..That's a good question about Hogarth's work. I think I'd probably suggest Educating Intuition for starters.
Put a narcissist in charge and if we don't police them, there are no kind places left. We don't seem to learnt that either.
Love this concept. It's something that seems so obviously true to me after having learned it that I'm almost jealous I didn't think of it. Also, the cover art is a great depiction of this! AI again? Also, I gotta ask: what are some ways you've designed experiments/constructed feedback loops for yourself?
Hey Matt! Yes indeed, the art is AI. Not Midjourney, this time, but DALL-E. One nice thing about AI art for me is that I don't have to worry about licensing issues. (Kind of funny, by relying on technology that probably violated every single creator's copyright, I now don't have to worry about licensing issues for images on a newsletter...hmmm.... ). In any case, regarding experiments, one thing Hogarth told me that really resonated was that people don't speculate nearly enough. I know that sounds odd, but what he meant was that people don't hypothesize enough in normal life. Even in personal interactions, he would say, you should have a hypothesis about, if I do X, this other person will do Y. Without a hypothesis, he felt, it's very hard to learn because you didn't set out a prediction, essentially, and are less likely to recognize a solution even if you stumble on it. So I like to do that. Right now, my main experiment is with my book (I know, surprising), where for the first time ever I started with a macrostructure for the project. This is completely new to me. I've never done that even with a long article before. My hypothesis was that this would help mitigate one of my major weaknesses, which is a tendency to pack everything I think is interesting into a chapter, because I have no idea where that chapter is actually going to go until later. And that has definitely been the case. So I can see very easily that I'm writing shorter in my drafts, by a lot, than either of my previous two books. So far the longest chapter is slightly less than an average length chapter from Range, and the Range chapters were much longer in drafts. Unexpectedly, it also has me writing in order for the first time. I started with what is going to be chapter five, but then realized I was leaving all of these blanks because it depended on what would come before that chapter in the macrostructure. So I started back at chapter one. I know that sounds small, but at this point with pretty significant experience for me to be working in a completely unfamiliar order actually feels quite novel and kinda scary. Whether it produces a good book, of course, I don't know. But I do think it is making me slightly more likely to consider writing another book at some point. In the middle of each book, I say: "never again." And I believe it. I'm saying it now, but with not as much force, and I think that's because I can now see a way to be a little more sane in the process, and not to have to write the length of two books in order to end up with one. In this case, my editor (who with previous books I didn't really speak with until I was done) is serving as useful feedback, but so are some objective measures like chapter lengths.
Huh what a neat reflection. I'm glad the process has felt more manageable, even if only a little, and it makes me even more excited for when it eventually comes out. Regarding self-experiments, I find them really helpful, but I also get frustrated when I feel that I can really only do one at a time. I find that if I try more than one change at once, I find it a bit hard to focus on both things, and they both suffer for it. Do you have the bandwidth to focus on more than one experiment at once? I think I'll try to implement some change for myself, but I have to balance my impatience with the reality that I can really only change one thing at a time.
Well, for me the writing one is actually a large experiment given that it's a real departure from a process I had kind of entrenched for more than a decade. So I think with something like that, one at a time works for me. But I have other things going on that don't intersect with that. Like, I'm also traditionally a night person for work, but that's a lot less fun now that I have a kid who is getting up early no matter when I go to sleep. So I've been trying different morning routines and then keeping track a bit of how I feel and how easy I find it to focus at various points in the day. So that sort of thing doesn't feel to me like it's drawing from the same bandwidth. (Not that the specifics matter, but I've found that running right after I wake up actually makes me feel really tired the rest of the morning, even though I love running. But doing high volume dumbbells where I'm switching between sets quickly seems to be working really well. So that's a totally separate experiment I have going right now, and it's simple stuff, but key for me was just defining what I'm going to try instead of playing it by ear, and then finding a consistent — even if subjective — way to evaluate.)
That's well-explained and makes a lot of sense. Thanks, David.
So is the conclusion that, if you're in a wicked environment, only stay for a short time? Or just don't expect to learn anything and be on your guard for getting worse? I'm sure the answer can be found in the book! Will have to check the library.
Hi Caroline, great question! For the most part, I don't think we have much choice about only staying for a short time. Robin has a bunch of suggestions in his book, Educating Intuition, but I think many of them amount to strategies to make sure that you recognize that you can't rely on your instincts, and have to find other mechanisms to learn in wicked environments. And also, it's simply never going to be as straightforward as in kind environments. That's kind of a bummer, but, at the same time, it also means that even small improvements can make a bid difference.
That is sad. Robin was kind enough to have a conversation with me in 2021 after I read your book. We discussed applying his work to a better measurement of experience when interviewing executives for jobs.
That anything of mine led you to be in contact with Robin is about the best compliment I can think of. Thank you so much for sharing that, and I'm delighted you had a chance to connect with him. ...(I'd be interested to hear more details of your conversation, but mostly just wanted to say 'thanks' for leaving this comment)
He was great and really interested in helping us apply wicked & kinds ideas to understanding which environments may lead to superior learning for leaders. It helped lead us to measuring the learning richness of the environment, not just the actions taken to measure the value of experience.
Here’s a shortened piece on it. Range was invaluable as a catalyst to my thinking at the time.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davehodges/p/vxp-how-to-pick-the-best-from-the?r=24ptv0&utm_medium=ios
So helpful! I had no idea of this debate. I wonder why they see themselves as so distinct, what about melding them? (Haven’t read full article yet)
Celina, I think you're thinking along the same lines as Kahneman and Klein to some extent! And I think they did do a bit of melding in their "adversarial collaboration," but I also think there's more melding to be had, so I like your thinking;)
Having met with Gary a few times and explored his research, my (probably very simplified) understanding is that his argument is that intuition is only effective when two criteria are met: 1) it is a kind learning environment, and 2) one has significant experience to synthesize and recognize patterns. His classic study was with firefighters and NICU nurses. And this was important, because up until then, many assumed that decision making was how we do it on paper: lists of pros and cons of a particular decision, then coming to a rational conclusions. It seems obvious that can't be how it works in situations where one must make split second decisions, but it was radical at the time. And it ruffled feathers particularly because it was neither the rational decision making model people are familiar with but it also doesn't mean that all intuition is correct. Our biases and heuristics often lead us to think an environment is kind when it isn't or that our intuition is the result of enough experience to be relevant when it isn't.
This is a great description, Jen, thanks for putting it here and I hope others read it. You reminded me of a really neat story Klein shared (I think it was in his book Sources of Power, but I'm not positive) in which an officer aboard a British ship recognizes a radar blip instantly as a missile, not an American plane. One of the fascinating things (if I recall the account correctly) was that the officer explained how he was able to tell the difference, but Klein and colleagues decided his explanation was impossible, and that he had actually picked up on something else that differed from the typical pattern. And when they showed him, he agreed they were probably right. This gets at my "just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist" line I adopted at Sports Illustrated, when I realized that research often contradicted the explanations that athletes gave for how they do what they do. I digress...(what else is new?)
Haha! Love that "just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist" line. So true. This issue crops up all the time in psychological research. Some of my favorite examples are in Damon Centola's book Change, where researchers asked homeowners what would change their behavior to more climate friendly options. They pretty much all said hearing about the consequences of not acting and saving money by taking action would be most effective in getting them to change. But when they tested what actually changed behavior, it was overwhelmingly based on what their neighbors were doing, something homeowners had rated as not significant.
p.s. Apologies for typos in these responses... as you may have noticed, I don't proofread them as meticulously as the actual posts.
I love these social norms findings, so will be picking up Change. Thanks Jen!