Nonsense (book by Holmes)

Nonsense

Jamie Holmes

Nonsense

This is a book about our reaction to ambiguity and the potential negative and positive effects of “ambiguity setting” on our behavior. The title itself seems ambiguous and it took me some time to relate the title to the content. My understanding of the title is that we divide our experience into sense and nonsense (think non-sense as opposed to silliness), and we deal poorly with the nonsense. In fact, our brains work very hard to make sense of things with sometimes odd results. Ambiguity can lead to clearly undesirable outcomes or surprisingly positive ones. Understanding how we respond to ambiguity and how to “manage” it might result in more positive outcomes. As the book expresses it, “I’ll hope to convince you of a simple claim: In an increasingly complex, unpredictable world, what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower, or confidence in what we know. its how we deal with what we don’t understand.”*

The book starts with two stories about a man named Michel Thomas (one of his many names). In 1996, he taught a group of ordinary students French over a 5-day period. At the end of the five days, they were conversant speakers. They met in a standard classroom and in the first few minutes he introduced himself, and suggested that they change the room around. Specifically, the student carted off the desks and brought in living room furniture and created a comfortable environment. He then told the students that they should not read or write anything, that there was no homework and that they should not review at the end of the day. If, during class, they couldn’t remember something…it wasn’t their problem. It was his. At the end of the five days, the students were tested by the head of the college French department and found to be proficient in speaking – an outstanding result.

Michel Thomas spoke 11 languages and could teach them to people in very short times. But before he did this, he had another career. He was a counter-intelligence agent at the end of the Second World War helping to capture underground Nazi groups. In pursuit of one such group, he was required to actually meet its leader. Thomas had established an identity as a higher level leader of a similar underground group who was bring all the local groups together. For the meeting, they chose a cold rainy night, picked up the underground leader and his associates on motorcycles, took them to a safe house in the middle of the night, then transported them again through the wind and rain to the final meeting place. He had them wait while he tended to other matters, allowed himself to be interrupted and generally treated the meeting as unimportant. The Nazis were convinced that they were meeting a really important person and submitted to his authority. He then used this group to connect to more groups. When the Nazis were ultimately rounded up, they were adamant that Michel Thomas’ character was their leader and not a fake.

I found the juxtaposition of these two stories fascinating. With the teaching of a foreign language to the average students, he manipulated the environment to be unlike school. It was casual and low stress. He was responsible for teaching and they need only participate. These students knew what school was like, but this was not that. They were in an ambiguous state (since this is not school, it must be something else) that made them open to observation and learning. In contrast, Thomas created ambiguity for the Nazis but making them uncomfortable and acting mildly disinterested in them. There were many signs that could have alerted them to the fraud, but Thomas had created a disorienting environment that disabled their ability to be observant and to think clearly. They resolved the ambiguity by accepting his authority.

Everybody confronts their ignorance or uncertainty daily. We do not and cannot know everything, so we often encounter circumstances when we know something but not enough. We can’t be confused without some foothold in knowledge. Instead of feeling uneasy because we half understand, we’re as calmly certain in our ignorance as we are assured in our everyday rituals…. [there is a] a hazy middle ground between the two extremes, when the information that we need to make sense of an experience seems to be missing, too complex or contradictory. It’s in these partially meaningful situations that ambiguity resides.

Modern society has many tools to increase the amount of information that we can gather, which could decrease our risk for ambiguity, but naturally it also increases the amount of information that we get that is unclear, obscure and misleading. On balance, we probably face much more ambiguity today because we are inundated with more information than we would have been 25 years ago. To the extent that social change seems to be happening more quickly, the ambiguity inherent in any thought about the future may be greater. For example, will the careers that are attractive to high school students today even exist in 20 years? If not, how should schools prepare students?

Driving our response to ambiguity is a need for closure. This is the need to avoid ambiguity and related to the concept of ambiguity intolerance. People vary in their ambiguity intolerance, both in general and under specific conditions. A generally tolerant person may be intolerant under stressful conditions and a generally intolerant person can be more tolerant under relaxed conditions. An experiment was conducted where people were shown a sketch of a dog. They were shown successive sketches which looked increasingly like a cat. People with high ambiguity intolerance were slow to recognize that they were looking at a cat. The need for closure expressed by individuals is intensified in groups. Misunderstanding, stress, and fatigue can all drive groups to hurry their decision making. We are generally unaware of these effects on our need for closure or drive to decide and move on.

The first portion of the book discusses how we make sense of our world. We are bombarded with inputs that we must quickly sort into two buckets: things we must respond to and things we don’t. There is so much information, they we develop shortcuts to simply the categorization. We may not consciously notice when these shortcuts create “mistakes”. For example, people can be shown playing cards and asked to report the identity of the card. Most of the cards will be standard combinations of suit and color (red heart), but some are mismatched (a red 3 of spades). The cards are shown very briefly to the subjects who correctly identify the standard cards fairly easily. But they misidentify the trick cards 96% of the time (tending to ignore the color in favor of the shape). With increasing exposure time, subjects’ identification of the trick cards improved though the mistake rate was still 10% with one full second of exposure (more than 30-times the time required to correctly identify a standard card). Other studies have shown that our brains take more time to process the anomalies even when they then make a mistaken identification. So we may identify a problem unconsciously– and then effectively ignore it. The book quotes Jordan Peterson’s concept that to cope with the overwhelming volume of input, we spend our time “eradicating vast swathes of information.” Instead we substitute our beliefs about what we are seeing.

The beliefs that we use are essentially our expectations about the future. These are less logical than might be expected. The book describes an experiment where people were given a set of oddly shaped objects with a variety of weights. For example, a subject might get a series of weights of 740, 890. 1,007, 1,570 and 2,700 grams, and then they’d be handed a 70-gram weight. When people picked up the odd weight….They laughed. Our reaction to the unexpected violation of our expectation is this low risk environment was humor – but it is not hard to imagine other emotional responses in other situations. The game “Mad Libs” is funny exactly because it contains a series of mismatches between expectations and reality in a low risk environment. Humor is not just a measure of incongruity; it is also a measure of success in making sense out of the incongruity. When you hear a joke and do not get it – you are frustrated. But when you hear a joke and get it, part of your reaction is the glow of success in making sense of the silly situation. “Getting it” requires the mind to make connections, fill in missing information, and resolve contradictions – all done in an instant.

This process is one of the things that we learn early in life. We learn various concepts through our daily lives then apply these concepts to new situations. These concepts are our mental models, which we add to throughout of lives. When we see something like what are familiar with, we expect it to be basically the same. When we got to hotel and see a brand new style of faucet we are confused and try to work how to use it based on the faucets that we know. The mental models that we had as children were simple and inflexible, but they evolve as we learn. Some mental models (social constructs) are quite complicated. For example, there are a wide variety of ways that we act when meeting people reflecting very complex mental models related to occasion and relationship. People who behave in ways that are outside of our expectation from the circumstance make us notice. There is a right way to meet the queen for the first time. We learn to accommodate new information into our mental models so that they are a more useful perspective on the world. In fact, we don’t want to spend too much time in a state of contradiction or misfit. We are driven to make the accommodation quickly and move on. This means that we may favor speed over accuracy (a bad decision now is better than a good decision later) or an instantly useful model that is generally defective (it is good enough for now). In many ways, the process of making sense of things is the process of growing up (which in this sense – never stops). Understanding how we make sense of things can illuminate the benefits and risks of our dependence on sense-making.

Much of sense-making is unconscious. In an experiment described in the book, people were given the task of copying forty-five 6-9 letter strings. The strings contained a pattern, but subjects were consciously unaware of this. The subjects were then told that there was a pattern and asked to mark a new set of letter series that matched the pattern. The subjects were pre-assigned to two groups. One group had no preparation, but the other group read a surrealistic “story” by Franz Kafka before beginning the copying exercise. The second group, primed with the effort of reading the Kafka story, found 33% more correct strings than the unprimed group. Though making no effort to detect patterns, the primed minds unconsciously noticed and partially solved the problem.

A body of research suggests that we have a type of conservation of certainty. If some things become uncertain, we compensate by being more certain about other things. For example, an experimenter had people go through a deck of card adding up the values of the cards. Hidden among the cards were a number of wrong color cards (think black 2 of hearts). The majority of people took no conscious notice of the anomalous cards. Surveyed afterwards about their feeling on a social issue (on which they were previously surveyed), people who saw anomalous cards were more committed to their existing beliefs….the increased commitment was the result of exposure to anomalies that didn’t reach conscious awareness. People who notice the anomalies were excluded from the trial. Thus confusion, conscious or not, has two effects. We become more sensitive to patterns and potential patterns around us and we become more committed to our beliefs. The book does not explicitly say this, but in combination we may be more prone to see supporting information for our existing beliefs when we are stressed, confused, or uncertain about what is going on. This is the foundation for cognitive dissonance. This is the disturbing feeling of experiencing two conflicting cognitions – opinions, ideas, desires, or beliefs about the world, oneself, or one’s behavior. When we explain the importance of a boring task, we are using cognitive dissonance. A growing body of evidence suggests that the dissonance is a literal feeling of discomfort that is expressed at a very low level when we are aware of uncertainty or confusion. We then experience relief when we can decrease our uncertainty and it apparently does not matter what particular uncertainty we reduce. This may be the most important point. We seem to have an overall set point for uncertainty. If our total uncertainty rises too high, we can get relief from dealing with anything – not just the “cause” of our increased uncertainty. For example, we can identify otherwise obscure patterns in our world, assign them order and achieve relief.

The overall process seems to be something like this. We notice a mismatch between an expectation and reality that triggers a state of anxious vigilance. Our brains begins looking for new information related to this anomaly using its pattern seeking capability. Through this we reach a preliminary resolution which is then intensified. This intensification results in our commitment to the resolution selected. The process is sequential and plays out over minutes or hours without our necessarily noticing. What I have described implies that the item being resolved is the same as the anomaly that triggered the process, but the research has shown that one item may trigger the process, but resolution may be achieved on another topic altogether. What is important from a physiological perspective, because that it what this seems to be, is that the anxiety returns to a lower, less irritating state. This is why stressing over a particular work issue may be relieved by completing other items on your to-do list. The book suggests that this is not a minor activity on our part but something that drives much of our behavior through the day.

If this description of resolving an anomaly seems vague, an alternative expression might go like this. We sense an increase in disorder, we seek some pattern that can increase our overall sense of order and we choose that pattern to restore an acceptable degree of order to our world. Even though we can’t control our world, we can create a mental model of the world that feels controlled.

Everything described to this point really focused on our reaction to a single issue, and in that sense is simplistic. We often confront more than one issue simultaneously and sometimes with everything changing in a major way. The book discussed the example of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake which destroyed a good portion of the city, killed many people, and completely violated people’s sense of normalcy. In the 10 days following the quake, four times the normal rate of marriage was occurring. In one recorded case, the man about to marry could not even tell the clerk the name of his prospective bride (suggesting that he had just met her and that she also was acting precipitously). When the world goes crazy and everything is up in the air, our drive for closure goes way up. Similar behavior is apparent after other disasters in other cultures. Even being reminded of past disasters can triggered a stronger need for closure.

The experience of wonder has the same effect. Astronauts, having seen the world from space, reacted by giving more meaning to the experience. In one study, people were shown fabulous scenes from the BBC ‘Planet earth’ and then were shown strings of 12 digit numbers and asked to identify those strings created by humans and those created by a computer (all were computer generated). Those primed with wonder-inducing scenes identified more number strings as human created than without priming.

Big events cause reappraisal of our lives, which means we notice the ambiguities and anomalies that we have been accepting, and we are driven to resolve them. After Hurricane Hugo hit the east coast of the US, 800 more marriages, 570 more divorces and 780 more babies were born (than would have been predicted on previous trends) in the aftermath. The disaster was an amplifier of existing feelings. The book is not directed at the impact of these processes in a business setting, but the application seems clear. In periods of low stress, inconsistencies build up within an organization’s efforts. Perhaps initiatives and strategic experiments get underway. But a business downturn, with origins unrelated to the company, triggers intensified need for closure. The need to resolve this uncertainty feels urgent and companies find it hard to resist the urge to act fast. While we assume that these decisions are rational responses to the events causing the business’ problems, the discussion above makes it clear that the actions may not be entirely “conscious” or rational. Studies of decision making by stressed people, whether they recognize the source of stress or not, make it clear that the need for closure climbs. People decide faster, but they also tend to decide based on pre-existing biases (which is cognitively efficient) and to become fixed on their decision (they are reluctant to reconsider their decision). Altogether, urgency makes our thinking processes inflexible.

Interestingly, when we are uncertain about something and can’t resolve the uncertainty, we can choose to trust someone else to make the decision for us. This is how experts like dentists or accountants are employed. But is also may be why executives employ consultants. Consulting firms with good reputations can be “trusted” to give good advice making the decisions for the executives easier.

The urgent drive for certainty has similar features in groups as it does in individuals. First impressions matter, people fall back into familiar patterns, and disconfirming information is ignored. To be more clear….Under time pressure…group members who voiced opposition to a given consensus were more quickly marginalized and ignored. Groups are more accepting of being dominated by one person or accepting a simple answer. The pressure to decrease uncertainty in groups also leads to polarization within the group…people flee the uncertain ground in between. It is just as difficult for a group to confront a complex situation, despite potentially bringing greater diversity of thought and insight to the analysis, because the psychological dynamic of the individuals and collective is to ignore divergent information. This argues that groups have just as much of a need to develop a way to step back from the urgency of the moment in order to allow the value of divergent information to be assessed.

Two types of tools can decrease the impact of “urgency” on our decisions. One type increases awareness of our need for closure in the moment. The other focuses on the consequences of the “easy” decision. But more generally, a behavioral approach might be to revisit a potential decision a few times over a few days, while in different moods and settings, in order to see if the decision continues to feel right. Being aware that we often become more committed to a decision should also make us aware that if our commitment wavers, there may be a good reason to reconsider.

Ambiguity is found in a variety of situations including negotiations, medical diagnosis, and predicting the future. Each of these situations can have serious consequences if the ambiguity is poorly handled. For example, over-reaction during hostage negotiation can get people killed. An excess desire to obtain a clear diagnosis of an unknown condition can lead to dangerous unnecessary surgery. Businesses that depend on predicting the future (think fashion) can succeed or fail depending on the success of their ability to determine which of many possible futures are most likely. This leads to the observation that business success depends on managing ambiguity well. The highest performing companies…, “often have more in common with humiliated bankrupts than with companies that have managed to merely survive.” Firms that go bust…have the same characteristics as firms that go gangbusters. The certain markets, the opposite of sky-high success isn’t abysmal failure but is mediocrity. What seems to drive both great success and complete failure is “committed tactics” in the face of ambiguity. Every time that you see clothing being discounted, you see a failure of prediction; however a business model that prices assuming future discounting is unlikely to make a huge profit or a huge loss. Clothing provides an excellent example of the ripple of uncertainty through a business environment. Suppose a retailer thinks it may sell 100 jackets, their jacket supplier may stock 150, just in case. The leather supplier may stock 200 worth, just in case. If the original prediction is perfect and 100 jackets sell, the supply chain still has a large inventory. This approach buffers somewhat against not having stock available, but creates a cascade of losses should leather jackets be unpopular. This problem has driven development of many just-in-time, zero inventory business models – that sacrifice some upside in exchange for some certainty.

This highlights one of the bigger problems for companies; the future is ambiguous yet the business needs to plan. Many businesses employ people whose primary function is predicting future input supply and customer demand. In the case of fashion, the people who were paid to foresee trends were so bad at it – and so blind to their cluelessness – that he could build the biggest fashion business retailer in the world by admitting that he couldn’t predict fads. Zara’s spectacular success is based on Ortega’s bald admission that we often don’t know the odds, even in the short term. In this example, Inditex built a supply chain that rapidly responds to changes in demand to supply just what is trending by eliminating waste in the supply process. They may produce less than demand would permit, but they sell everything they make without discounting. The point is less about “lean supply chain” than it is that ambiguity can be accommodated by an attempt to “control” it via planning or by accepting the ambiguity and responding to it. We also need recognize that we can’t always resolve ambiguity by seeking out more information.

If you were to choose to embrace uncertainty – what would that look like? It might seem odd, but one approach would be to accept that not all “good” results are due to luck and not all “bad” results are due to poor decisions. Luck happens. The application of this idea relates to how we react when something has been going well. It is common to see a string of good results and attribute the success to good decisions and execution. We assume that “we” are good – and we certainly do not assume that we are just lucky.  But if we accept that luck matters, then we would also be constantly looking for signs that things are going to turn less lucky and prepare for those events. Good results lead to complacency. In contrast, people and organizations that experience bad results must learn how to deal with the issues. This increases the ability to deal with good fortune. In other words, failure can be a predecessor for success. The causes of failure can be ambiguous and sorting through the failure’s causes makes us recognize and accept this ambiguity.

A second application of the idea is that the future can’t be predicted and it is not that productive to obsess about it. This has particular application to potential innovators. This is because the more innovative a product, the less you know about its chances of success. “Innovation drags you into the realm of ambiguity,”….in some scientific fields, experiments fail more than 70 percent of the time. Between 70 and 80 percent of new food products fail.

A third application of the uncertainty embracing could be created in education. One view of the role of education is to teach students a range of facts together with proper social behavior. In a certain world, you could teach the children the relevant facts for life as an adult. In an uncertain world, it is not clear which facts will be relevant in the future. In fact, it is not altogether clear what sort of behavior is necessary in the future either. The behavior of self-employed contractors is probably different from that of unionized labor in heavy industry or technology entrepreneurs. Teaching children for an ambiguous and uncertain world would probably be less oriented to facts and more oriented to principles. It would be less oriented to compliance and more oriented to autonomy. The emphasis might be on student learning to learn for themselves. Standardized testing would make little sense in such a world. This would be equally true for in-job worker education. After all, in a typical workplace…”the really valuable skill is to be able to approach a problem that doesn’t have a single right answer.” Overall, this also indicates that education for ambiguity would have a significant emotional component. Dealing with uncertainty, failure, and wasted time can take an emotional toll. Resilient students would understand that these outcomes are “normal” and learn to accept them. This section of the book started by discussing improved methods of coaching golfers, but one of the things that was not mentioned was the skill of elite golfers to forget their previous shots. Good or bad, each shot is a new chance to make progress and requires the golfer’s full attention.

To learn from failure, people need to be able to take ‘responsibility” for the failure. For example, subjects were asked to decide whether to use a race car with a possibly defective gasket. They were offered a link with more information. About 80% of subject chose to run the race; but if they had clicked the link, they would have learned that there was a 99.99% chance of gasket failure. When asked what lead to their failure to make the right decision, a key explanation was that experimenters hid the critical information by forcing them to take an extra step. A week later the same subjects were given a different (but similar) task. Of those who had accepted responsibility in the previous week, 40% made the right decision (the problem was more complex) but only 15% of those who blamed the experimenter succeeded. The ability to accept responsibility increased “learning” almost 3x. Interestingly, of those who initially chose not to race AND took credit for the decision were about as bad in the second test as those who deflected blame in the first round. Both denying responsibility and accepting undue credit might both be examples of assuming that we are better than we are. Companies may get this half right, in that they often due project reviews when a project fails. They rarely do reviews when a project goes well, possibly because success is attributed to “good people” instead of good practices.  The reasons for success can be just as ambiguous as the reasons for failure, but they are usually even harder to discover, since we’re even more unlikely to look for them. It is easy to find examples of people or organizations that do create on great thing (art, discovery, product, or service), assume that they understand what success means and yet never repeat it. For a long time, Apple was a one hit wonder. Persistent success may be like knowledge, which…earns its keep by allowing itself to be persistently questioned….we gain true confidence when we allow our ideas and success to be consistently challenged. Our most important beliefs, John Stuart Mills wrote, should “have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

 

Innovation is a domain where ambiguity plays a huge role. It is often unclear what problems are important enough to be worth solving. It is unclear how valuable some solutions are to the people who might use them. But a really interesting aspect of innovation is that it is often unclear what many things really are. For example, it would not occur to most people that mobile phone cards are a form of currency. Alexander Graham Bell was not the first person to transfer voice over wire, but he was the first to see that it served a different purpose than the telegraph. Innovation usually happens when an inventor grasps the potential of an existing technology’s previously neglected function. It happens when he or she recognizes that something that seemed to have a clear function actually has an ambiguous function. We are adept at putting things in boxes and not reconsidering them. When something is in such a mental box, we feel closure. Creative people will reexamine the meaning we have fixed to such things and may find additional meanings. “Fixedness” is a key barrier to innovation because it deprives things of their ambiguity.

There are wide range of problems than can be thought of as insight problems. Recognizing that a SIM card is equivalent to currency is an insight of this type. The book describes a two-step process to attack such problems. First, it is necessary to abstract or obscure some element of the object. [As used here, an object can be any element of the situation. It could be an action, a part, or a sequence.] The second step is to build a solution using this element of the object.  This method has been called the generic parts technique to reflect the abstraction step. An interesting example of the technique involves the loss of life when the Titanic hit an iceberg. What the people needed was something floating where the people could wait until rescue arrived. There were not enough life boats for the passengers and of course over 1000 people died. The people never considered the possibility that they could wait on the iceberg and use the boats to transfer people from the Titanic to the iceberg. Their inability to abstract their need to something that is “floating that we can stand/sit on for 4-6 hours” meant that they did not consider a giant floating object right nearby. People are not always that observant, and may be less observant under pressure. When people are asked to describe the components of various objects, they typically miss 2/3 of the components. In the context of this book, 2/3 of the components are so unambiguous that they are invisible. Learning to see in such detail may be learnable. As a class, the most common missing components might be characterized as verbs. People conceive of things in terms of things and miss that things embody actions. For example, candles burn, heat, convect, melt and sit. A trigger for creating new ideas about a problem is to think of synonyms for each of the appropriate verbs and use those synonyms to create ideas. For example, during the development of Teflon coated cookware, developers wanted to fasten Teflon to steel. There are about 6o synonyms for fasten, one of which is adhere – a term with a chemical connotation. A developer could then ask how they might adhere Teflon to metal as a potential solution (this was not the actual solution to this problem).

One experience that seems to increase the capability to use ambiguity is living in a foreign country or learning a foreign language. Exposure to another culture teaches that there is more than one way to see the world or respond to events. A foreign language provides alternate expressions, idioms and syntaxes. Altogether, they undermine the idea that there is one right way of being and this ambiguity is a stimulant to creativity. They have less fixedness that appears in the greater ability to solve puzzles unrelated to language and culture. We normally think about culture as a positive effect on us, but an alternate way of thinking about culture may be that culture is a shared warping of the world, a communal papering-over – or collective denial—of ambiguity. It can be partly defined as a set of instructions for the contradictions that we should blot out, and the… [things]…we should have faith in: guidance for how our beliefs should bend perception.

Interestingly, the book segued this definition into a discussion of prejudice. Study of this topic described a prejudice outlook by a hanger for certainty. Prejudiced people…”seem afraid to say “I don’t know.’ ” They have an “urge for quick and definite answers,” “cling to past solutions,” and have a preference for “order, but especially social order.”  We commonly associate prejudice with bigotry, but the root concept is really the idea of applying a distorting lens to our view of issues. The search for certainty makes us less open to non-simple solutions to problems and more prone to remember past occasions where things were OK. This idea of prejudice is linked to a concept called “expectancy”. When we expect events to go a certain way, we have pre-judged the situation. We expect to see certain kinds of solutions, people, or behaviors and resist those things that do not meet our expectations. That expectancy also keeps us from looking further than our first reaction for more perspectives and solutions. And of course it makes us see people in a stereotypical way that does not address them as individuals. We expect accountants to act a certain way and scientists to act a different way which misses their potential to solve problems in situations outside those areas.  Mark Twain said that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”  The claim holds because both empathy and creativity spring from the same source: diversity….That’s why studies that have shown a high need for closure hurts creativity. Empathy is an act of creativity too: we create a connection between our experience and theirs. When we choose to define them according to a stereotype, we can’t empathize.

We may expect things to change, but to a great extent we seem to assume that change will be small. Psychologists have compared people’s perception of change over the past 10 years to what they expect to see over the future 10 years. Despite reporting significant changes in a range of areas over the preceding decade, they expect slight change in the next 10 years. We have a strong status quo bias, perhaps because we think we understand what is happening now and we are biased to think that little will change. This was true for every age of subject. We look back and marvel at how much has changed in our life and look ahead and expect things to be about the same. We think we are at the “end of history” and everything is settled. Every story leads to an end, and the present is that end. It is fair to say that we are poorly equipped to predict the future, but one of the few things that we can probably safely say is that it will be different. The uncertainty of the future conflicts with our status quo bias and has the potential to freeze us. Our best defense is to come to grips with the fact that we do not know and cannot know the future. We have options of responding to events or creating events, but predicting events may be beyond us. Our options depend on recognizing those moments when our prejudices distort our thinking and decision making and step back. We must recognize when the situation is ambiguous and decide how to respond. When I began to read this book, I was strongly struck by how Thomas Michele created ambiguity that opened up the potential for people to learn a foreign language at an extreme rate or caused them to throw aside all caution despite being faced with alarming contradictions. From one perspective, Michele was a very manipulative individual. But from another, he was a person who understood how our desire for closure kept us from reaching our goals. Opening ourselves up to ambiguity opens us to finding solutions to many problems that our own expectations blind us to.

Comment and interpretation:

• The need for closure sounds a lot like the concept of perceiving-judging that is part of the Myers-Briggs type concept. I was taught that our position on this spectrum is actually quite variable and changes with the circumstance, mood, and specific situation. In the context of group decision making, I am struck by how rarely teams ask, “Do we need to decide this now and why is that the right choice?” Groups both rush to decide and avoid deciding – usually without discussing the choice to decide. In the book’s context, it is more interesting to think about when groups avoid decisions. The book suggests that one person can “infect” the group with their own need for closure (or closure avoidance). This can defer decisions that should be made immediately and rush decisions before their time. It would be interesting to see the effect of a discussion on choosing to decide on the group’s performance.
• Risk is often expressed in percentage terms. I suppose this fits the logic that you can assign the probability of all possible outcomes. This assumes that you can describe all possible outcomes – and the point of uncertainty is that you can’t always know the range of outcomes. This question occurs to me because of discussions I have been part of about correcting project values using some kind of “probability of success” measure. The purpose was to help management understand that the portfolio of projects would not all succeed. This tempered expectations and introduced a pseudo scaling to the estimates. There was a lot of resistance to this concept from technology people who had two concerns. First, they asserted that projects either succeeded or failed therefore intermediate probabilities made no logical sense. Second, they observed that projects failed for unexpected reasons and the unexpectedness made any estimate of probability of success misleading. Perhaps the argument reflected an unconscious appreciation that using risk to describe uncertainty was misleading. This may be one of the biggest problems for innovators. The more innovative the effort, the greater the uncertainty becomes. For organizations attempting to manage a portfolio of projects this creates a dilemma. In most portfolios, the majority of projects reflect small incremental innovations where risk is more prevalent than uncertainty. However, the portfolio may contain a few projects with great potential value that are dominated by uncertainty. How can these two types of projects be considered together? I don’t know the answer to this question, but perhaps this exposes the inappropriateness of comparing such disparate types of exposures to failure.
• The origin of the game Mad Libs (http://www.madlibs.com/history/ )provides an interesting example of uncertainty at work – and how random inputs can make an otherwise sensible experience funny. The book spends some time on humor because one major driver of humor is the contrast between an actual outcome (punchline) and our expectation. The stronger our certainty about what comes next, the greater the potential for humor.
• Jokes of various forms were featured in the book and I’d be remiss not to include one and my favorite variation on it. There are only three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can’t. My favorite variation is: There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
• The first time that I heard a good explanation of cognitive dissonance the topic was trust of dentists. Going to the dentist is no fun and most of the time we are going without having a problem (preventative care). In order to justify this behavior, we convince ourselves that we trust the dentist and that preventative care is good for us. The longer we have been going to a single dentist the more likely we are to trust them. It is the story that we tell ourselves about the benefits that removes the dissonance.
• See Economist article on “rebound effect” in context of truthiness
• The technical term for seeking resolution in any area as relief or stress in a particular area is “fluid compensation”. To-do lists fill this purpose in my world. When there seems to be too much to cope with, I make a list of things that need to be done. There is no sense of priority or urgency to this list. It is just a list. I then do those things that are easy to do – not critical or valuable – just do-able. At some point, the stress dissipates and I throw the list away. I’ve been aware of this behavior for some time and occasionally recommend it to others, but never had an explanation before. No doubt some will notice that I did not use this to make the most “productive” use of my effort. I can assure you that being stressed in this way is remarkably unproductive, so job 1 is probably get rid of the stress. The exercise has also taught me that to-dos that make our lists often don’t matter to others. I have sometimes dropped “important” to-dos in this process and nobody ever noticed. To me this suggests that I give tasks that momentarily interest me some “importance’ to motivate me to do them, but that I am fooling myself. Thus the whole process includes two kinds of cognitive dissonance. The creation of false criticalities and the resolution through unrelated tasks.
• The discussion of stress and urgency describes experiments where a job candidate started well and ended poorly or the reverse (ended well). When interviewers had time to consider the candidate, there was no effect on scoring between the two kinds of candidates. But when forced to decide quickly, first impressions dominated the decision. Starting strongly is more important than ending strong when people are making subjective decisions, when people act with urgency.
• I have heard a lot of managers talk about acting with urgency. If urgency makes us less rational and less flexible, why do they want us to act with urgency? Might we make better decisions if we acted less urgently? And if we are seeking agility, might we want to be less dedicated to past decisions so that we can make a “new” decision as we gain more information.
• One of the amusing/distressing features of consultants’ effect is that the consultants often find the information and “opinion” they present to executives in the organization right under the executive noses. When viewed without any context, this makes the executives look out of touch or uninterested in their employees ideas. But viewed through the uncertainty/expert/trust lens, those executives may feel uncertain about which of many options to choose (including those presented by lower level managers) may make the choice to trust a consultant to make a recommendation because choosing to trust is “easier” than deciding directly. This may be why so many consultants seem to tell executives what they already know; their role is to frame the decision that is already favored by the executives to feel less uncertain and more rational than it felt originally. This may also be why such engagements are short term and timeline driven. The consultant is really just finding the existing preferred solution. This sounds pretty cynical when expressed this way, but from the perspective of the executive confronted with great uncertainty – this is truly efficient and effective. And it pays to remember that all of us delegate similar decisions to experts in health care, home repair and finance for exactly the same reasons.
• The book points out that a lot of companies get their start in bad economic times. The same forces that cause companies to fail, as the status quo breaks down, enable new companies to prosper. In 2009, 50% of the Fortune 500 were companies founded in recessions or bear markets. Uncertainty feels bad for incumbents, but like opportunity for entrepreneurs.
• While writing this summary, the following appeared in the Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21707529-no-holds-are-barred-paul-romers-latest-assault-macroeconomics-emperors . A number of conclusions could be drawn from this essay, but the one I really noticed was the concept of forcing solutions by manipulation of assumptions dressed up as theory. I think about all the apparently quantitative assessments that are really just the accumulation of guesses plugged into a calculation template. A process to create false certainty in order to avoid confronting the fact that the future of any innovative effort is uncertain. Models can be powerful tools to understand complex systems, but they are only as good as the data creating them. If the data aren’t data, but guesses, then the models are just guesses too.
• I had a course in graduate school called “Advanced Cereal Chemistry” which was unique in my experience. Each week (we met once a week), the teacher presented a problem in cereal chemistry. One problem consumed 25% of the semester. We described the problem, which was always a practical problem in industry, and then asked us to solve the problem. As we made suggestions, he would explain the results of past attempts to use those ideas or additional details that he had not mentioned. It became clear over the course of the class that many of these problems were decades old and had resisted the efforts of many people. There were no tests, just papers describing how we would go about solving problems. Two things are interesting in retrospect. One – this was like real research in that problems had history, including history of attempted solution. And most ideas that we came up with would have failed. He made it clear that there was no shame in this – as long as you kept working away at it. Second, some of the problems that our class struggled with have been solved in the last 20 years. They were not unsolvable it turns out. They were just hard to solve.
• It did not fit well with the summary, but a portion of the book discussed the idea of approach-avoid behavior. When we are nervous or afraid, we will avoid something novel. When we are “relaxed”, we are willing to try new things or take a risk. The book extends this concept to cover coping with ambiguity. When we are tense, we will seek out certainty – whether it is real or faked. We will ignore the real ambiguity in front of us in favor of the imagined certainty. In contrast, when we are comfortable, we seek out novelty. If we want people to take chances, we must remove some of the fear of failure’s consequences for them. In the world of Silicon Valley, it is often discussed that successful entrepreneurs often have a few failures behind them. A “good failure” almost seems like a pre-requisite to success. That is an environment that has normalized “nothing ventured – nothing gained”. Established organizations seeking more “change” from their organizations might want to think more about what their employees feel threatened by and seek ways to eliminate those fears.
• The generic-part technique is very similar to the descriptions to the Systematic Inventive Technique that also reconceives parts in a specific set of ways – all intended to break fixedness. It is also similar to TRIZ which involves categorization of problems into about 40 categories and then applies a series of specific actions depending on the category.
• The book suggests that inventors must embody two traits. (1) They have a wide range of experiences or mental models of knowledge domains to utilize. Second, they dig into details of things. They combine breadth and depth. Most organizations like to categorize people and they struggle to categorize people who are both specialists and generalists. Certain jobs are for each, and even certain job categories. By innovative companies need to understand the people who are both and develop systems that promote the “bothness” of their innovators. People who are interested in all the altitudes of a problem. It seems that as people are promoted, the part that is left behind is the attention to detail. It makes me wonder if one of the barriers to corporate innovation is the loss of (or absence of) “bothness” higher in organizations.
• One of my past colleagues had a poster with a range of advice. My favorite was, “When forced to choose, choose both.” An embrace of ambiguity that I appreciated.

*Text in italics is directly quoted from the book