Dan Erwin

When Can You Trust an Expert?

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” begins with the memorable story of art experts asked to determine whether a magnificent example of a kouros, a sculpture of a striding boy, was genuine. Several of the experts had a strong visceral reaction in their gut. They believed it was a fake. But they were not able to say what it was that made them uneasy.

Their decision was a classic case of intuition. The experts knew it was a fake but didn’t know how they knew that. Those who drew their conclusions from the book early on might have come away with an almost magical view of intuition. That would be a wrong conclusion for later in the book Gladwell reveals that he does not hold that position. So how did the experts recognize it was a fake?

Not magic
Expert intuition actually involves both fast, intuitive thinking and slow, deliberative, more logical thinking. In that first phase, a plan or tentative decision comes to mind automatically. In the second phase, the plan or tentative decision is simulated to check if it will work. Herb Simon won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in decision-making. He concluded that intuition is a form of pattern recognition. He described intuition this way: The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing less than recognition. And by the way, sometimes this all happens in less than 60 seconds.

Assessing magic
As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking Fast and Slow, we’ve inherited some types of memory from our ancestors. Specifically, we “know” when to be afraid. And we tense up when we come into those situations. But what does it take to acquire expert intuition?

There are all kinds of business consultants, coaches and “experts” on the web, writing blogs and commenting. What can be galling is their sense of confidence. Confidence is the consequence of two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are liable to be confident when the story we tell ourselves—and others—comes to mind easily, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But remember this: the ease with which a person proposes solutions and the fact that the solution makes sense does not guarantee that the proposal is true. The problem with ease and coherence is often that “what you see is all there is (WYSIATI).”  That’s a formula for error and sometimes disaster.

Instead, the questions that need to be in the front our lobes regarding expertise are two: what am I missing (see my post of August 14, 2022), and what don’t I know? Much of the time it’s very important not to trust anyone’s judgment, and that includes yourself. I often rely on my inherent insecurity regarding important decisions. I may lean on my insecurity for ten minutes or less—and on other occasions, several weeks, giving me time to do a lot of research. Fears of making the wrong decision along with a dose of skepticism can go a long way toward making effective decisions.

Evaluating the “intuition” of others
So, when you have need for expertise, whether internally or from a consultancy, how do you go about evaluating the expertise of a person? The answer comes out of skill learning and the processes of deliberate practice:

--When the environment in which a person has worked is regular enough to be predictable.

--When the person has had an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged, deliberate practice.

What Am I Missing?

I was a bit surprised in a recent conversation with my ophthalmologist that though she was a superb eye physician, she was utterly in the dark when it came to human behavior. We got off my discussion of some refraction issues—readily resolved—and onto the behavioral failures of highly educated business people. Her underlying assumption was that the behaviors shouldn’t have happened because these well-educated people should know better.

I commented that far more often than not, behavioral failures are out of ignorance, not laziness or intention. Boy, that didn’t go over well. I repeated the simple statement a couple more times, but it was obvious from her nonverbals that she absolutely was not accepting my conclusion. I thought about saying, “look, I’m the expert in behavior and you’re the expert in ophthalmology,” but realizing that she wasn’t ready to go that far, I stuffed it, just letting it soak in and knowing she’ll want to talk about it six months from now at my next appointment. So, I went back to the questions about my refraction.

What she was missing was a great deal of understanding not only about human behavior, but especially about the complexities making up simple behaviors like listening and questioning, much less the rich complexities of highly interactional business conversations and often highly interactional personal conversations. Her problem was not unusual: medical specialties like business specialties (think “silos”) create thick walls. And some issues of behavior never break through such walls. And like plenty of professionals, they naively think they understand talk and communication. Sheer nonsense!!

Many never give thought to what they’re missing, especially in their conclusions about human behavior, business or otherwise. In this instance as in many, she was missing a lot of facts about the business of human interaction. Most people simply talk and communicate based on what they learned from their family of origin and perhaps from a teacher or two. I had a required speech communication course (“sending and receiving”) in high school in 1950-51, but very few have had my educational experience, much less a quality trained teacher.  And if you’ll think about it, very few families ever talk about talk and communicating, or even have the expertise to engage thoughtfully and accurately.

The “what am I missing” question is quite different than the “what am I missing out of” question. That’s primarily a question about missed luxuries in life—missed experiences that others might have or be having. “What am I missing?” is a question about your thinking related to problem solving and decision making. It’s an attempt at gaining better data and/or better ideas in your processes.

But this question of “what’s missing?” is assuming a far more important and obvious role in technology, a role that openly costs billions of lost dollars for a company. Of course, I’m quite capable of also arguing that what’s missing in conversations can also cost billions, but let’s not go there.

So, as I reflected about the issue with my eye doctor, I thought not only about what we miss in behavioral interactions and knowledge, but how often we miss major issues in business thinking—especially in the cutting-edge world of algorithms. And about how often algorithmic failures have become front page issues.

Sometimes Life is Beyond Our Control

I regularly enjoy conversations with seven or eight friends, retired university faculty, social workers and businessmen. Recently, I’ve become aware that a couple of them are profoundly alarmed and emotionally upset by Trumpism and the Ukrainian invasion and their impact upon themselves. They talk about both quite often and seem personally frightened. I’ve intended to tell them just to take a good stiff drink, do what you can do, and go on with your life. But I’ve come to realize that won’t work for them...

I certainly don’t disagree with their politics. It’s fairly obvious to me that our past president was an evil, greedy bastard who, thus far, has evinced little interest in the common good. Yet human personal and political reality is never that clear cut. Most of us know that good people can do bad things. But my friends seem unaware that sometimes bad people do good things. The current situation seems to bode fairly well for financially and physical secure guys like them, although not for the lower-middle and lower classes. So, what’s really intriguing to me is why some of these guys get so profoundly alarmed by the situation.

The issue, I realized a few months ago, is what’s referred to as locus-of-control...