CONCLUSION
The Wisdom of the Experience Coach
IS THE EARTH FLAT?
Is it turning?
Is it circling around the sun?
Is it traveling through space?
The 2018 documentary Behind the Curve starts with a prominent believer in the so-called flat earth theory answering these questions. He implies that, because we don’t feel it, it’s not really possible that we are on a globe within a solar system within a galaxy, each moving at extremely high speeds within a vast universe. And because he can see the buildings that are miles away from where he is standing, he refutes the existence of earth’s curvature. “Science just throws math at us,” he says, “whereas we go: Hey by the way, there’s Seattle.”1
The flat earther is right—based on his experience.
Like all the members of the animal kingdom, we humans have a high capacity to gain information and insights through observation and participation. We develop a wide variety of physical and conceptual skills through repetition and practice. We can also reflect on what we’ve witnessed and make predictions about the future.
Acquiring reliable knowledge as a result, however, is not guaranteed. It’s a myth that experience is always a great teacher.
If life were like riding a bicycle or playing tennis, the lessons of experience would be largely reliable. These and similar activities can feature many complexities and uncertainties, especially at competitive levels, but they involve kind learning environments. The feedback is immediate, abundant, and accurate. Even if people make mistakes or sometimes behave in a way that is not optimal, repetition and trial and error provide them with frequent opportunities to gain valid insights and skills. Because the rules of the game don’t change suddenly and dramatically, the resulting lessons are also durable. To improve learning even further, professionals hire coaches to judge their skills objectively from outside and provide constructive criticism.
Unfortunately, many situations in life are not like cycling or tennis. In a complex and changing world, the lessons of experience may not be as reliable as we assume. Many learning environments can be utterly wicked, and our resulting intuitions can differ significantly from the realities. They may not only fail to represent a given situation accurately but also constantly feed us a convincing illusion. The rules can change suddenly and dramatically, rendering our intuitions obsolete.
But because the lessons of experience keep being personal, automatic, quick, encouraging, and durable, we still find it easy to trust them and rely on them as we make judgments and decisions.
Denying or going beyond experience can be difficult, especially when the explanations that contradict our experience-based beliefs are abstract and opaque. People may even choose to hold on to their resulting perceptions despite concrete evidence to the contrary. And more experience can make things worse, producing thought leaders with unshakeable yet misleading convictions.
In Range, author and journalist David Epstein writes about the benefits of “thinking outside experience” under these circumstances. This approach, supplemented with mathematical methods and technological advances, ultimately allowed scientists to develop a better understanding of the shape and movements of the planet we live on and constantly experience. The view from inside may be clear, but it may not coincide with the view from outside, unexpectedly causing and then reinforcing misperceptions. This is why learning to think outside experience is such an important skill.2
But the issue goes even deeper than being right or wrong. We develop many of our tastes and tendencies in life through interactions with our environment. People’s preferences can differ simply because they have been exposed to different experiences. And what we subsequently learn can depend on our prior beliefs, preferences, and knowledge. Our personal experience has an enormous influence on who we are, what we want, and how we behave.3
Hence, the ability to scrutinize experience critically is of paramount importance. But given the wide variety of learning environments across different domains, analyzing the implications of its lessons becomes a tricky task. To make things even more complicated, some amount of experience—kind or wicked—is often needed even to acknowledge these problems and to recognize valid solutions when they present themselves.
Luckily, unlike most members of the animal kingdom, we don’t need to be passive recipients of experience. We can take charge of and actively shape our learning. We have the cognitive resources to look beyond experience and further enrich our understanding of the world we live in. By recognizing how our experience molds our minds, we can learn appropriately from its lessons and unlearn, relearn, improve, or even ignore them, depending on our personal and collective objectives. We can also design methods and mechanisms that render our learning environments kinder and our experience more reliable.
A first step in this quest is to acknowledge that experience is often systematically filtered. It can simultaneously feature missing details and irrelevant information, without our noticing. Sometimes these filters are beyond our control. For example, many failures within a given process may simply be unobservable, while one can readily observe successes and survivors. But some distortions are due to how we gather, consider, and remember information. For example, we may be tempted to overgeneralize from our limited personal experience.
Especially when the stakes are high, it becomes important to ask two questions about our experience: What’s missing? What’s irrelevant? The answers to these questions can then gradually help us develop a radar that reminds us to take the lessons of experience as signals to reflect on and test further rather than as definitive verdicts.
While this approach is designed to enrich the personal lessons from experience, there’s no doubt that applying it to one’s own decisions can be counterintuitive and difficult. Here is where the perspective of an outsider can be valuable.4
We are usually much better advisers to others than to ourselves. We can quickly and easily see problems in people that we observe and propose ways to solve them. But we can struggle to recognize and manage the same issues when we ourselves suffer from them.5 Unlike professional athletes, however, most of us don’t have coaches to view us from outside, providing constant and reliable feedback about our objectives, perceptions, judgments, and important decisions. Our parents, teachers, friends, and partners may end up spontaneously playing that role. But, like most people, they may simply be unaware of the various illusions of experience.
Instead, is it possible to specifically envision an experience coach, who acknowledges and warns us about the potential flaws in its lessons? What would be the main signals that such an adviser would consider when providing feedback about the way one learns from experience and the resulting lessons?
There are three major observable symptoms that suggest when experience is being deceptive instead of providing reliable knowledge. Looking out for these red flags can help to quickly locate the possible learning problems. Once correctly diagnosed, they become easier to mitigate.
Availability Bias
People tend to assess the importance and likelihood of events based on their availability in experience. The more frequently people observe something, the more prominent it becomes in their intuition. This tendency works well in kind learning environments. It saves decision makers a great deal of time and effort as they learn their lessons and make their choices.6 However, in wicked learning environments, what’s readily available to experience is rarely all there is. The following questions should help uncover what’s missing.
• Is experience mainly based on outcomes? If so, processes are missing from its lessons, along with all their complicated and relevant features.
• Is experience mainly based on a selection of outcomes? If so, specific types of outcomes (for example, successes or failures) may be missing from its lessons, along with their own distinct characteristics.
• Is experience mainly based on personal observations? If so, counterfactuals and insights from others may be missing from its lessons, along with a more representative and creative view of the situation.
In short, the experience coach would raise a red flag if the lessons of experience are primarily based on what’s readily and easily available to observation. Going beyond available experience would lead to a better perception of a given context.
Inappropriate Anchors
When making judgments, predictions, and decisions, people tend to anchor on particular points of reference, then base their judgments and decision on these. This tendency works well in kind learning environments. Comparisons and associations provide a clearer sense of the situation.7 However, in wicked learning environments, people can easily focus and anchor on details that are irrelevant, or worse, against their best interests. The following questions should help discover what’s inappropriate.
• Does experience lead to a simple causal story, on which decisions are based? The more complex and uncertain the learning environment, the less reliable this story would be.
• Does experience involve alluring comforts, emotions, options, and/or games? These can hide unethical practices or distract people from their personal objectives.
• Does experience lead to a rigid focus on a selected subset of issues? If so, changes in the situation would lead experience to become quickly obsolete. Even if the situations remain unchanged, opportunities and happy occasions may exist outside that focus.
In short, the experience coach would identify the primary anchors in a given situation and then raise a red flag if these contradict one’s preferences or best interests. Going beyond these inappropriate anchors would improve personal strategies and decisions.
Flawed Convictions
People can gain expertise from experience. As a result, they don’t have to think deliberately about many of the details. This tendency works well in kind learning environments. As people increase their knowledge and improve their skills, they can act with greater confidence and competence.8 However, in wicked learning environments, more experience can lead to unreliable convictions that get in the way of reviewing, unlearning, relearning, and improving the lessons of experience.
There are two sets of questions to consider here. The first set is about the learning environment:
• In what ways is experience filtered and distorted?
• What’s the degree of complexity and uncertainty?
• Does the future resemble the past?
• How much does experience play a role in one’s learning and intuition, compared to more formal methods of obtaining knowledge?
• What’s available, missing, or irrelevant?
The second set of questions is about the decision maker:
• How convinced is the decision maker about a certain lesson?
• How much of that conviction is fueled by personal experience?
• To what degree is this belief self-fulfilling?
• What’s the decision maker’s level of statistical literacy?
• Has the decision maker ever tested any experience-based convictions?
In short, the more wicked the learning environment, the less reliable are the lessons of experience and the less valid are the convictions that these produce. The experience coach would raise a red flag upon noticing convictions based on wicked experience and then attempt to install a healthy dose of skepticism by asking the two sets of questions above. Going beyond flawed convictions would lead to a better and faster adaptation to one’s environment.
EXPERIENCE CAN INDEED be a reliable teacher, a dear friend, and a crucial ally. It’s a major source of information. Its lessons help us form our preferences and perceptions. That’s why it’s vital to look at it and the environment in which it’s obtained with a critical eye.
At an organizational level, one could envision experience coaches working to identify problems with learning environments across different functions and then devising better mechanisms for learning and decision-making accordingly. Viewing the issues from outside would make it easier to identify possible symptoms without falling prey to possible deceptions. In this book, we have attempted to fill the role of such coaches, offering as many solutions as possible to the problems we’ve diagnosed and analyzed.
At a personal level, one may need to become one’s own experience coach. That can feel quite uncomfortable. With this book, we hope to provide the necessary motivation and means to look at the lessons of experience from the outside, and then to offer some practical ideas for dealing with the implications.
That way, some of the wicked environments we often inhabit may become a little kinder.