Transactive Memory

The
term coined by Daniel Wegner simply means – individuals can act as
extended memory to one another. That simply means that you need not
know something that you know that your wife or father knows. This is
described in detail in Malcom Gladwell’s “The tipping point”. A closely
knit team is more efficient in remembering things than individual team
members. This has a positive effect on how the team performs. May be
this explains the efficiency of Agile teams who rely heavily on communication among the team members. Gladwell also talks about effect
the magic number 150 has on organizations. He cites the case of
Gore Associates and their high efficiency. He also talks about how “peer
pressure” ( rather than dead-line pressures or pressure from
supervisors) pushes people perform better.

This also brings
forth the Japanese working style. Kenichi Ohmae describes in his book -
“The mind of the strategist”, about how the Japanese organizations are
structured. He talks about the how people work closely within/across
teams. According to him, in Japan, children are taught how to mix with others
and work in a group at school. This is the first lesson they learn at
school before anything else!. Does this explain Japanese efficiency?

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Fallacy of Success

Is success predictable? There are many business books that tell you how to achieve success. They give you a list of things you can do to achieve success. According to Phil Rosenzweig, things are not so simple. He says, the situation is more complicated than that. The dynamics of the business environment is very complex. He tells you that business gurus who have built formula for success have based their theories on skewed data. They are basing their theories only on the companies that have succeeded. The data suffers from survivorship bias.
Even if you have a very good strategy future is uncertain. What you think is a very smart strategy might fail miserably. And, an ordinary strategy might make you highly successful. According to Nassim Taleb,it is easy to give explanations for the success after you have succeeded. If you have failed, no one will even listen to you in the first place. Mind you many of these explanations suffer from Texas sharpshooter fallacy. According to him, you can achieve moderate success with a good strategy and hard work. If you have achieved may be there is a high probability that some other subtle forces are at play. Since, people can not understand the entire situation they tend to attribute their success to some of their strategies, values etc. Many times the relationship between the cause and effect is very subtle. There may be a time lag, or other forces at play. This is called ‘dynamic complexity’. This leads to many of the erroneous explanations.

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Fallacy of expertise

Expertise is all about knowledge and skill in a particular field. So, what is the fallacy of expertise? Psychologists say that we over estimate our own capabilities. There was a study conducted by researchers to analyze how experienced surgeons diagnose diseases. The researchers had also developed a simple statistical model for the diagnosis. It was found that the statistical model was more accurate than the expert diagnosis. There may be many reasons why the expert diagnosis is not correct. Our brain uses lots of short cuts during thinking, watching etc. Since the expert believes that he knows the field thoroughly( which is an over estimation by the way!), he may be a little lazy to analyze the facts in detail and arrives at a decision hastily. Or, it is also possible that his ‘mental model’ about the conditions that are associated with the disease may be wrong!. There may also be many other cognitive biases at play.( Hopefully, more on these in a later blog!)

It is generally found that a group of people make better judgment than individuals. This is called the ‘crowd wisdom’. Remember an old saying – ‘ Two heads are better than one’?. This has been proven by research. So, what does this mean to us? We can make better decisions in life situations, in work etc, by consulting more people about the situation. Remember though that the people you consult should have genuine interest either in you or the problem at hand.

Software teams for example can come up with better architecture, estimation or features for a product by brainstorming rather than working in silos. This leads to better products, better architectures, better estimations etc.This circumvents some of the errors made by experts in the team.

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