Teach Experts to Think Differently

Source: Wikimedia

I've written an article for Training Magazine, published this past week.  It is titled, "Teach Experts to Think Differently."  You can view the article here.  Hope you find the ideas useful, particularly if learning and talent development are areas of responsibility for you. 

Generalists vs. Specialists: Boosting Creativity on Your Team

Scholars Florenta Teodoridis, Michael Bikard, and Keyvan Vakili have completed a new study regarding the role of generalists vs. specialists in the creative process. They posed the following hypothesis, as described in a recent Harvard Business Review post:

We theorized that the benefits of being a generalist are strongest in fields with a slower pace of change. In these fields (think oil and gas, mining), it might be harder for specialists to come up with new ideas and identify new opportunities, while generalists may be able to find inspiration from other areas. We also theorized that the situation flips for fields with a faster pace of change. In this case (think of quickly evolving fields such as quantum computers and gene editing), generalists may struggle to stay up to date, while specialists can more easily make sense of new technical developments and opportunities as they arise.

How did they study this question, and what did they find? The researchers examined the breakthroughs in mathematics by scholars in the Soviet Union from 1980-2000. They specifically wanted to look at the work being conducted during the Soviet era, when the pace of change was slow, to the period after the Soviet Union collapsed, when the pace of change increased substantially. Their detailed study confirmed their initial hypotheses. As they noted, "Generalists appear to be relatively successful as long as the pace of change is not too rapid, but their productivity decreases when the pace of change increases. At the same time, specialists appear to perform better when the pace of change accelerates."

Experts and Innovation

Stanford Professor Riitta Katila describes the role experts should and should not play on a team when it comes to developing breakthrough innovations. Check out the video clip below, in which she describes lessons from her research:

The Downside of Preaching What You Practice

You are an expert and high performer in your organization, and senior leaders have asked you to share your best practices, your secrets to success. How should you approach the fulfillment of this request. With caution! Why? It turns out that preaching what you practice can backfire. At Stanford, researchers Benoît Monin and Lauren Howe have studied physician and patient behavior.   What happens, for instance, when a doctor shares information regarding his or her own healthy lifestyle with a patient who may be living in an unhealthy manner?   Here's what they found:

Doctors who emphasize their fitness seem like they may be more critical of patients who don’t live up to the same high standards. And it’s not that doctors actually devalue patients; it’s something overweight patients fear might happen to them when seeking out a new doctor, especially a doctor who touts his or her own exemplary health habits in their literature or online. This is called anticipated devaluation, and it can make overweight patients shy away from doctors who emphasize that they practice what they preach. Moreover, the researchers note, when patients feel devalued, they may seek care elsewhere or delay seeking it altogether to the detriment of their long-term health.

We should not be surprised by these results.   For me, the takeaway is that we must demonstrate empathy when we preach what we practice.  We have to step into the other person's shoes.  Moreover, we have to acknowledge our own fallibility.  Talking about our mistakes, and the hurdles we have had to surmount, can help others listen to our ideas and recommendations.  

Advisers and Uncertain Advice

Celia Gaertig and Joseph Simmons have published a paper titled, "Do People Inherently Dislike Uncertain Advice?"   The authors focus on the longstanding research finding that individuals prefer confident to uncertain advisors.   Individuals generally don't want take advice from someone who does not appear self-assured.  Gaertig and Simmons extend this research by examining the question:  Do people exhibit an aversion to uncertain advice itself?

The scholars studied advice evaluation in a series of studies focused on issues such as sports predictions, finance, and weather.  Their findings proved remarkably consistent.   Indeed, people evaluate confident advisers more favorably than those who appear uncertain and hesitant.  However, people do not necessarily dislike uncertain advice.   Here is an excerpt from their paper: 

In eleven studies, we found that people do not inherently dislike uncertain advice. We observed this in studies of sports, weather, and stocks. We observed this in studies that operationalized uncertain advice as imprecision, as statements of numerical probability, and as statements of non-numerical uncertainty. And we observed this in studies in which people directly evaluated the advice and in studies that asked people to choose between an advisor who provided certain advice versus one who provided uncertain advice.  

This paper gives me comfort.  It shows that people are quite capable of sifting through advice, and recognizing the merits of advice couched in the form of probabilities.  We do not expect complete certainty.  That's a good thing, as I believe we should be skeptical of advice and predictions that seem to express absolute certainty.    We just might be more rational than some people think!  

How You Think vs. What You Know

Philip Tetlock wrote a terrific book last year titled Superforecasters.  In that book, he describes the  decades of research he has conducted on expert predictions. Put simply, he has found that experts don't make great prognosticators, despite their vast knowledge and experience. Knowing a great deal does not enable you to see the future. In fact, it can be a handicap at times, because you may be tied down by conventional wisdom, long-held assumptions, and pre-existing beliefs. In Tetlock's research, he has found that a small set of people have an uncanny ability to make accurate predictions. These people are not experts in the domain in which they made those forecasts. What enables them to predict so effectively? Tetlock conclues that the key is HOW THEY THINK, not what they know. The best forecasters exhibit the following characteristics:

• They are open-minded, reflective, and intellectually curious. 
• They acknowledge what they do not know. 
• They gather information from a wide variety of sources and question the validity of each source. 
• They enjoy pondering a range of diverse views, and they update their conclusions as facts change. 
• They treat beliefs as testable hypotheses rather than hard truths.

In my view, the same might be said about the best leaders.  They often distinguish themselves by how they think, not what they know.   The best leaders are reflective and intellectually curious, question the conventional wisdom, do not become wedding to existiing beliefs, admit what they do not know, critique the validity of information sources, and gather diverse opinions before making key decisions.  

Closed-minded Experts

Experts can be quite closed-minded at times. They exhibit overconfidence and a bias toward the status quo. Victor Ottati and his colleagues have documented evidence of what they call the “Earned Dogmatism Effect.” The scholars argue that social norms about novices versus experts play a key role in how people perceive new ideas.   Here's how they explain this effect: 

“Consider, for example, a seminar pertaining to cancer. Within this situation, some individuals may occupy the role of “novice” (e.g., a layperson) whereas others may occupy the role of “expert” (e.g., a cancer researcher). Because novices possess limited knowledge, social norms dictate that they should listen and learn in an open-minded fashion. The expert possess extensive knowledge, and therefore is entitled to adopt a more dogmatic or forceful orientation. Dogmatic statements are more likely to be tolerated when the “expert” speaks than when a “novice” speaks. Novices possess limited knowledge, and as such, are expected to adopt a more humble and open-minded orientation.”

The researchers conducted a series of experiments to explore this effect.  In their studies, they demonstrate that even simply the self-perception of expertise can lead to closed-minded behavior.  In  one experiment they provided people false feedback on a simple test, leading some individuals to believe that they had a great deal of expertise, while others felt that they were not knowledgeable at all relative to most others in the study.   The individuals who were made to feel as though they were experts exhibited closed-mindedness in a subsequent aspect of the study.   That effect is pretty incredible, given that the individuals were not ACTUALLY experts.  The feedback that they received was MADE UP!  

Innovating Through Pyramid Search

You would like to innovate, and you have heard that bold innovations often come from outside of one's particular domain of expertise.  We derive breakthrough ideas by tapping into expertise from analogous fields.  I've blogged about that topic previously on this site.  However, you may find yourself asking:  Where do I begin?  How do I find an expert in an analogous field?  Which analogous field should be explored? 

Marion Poetz and Reinhard Prügl write this week in Harvard Business Review about a concept called pyramid search.   Here's how they explain the process:

 

The basic idea is that you identify people who might have some knowledge of or interest in a given topic area, and you ask them who else might know even more than they do — or who else might know of others with greater knowledge. Then you contact those people and repeat the process until you’ve gotten to the top of that particular topic area, or pyramid, and found individuals with the highest levels of expertise and passion.  Once you’re at a peak of a pyramid, you’re more likely to get a referral to someone in a distant but analogous topic area (when we say “distant,” we’re not referring to geography but to contextual differences between subjects). That’s because the highly curious, knowledgeable, well-connected people at the top of pyramids tend to reach out to people outside their domains.

Will Non-Experts Fuel Future Disruptive Innovation?

Highly successful entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain has published an interesting essay on the Forbes website.  Jain argues that non-experts will fuel much of the future disruptive innovations.  He challenges Gladwell's emphasis on experts in his book, Outliers.  Jain explains that the experts won't necessarily be the ones to solve some of the world's most challenging problems. 

Jain offers two main reasons.  First, he explains that experts can often be quite myopic.   Second, Jain argues that information is widely available these days, not restricted to a few experts.   Moreover, technology is moving so quickly that expertise seems to become outdated much sooner than in the past.  Here is an excerpt that describes his thinking:

The human brain, or more specifically the neo-cortex, is designed to recognize patterns and draw conclusions from them. Experts are able to identify such patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because non-experts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain’s ability for abstraction, rather than specificity. This abstraction—the ability to take away or remove characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics—is what presents an opportunity for creative solutions.

Do you agree with his arguments?