Experienced firefighters, when facing new situations such as a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived from their intuition formed after years of fires in houses, and tend to make wrong decisions. When the status quo changes, chess masters also can find that the abilities that took years to master suddenly are turned obsolete”
David Epstein starts his first chapter giving us the examples of chess and golf as the representatives of the culture that defends the theory that “anything in the world can be conquered the same way”.
He refers to those who support the idea that having an early start and a deliberate practice of any activity, the famous 10,000 hours of practice, guarantees that the practitioner will become a successful expert. This theory, in the words of the author, “is based in the very important, very tacit conjecture that chess and golf are representative examples of all the activities that matter to us”
The central point of his work, and that he illustrates over and over through a variety of examples, is that the majority of the matters of the World, or those things we are willing to learn and do, are not alike chess or golf. He categorizes activities as those two belonging to the realm of “kind” learning experiences.
These environments are those where the instinctive recognition of patterns work powerfully. For example, Garry Kasparov – probably the greatest chess player in the history of the World – when explaining his process of deciding his movements explained that “he sees a movement, a combination almost in an instant manner based on the patterns that he has seen before”
But, can repetitive experience create abilities in the ample range of scenarios in real life?
Epstein demonstrates in his book how, from organizational culture students to psychiatrists that try to predict the evolution of a patient, from HR professionals that must decide who will be successful in the training phase for a new job; to the engineers, experts and scientists in NASA that decided that the Challenger could take off without having into consideration all the available data; in all those domains where human behaviour is involved, the mere repetition of past experiences does not generate any sort of learning.
In fact, in such domains that Epstein decides to refer to as “wicked”, the rules of the game are not clear. There could or could not be repetitive patterns; despite of this fact experience tends to lead people to make wrong decisions, because these decisions are based on the first thought that comes to their minds. This has the name of “cognitive fixation”, and one way to avoid it is exactly the opposite of learning by repetition or the 10,000 hours of practice.
Reading Range is a challenging and captivating experience, it forces us to rethink all current trends about “experts with omniscient knowledge” , to open the path for those who instead of driving along one unique route decide to do so on an “eight lines highway”.
One and the others are essential in decision making teams, incorporating diverse personalities will bring significant benefits short and long term in the broad range of projects in the current World, that is certainly more “wicked” than “kind.