Knowledge Project

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Insights are disorienting and they make you change the way you think; organizations think they want insights and innovation and say that they want innovation, but in reality, they don’t, because insights force them to change 
• Organizational mistakes are costly and public, but no one knows when an institution fails to make an insight, which is why they often default to error reduction 
• Innovations have a track record of failure until they ultimately succeed, so it’s easy to dismiss something that has failed 9 times, not knowing that a 10th iteration may have resulted in the innovation materializing 
• Experts are well-aware of their mistakes; their mistakes eat away at them 
• It’s our natural tendency to dismiss anomalies because they threaten our existing worldview, but we should explore them when they happen  
• People tend to reach a certain level of performance, and then they stagnate; the ones that continue improving engage in a process of “unlearning” where they question their previously held notions about the given subject and explore new depths that would have otherwise remained unexplored had they not questioned their mental model
• Experts welcome the chance to operate outside their comfort zone of routines because it may result in new insights, whereas journeymen are reluctant to operate in the gray area because their tried-and-true techniques and routines aren’t useful 
• Making mistakes + reflecting on those mistakes = progress toward becoming an expert
• Biases are related to our experiences; we don’t dismiss our experiences, why should we dismiss our biases?
• “If the advantages and the disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn’t matter which one we pick.” – Gary Klein on the Zone of Indifference
  • And yet people and committees will spend an enormous amount of time mulling over the choice when in reality it won’t materially matter which one they choose
• Instead of gaining compliance through fear and intimidation, work to gain compliance through trust and faith 

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

My guest today is celebrated research psychologist Gary Klein who has spent nearly 50 years studying how and why people make the decisions they do.

We discuss naturalistic decision making, the crucial difference between experience and expertise, why some people stagnate and others progress, Cognitive Flexibility Theory, the role of storytelling, surprising ways to gain insights, fixation errors, cognitive biases, mental models, accelerated learning, and so much more.

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