What is the significance of unlearning? - Chapter 17

Filling a mental storehouse. Much of the training and guidance that we receive relies on the storehouse metaphor: our minds are store houses to be filled, and as we grow up and gain experience we add more and more information into them.

The storehouse metaphor assumes that we can organize our knowledge into explicit rules, and procedures, also a comforting notion. The storehouse metaphor works best in well-ordered domains that have neatly sorted out the concepts, principles, trends and dynamics. As inventory managers we can easily check whether the trainees storehouse contains a certain fact, rule, or procedure.

We can evaluate performance by seeing how well workers conform to the rules and procedures, and how many of the facts they know. We can perform quality reviews to see if people are doing the job right away. The storehouse metaphor doesn’t work as well in complex situations as in well-ordered ones. It ignores tacit knowledge (perceptual skills), workarounds, pattern matching, mental models.

The storehouse metaphor runs into another problem in complex settings: Fixation.

Cognitive rigidity refers to fixation. Holding to our initial explanations even in the face of contrary evidence. We don’t have much trouble explaining away contrary data: The data may be flawed, or irrelevant or ambiguous. Fixation isn’t a type of defective reasoning. It’s a natural outgrowth of the way we use our mental models to guide our attention and make sense of events.

The storehouse metaphor fails to take fixation into account because the metaphor focuses on adding more knowledge into the storehouse. When we begin to work in an area, we tend to oversimplify matters in order to gain some initial understanding. Later we have to abandon these oversimplifications.

Where does the need for unlearning originate?

The Montly Hall problem: three passes at the problem, the first pass uses an exercise that relies on experience, the second on a question, and the third exercise uses a new frame

Complex learning isn’t simply a matter of adding additional beliefs, as in the storehouse metaphor. Rather, we have to revise our belief systems as we experience failures and admit the inadequacy of our current ways of thinking. We discover ways to extend or even reject our existing beliefs in favor of more sophisticated beliefs.

What is the snakeskin metaphor about?

In a complex world, the snakeskin metaphor may be better than the storehouse metaphor. Snakes continually shed their skin. The snakeskin metaphor suggests that we outgrow our initial models and have to shed them as our beliefs become more sophisticated

What are ways to learn and re-learn?

How can we get people to abandon old mental models so they can grow into new ones?

To overcome fixation, one thing we can do is spot when it is happening to us. A second suggestion is to keep an eye how much contradictory evidence we need to explain away in order to hold our beliefs. Third, we can look at some comparable cases to see what typically happens: if our estimates are very different we better have a good explanation.

Fourth, we can bring in a person who doesn’t have much history with the issues at hand and who thus will have a fresh perspective. People usually have to lose faith in their old mental models, before they can seriously consider new ones. Another strategy is to use analogies and metaphors.

Another strategy is the crystal ball method. This method is to have someone explain what he or she thinks is happening, then say that a crystal ball shows that the explanation is wrong, even though the facts are correct. The person has to come up with a different explanation for the same facts.

All these methods have some value in helping people shed outmoded mental models and learn new ways to think and to transform their mental models.

Activities can help us understand the mental models of subordinates and teammates.

The storehouse metaphor will also affect hiring and promotion decisions because it undervalues the expertise, tacit knowledge and the rich mental models of skilled workers. The notion that expertise depends on facts, rules and procedures offers false optimism about the ease of creating experts.

That’s why we need a different metaphor and different methods for learning cognitive skills!

Filling a mental storehouse. Much of the training and guidance that we receive relies on the storehouse metaphor: our minds are store houses to be filled, and as we grow up and gain experience we add more and more information into them.

The storehouse metaphor assumes that we can organize our knowledge into explicit rules, and procedures, also a comforting notion. The storehouse metaphor works best in well-ordered domains that have neatly sorted out the concepts, principles, trends and dynamics. As inventory managers we can easily check whether the trainees storehouse contains a certain fact, rule, or procedure.