Why do experts sometimes commit errors? - Chapter 7

This chapter takes up the topic of expertise, it’s strengths and its limitations.

What do mental models of experts entail?

Experts are not just accumulating experiences. People become experts by the lessons they draw from their experiences, and by the sophistication of their mental models about how things work.

Mental models are developed through experience: individual experience, organizational experience and cultural experience,The richer mental models of experts include more knowledge and also enable the experts to see more connections. These are two defining features of complexity. The mental models of experts are more complex than those of other people. We need not to conduct research projects to appreciate the mental models of experts. We can see it all around us.

Here's an example. The dishwasher is broken. Someone is coming to fix it. You think it is a huge problem and that you have to buy a new dishwasher. But when the expert comes he has fixed it within 10 minutes. This shows the rich mental model of the expert on how appliances fail.

Ideally, experts wouldn’t make any mistakes. But we know that’s not true. In fact, expertise gives rise to errors. With experience we learn more and more patterns. These patterns let us size up situations quickly and accurately. The experience and the patterns enable us to judge what to pay attention to and what to ignore. That way, we usually reserve our attention for the most important cues and aspects of a situation.

However, if the situation is deceptive or is different from what we expect, we may focus our attention on the wrong things and ignore important cues. That’s why the concept of mindsets creates so much controversy.

Experience and patterns produce mindsets. The more experience we have, the more patterns we have learned, the larger and more varied our mindsets and the more accurate they are. We depend heavily on our mindsets.

What is yet the problem?

Our mindsets aren’t perfect and can mislead us. With more expertise, we may become more confident in our mindsets, and therefore more easily misled. The mindsets that reflect our experience and power our expertise, cause our downfall.

Mindsets helps us frame situations and provide anchors for making estimates. With more experience, our frames will be effective and our anchors will permit accurate estimates.

Jim Reason, spent most of his career investigating the basis for human error. His ‘Swiss cheese’ model of errors has had a major influence in deflecting blame for errors from the person working at the ‘sharp end’, the pilot or nurse, to a broader perspective that includes the training these people received and the kinds of organizational pressures placed on them.

Reason has contrasted two aspects of human performance that come up again and again in treatment of errors:

• The human as a hazard: it isn’t hard to spot slips, lapses, mistakes, and violations of procedures. People forget things, stop paying attention, get distracted, suffer from carelessness.

• Human as a hero: we can make note of adjustments, compensations, recoveries, improvisations. In this view, errors result from organizational failures.

According to reason, if we over-emphasize the human as-hazard model, we wind up blaming and shaming people at the sharp end, and ignoring the organizational forces acting on them. If we overemphasize the human-as-hero model, we may fail to address early signs of organizational dysfunction and the erosion of standards. The hard part is to find a balance between these two views, each of which captures part of the error picture.

Those who urge us to curb intuitions line up with the human-as-hazard model. They worry about overconfidence in biased judgments. Those who urge us to listen to intuitions follow a human-as-hero model. They worry about the consequences of making people distrust their intuitions.

CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA may be leaning too strongly toward the human-as-hazard model in the wake of its incorrect assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Balancing the human-as-hazard and the human-as-hero models isn’t simply giving each of them equal time or equal weight. We should find ways to blend them, expending the role of expertise when procedures and analyses aren’t sufficient.

Under what conditions can people develop expertise?

This was a question that Danny Kahneman explored over several years. He was trying to de-mystify intuition by investigating the condition under which reliable intuitions can develop.

Kahneman concluded that two conditions are necessary for reliable intuitions to develop:

• The situation must be reasonably predictable.

• People must have opportunities to learn. Low-predictability situations make it unlikely that people can develop expertise because it is so hard to identify reliable cues.

What is the essence of positive psychology?

Most tools for improving performance are aimed at reducing mistakes. Seligman initiated a new field, positive psychology, to help people move above the line and have satisfying lives. Seligman’s views apply to cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is the way people think and reason and make decisions and diagnose events. They apply to executives, housewives, students and procedures.

The guidance we tend to hear is about reducing mistakes. Procedures, checklists and decision aids are all designed to catch and correct possible mistakes. But eliminating mistakes isn’t the same as gaining expertise. Most organizations overdo the human-as-hazard model and put too much effort into reducing or eliminating mistakes.

We must make mistakes in order to learn. When organizations crack down on mistakes, they may unwittingly slow the rate of learning. Employee evaluations usually highlight mistakes and failures because they are easier to spot and document.

We learn from mistakes by diagnosing why they happened, but if an organization is overzealous about reducing mistakes, then workers may spend more time covering up their mistakes than they spend trying to figure out what caused those mistakes and how to do a better job in the future.

Experts are not just accumulating experiences. People become experts by the lessons they draw from their experiences, and by the sophistication of their mental models about how things work.

Mental models are developed through experience: individual experience, organizational experience and cultural experience,The richer mental models of experts include more knowledge and also enable the experts to see more connections. These are two defining features of complexity. The mental models of experts are more complex than those of other people. We need not to conduct research projects to appreciate the mental models of experts. We can see it all around us.