What happens when a familiar pattern makes us too certain about what we’re seeing?
In this short extract from On Experience, corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson tells a story about walking into a situation convinced he’d seen it before. What happened next reveals something fascinating about expertise, assumptions and getting things wrong.
Edited Transcript
Geoff: Because that sounds like the benefit of experience, but it’s also the trap of experience that, ‘Oh, I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it five times before. It must be that.’ You know, the cat looks black. It must be a black cat versus, hang on, maybe it’s actually a dog in disguise. I never thought of that one.
Michael: Yeah.
Geoff: It’s kind of the same with the architect. It’s like, oh, that’s in the
magazines. That’s what’s built, that’s what I need to build. Versus, oh, hang on, I’ve got a magazine from 10 years ago. Oh, hang on. And you kind of ask, what’s my reference?
Michael: Hmm. Yeah, yeah,
Geoff: Has there being cases where your experience has misled you?
Michael: Yeah. Absolutely. I was working with an organization many, many years ago where, one of those patterns or recognitions became obvious to me. And so I just assumed that, ‘Oh, well it’s this’. because I’ve seen that, you know, a dozen times before. And I started to design an intervention that the client had asked for because the reason I was hired was they were not happy with the results they were getting.
And so I fell into the trap of assuming I knew what I was doing, but in the design I realized I was missing some crucial subjective experience. So I had to go and interview some of the people that we were designing the thing for. And within two or three of the questions I was asking them, ‘What happens when you are in this situation?’
And they were saying things like, ‘I shouldn’t be in that situation’. Whereas in the pattern, I’d assumed they were in that situation by choice. And were choosing to behave the way they were, and they were going, ‘I shouldn’t even be in that situation in the first place.’ The mere fact we’re in the situation, there’s a problem.
Thankfully, they were gracious enough to share their experiences with me and I was able to hear what they were saying and adjust what I was about to recommend to the client. And it actually ended up changing the whole direction of what we did for them.
Geoff: And how did you respond to that? Did you feel pleased that you’d learned something or disappointed that you’d missed it, or both?
Michael: Yeah, no, definitely pleased. It’s a weird trait of anthropologists. We are more than comfortable failing, or what other people would consider failure. We don’t associate with that as useful, it’s not even a useful concept, it’s just not a relevant concept. Rather than seeing it as failure, we talk a lot about insights.
So doing something wrong, it’s doing something wrong, or failing in the eyes of others leads to a really useful insight. That’s a huge win for us, right? Where I thought this behaviour was being conducted for a particular reason, and then you get the insight, it’s being driven by a behaviour, I hadn’t, sorry, a belief system that I hadn’t factored in, which is what was exactly what it turned out to be.
That’s seen as a huge breakthrough. It’s it’s like a breakthrough in a crime
investigation where you assumed, it must have been Bob, right? Bob had motivation.
Geoff: It was the butler.
Michael: Yeah, it is the butler. Exactly that. And then you realise it’s not the butler, it’s Miss Pennyworth, or the other character, with the candlestick in the library.
The fact you thought it was the butler in the kitchen and you’ve now been corrected or self-corrected. We have no problem admitting. Yeah, I thought it was the butler in the kitchen. Thankfully we got the insight and we now know that was leading us in the wrong direction.
You find anthropologists have no problem, in fact, they almost delight in discovering they got it wrong. So that’s a quirk of a social scientist. And then the second thing is that you also find a lot of anthropologists are not easily offended.
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