1, #23 - When experience doesn’t help
On Kind & Wicked Learning Environments — Estimated Read Time: 46 seconds.
Learning from experience is not always straightforward.
Behavioral scientists Robin Hogarth and Emre Soyer describe learning environments as being either “kind” or “wicked.” Kind environments reward repetition—learning chess, golf, classical music. By contrast, wicked environments are complex or plagued with flawed feedback loops, so repetition doesn’t give you an advantage.
Experience is valuable in kind environments because you can develop a clear understanding of which inputs will lead to what outputs. But wicked environments are far more common and in these situations, experience may leave us without any more clarity. Or worse, the lack of clear feedback loops may lead us to draw the wrong conclusions.
Another author, David Epstein, points out that generalists are well suited for wicked learning environments: While singular deep expertise can be a liability in these contexts, a broad range of mental models gives you different perspectives to evaluate problems with unknown variables.
In our increasingly complex world, relying on our experience with a single field or framework will not be enough.
Insight inspired by: Robin Hogarth and Emre Soyer, and their book, The Myth of Experience. (Here’s a fun YouTube summary.) Plus, David Epstein and his book, Range. (Here’s his TED talk and here’s a great book summary from Banks Benitez.)