Most business concepts are “simple” to understand
I had the pleasure to meet Tom Asacker in person last Friday. He had brought me a copy of his latest book - a clear eye - which I started reading this weekend.
I immediately connected with the book. Just reading the intro (which you can download here in pdf) made me chuckle. He basically describes a psychological study designed to see how people would react to flawed reasoning. Here is how it went:
“In the study two people, A and B, were seated on opposite sides of a dividing wall, looking at a screen. Each person was instructed to learn by trial and error how to recognize the difference between slides of healthy cells and sick cells. For each slide, they had to push one of two buttons in front of them, “Healthy” or “Sick,” at which point one of two lamps, labeled “Right” and “Wrong,” would light up.
Person A received true feedback, meaning that his “Right” lamp would light up when he was correct and his “Wrong” lamp would light up when he was incorrect. These people—the A’s—learned to tell the difference between healthy and sick cells with a high level of accuracy. Person B’s situation was quite different. His right or wrong lamps lit up based not on his own guesses but on Person A’s guesses. He didn’t know it, but he was searching for an order where none could possibly exist.
A and B were then asked to work together to establish the rules for determining healthy vs. sick cells. The A’s told the B’s what they had learned and what simple characteristics they had looked for to tell the difference. Bs’ explanations, by necessity, were subtle and quite complex—and completely bogus. Here’s the amazing part. After their collaboration, all B’s and nearly all A’s came to believe that the delusional B had a much better understanding of healthy vs. sick cells. In fact, A’s were impressed with B’s sophisticated brilliance, and felt inferior because of the pedestrian simplicity of their assumptions. In a follow-up test, the B’s showed almost no improvement, but the A’s scores dropped because the A’s had incorporated some of B’s completely baseless ideas.”
This is too funny - you too must have met those people that are trying to cloud what they do behind nonsense or unnecessarily complex explanations. In reality - most business concepts are simple. People that use gobbledygook language to describe what they do are either incapable or they know that they are frauds in their jobs and try to protect it with a smokescreen of complexity.
I did get further than the intro and it looks like a great read! More on it later…
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November 2nd, 2005 at 2:18 pm
My entire career up until now is finally beginning to make sense.
November 2nd, 2005 at 3:26 pm
really
November 3rd, 2005 at 3:32 pm
It’s the “bullsh*t baffles brains” concept isn’t it? People who have no idea what they’re talking about can usually convince others to believe them if they use big words and talk in circles, even if the others fully understand the simple concept, because complex explanations “sounds smarter.” Then those who understood clearly and thought it was a simple concept start to second guess themselves, thinking their understanding was too easy.
There are usually far too many people at any given company who try to do this to cover up gaps in logic or to push through initiatives that will ultimately fail.