Scenario Planning; Experience, Hubris, Testosterone, and Decision Making; Airline Tarmac Hostages

Today's post is an Aggregation post.


This month's Wired has an excellent article on scenario planning, which I've written about before. The article is a quick-and-dirty, 5-step process that does a good job of communicating the essentials.


The New Yorker has a new piece by Malcolm Gladwell titled "Cocksure". In general, I try to read everything Malcolm Gladwell writes. This article is about age/experience, hubris, arrogance, testosterone, and decision making. I wonder if he's a victim of the same situation as Scott Adams, wherein everybody insists that he must work for the same company they do, because they've described it so well they must be an insider.


Another article worth reading might be, Airline Passengers Trapped On Tarmac. As August rolls around, and particularly Aug. 3rd, this is timely. The lines that grabbed me were:

"Because of the antiquated air-traffic-control system in which we — and every airline — operate, we're restricted as to the operational improvements we can make," says Bryan Baldwin, spokesman for JetBlue Airways.

Aviation consultant Michael Boyd says airline CEOs "should form a conga line" to the FAA, which oversees air travel, and demand the country's air-traffic system be modernized. That could increase airspace capacity and reduce the number of waiting planes.

I'll be writing about this shortly.

Experience and Karl Popper's Three Worlds

Sir Karl Popper is a philosopher of science and a student of the scientific process. He describes science through an ontology of three worlds, as shown below. World-One is the physical realm, World Two is the realm of subjective reality, and World Three is the realm of objective knowledge.



The worlds are positioned so that only the first two and the last two can interact; World One and World Three cannot interface except through the intermediation of World Two.

World Three contains our accumulated scientific knowledge, which is enshrined in (but does not consist of) the devices that store it.

Popper maintained that the activity of understanding consists of operating with World Three objects, and described World Three as an arena where linguistically formatted theories can be critically discussed.

World One : The Physical World

Let's say that there's a balloon in your house. You, the balloon, and the house are in World One, the physical world. You observe the balloon through the morning and afternoon. As the day continues, the balloon gets bigger and bigger. You measure the balloon and keep track of the results. This data, these measurements without interpretation, are in World One.

Time	Balloon Size
08:00 AM	12 inches
09:30 AM	12.5 inches
11:00 AM	13 inches
1:30 PM	14.5 inches

World Two : Subjective Reality

You wonder about this. What's going on? Your thinking takes place in World Two, the world of subjective reality. Opinions, assumptions, and perceptions abound. As you think, you decide to analyze the measurements:

Time	Balloon Size	Elapsed Time	Change in Size
08:00 AM	12 inches	0	0
09:30 AM	12.5 inches	1.5 hours	.5 inch
11:00 AM	13 inches	3 hours	1 inch
1:30 PM	14.5 inches	4.5 hours	1.5 inches

And you develop a graph of the data:


You develop a theory: the size of the balloon increases with time. This is not a bad theory; it explains the observed phenomena. You develop a formula to explain the relationship: Growth(inches)= Time(hours) / 3. You're still working in World Two. You feel very good about this.

World Three : Objective Knowledge

You decide to involve others in your thoughts; you'd like to have your findings recognized and accepted. You branch out from World Two (subjective reality) and tentatively step into World Three (objective knowledge). You contact several friends, explain your data and your theory. You introduce your theory to World Three.

Your buddy Ralph, ever the naysayer, says "I can't disagree with your findings. The value of a good theory is its usefulness to predict. Tell me: what size will the balloon be at 3:00 pm? You look at your chart and your formula, and say quite confidently, "At 3:00 pm, the balloon will have grown another half-inch, for a total growth of 2.0 inches, and a total size of 14 inches."


At 3:00 pm, you measure the balloon and your prediction was right on. You nailed it. You notify your associates, and they congratulate you on your new Law of Science. You publish your results and the New Law of Science for the world to use and benefit from. You've increased our knowledge of the universe. MaryLou, however, remains a skeptic. "I don't think you're right, but I can't prove you're wrong."

You decide to offer MaryLou some food for thought. You say, "Listen-- At 4:30 pm the balloon will be 14.5 inches inches, and at 6:00 pm the balloon will be 15 inches. You'll see."

Past Behavior is no Guarantee of Future Performance

At 4:30 pm, you measure the balloon, expecting it to be 14.5 inches, and find that the size has decreased to 13.5 inches. At 6:00 pm you measure again, hoping that the balloon is back on track, and you see that the size has decreased to 13 inches.



You notify your friends, share the numbers, and tell them that your new Law of Science has been disproved (falsified). Mary Lou consoles you, "It was a good theory; it explained the known phenomena. Something else must be going on. We'll figure it out". Your proposed theory is banished from World Three.

The next day Barry calls the group with a new theory. He's working in World Two. He suggests that it wasn't the passage of time, but instead it was sunlight that made the balloon grow. (It got real cloudy after 3:00 pm.) He builds on the previous process, develops a new theory, and it passes his initial test.

He sends it into World Three by publishing his data and theory. Others run the experiment at their house, and they're able to duplicate his results. Nobody is able to disprove it. Barry's Law is accepted into World Three, at least until such time as somebody can disprove it.

Karl Popper's Philosophy of Science

Karl Popper said this process of Falsification within Three Worlds is the essence of science. World One presents events and phenomena. World Two develops personal concepts. World Three rejects falsified concepts and accepts other concepts until such time as they are falsified. Science includes the test tubes and experiments, but it's fundamentally about publication, review, acceptance, and falsification.

Popper described science as an evolutionary process in World 3, in which scientists offered bold conjectures to explain phenomena and the community refuted or accepted them. He describes knowledge through the interrogatives:

"In seeking pure knowledge our aim is, quite simply, to understand, to answer how-questions and why-questions. These are questions which are answered by giving an explanation. Thus all problems of pure knowledge are problems of explanation."

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Experience and Popper's Three Worlds

We thank the Dear Reader who is still with us. What does Experience have to do with Popper's Three Worlds? Let's go back to the Venn diagrams and remember the constraint: World One and World Three cannot touch; they must be integrated through World Two. What would the Venn diagrams look like for the various combinations of Experience and Knowledge?

No Experience, No Knowledge

What would the chart look like for a person with very practical experience, and very little contact with the body of objective knowledge? The thing that jumps out of this chart to me is that there's he's got a lot of himself, and not much else.

Good Experience, No Knowledge

This is a person who knows the physical world, but isn't going to benefit from any of the common body of objective knowledge.

No Experience, Good Knowledge

This is a person who understands objective knowledge, but has no experience in the physical (real) world; academics and theorists come to mind.

Good Experience, Good Knowledge

This is a person who knows the world and knows the body of objective knowledge. The thing that jumps out of this diagram for me is that the person doesn't get in his own way. This seems a valid representation of most competent people I know.


My take-away is: Experience Matters.

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click here for a Karl Popper cartoon.

The Google Map is not the Territory

#3 in a series on Experience.

Is the Google-Web combination a substitute for experience? Is experience important or just an anachronistic relic?

Knowledge management practitioners will tell you that capturing the knowledge-base of the entire domain is essential. So to rephrase my question: is the essential "body of knowledge" (BOK) online? If the BOK is not documented and indexed, the Google-Web solution (Goo-Web) won't be as complete or reliable a toolkit as a group of experienced humans. Or to rephrase again, is a mental map driven by Google and the Web operationally sufficient? I'm convinced that the mental maps from Google will have a wider effect than the cartographic GoogleMaps.

The puzzles posed by new technologies are things we've seen before, just with newer bells and whistles. People once learned to say, "the map is not the territory", which was an exhortation to remember that any abstract, symbolic representation of the world was by definition a limited view. There is similar wisdom in this line from a Swedish army manual: "If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain".

The full quote comes from Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, who said:

"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness". This means is that our perception of reality is not reality itself but our own version of it, or our "mental map".

Rene Magritte was moved by Korzybski's insight to produce his famous series, The Treachery of Images, reinforcing the concept that the image or map is an abstraction of the reality.

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"Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation, maps are a way of conceiving, articulating and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon sets of social relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society." Harley. J. B. "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," The Iconography of Landscape

Similarly, the body of knowledge presented by Google-Web-YouTube is an abstraction of reality, and to the extent that a gap exists between that abstraction and the real world, the Geezers and the Gurus may yet have something to contribute.


The thumbnail of the Geezer's lament is, "kids these days, all they know is Google this, Google that", which reminds me of Plato's Phaedrus. The story has Socrates telling the Myth of Theuth, the ancient God who discovered writing as a remedy for the failings of memory. Theuth's gift prompts King Thamus to bemoan the impact of the new technology (writing) on the human race, in the same manner that some bemoan the presence of Google and Wikipedia today. King Thamus says,

for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. (link)

One problem with the inexperienced, within this framework, is that their maps are fundamentally uninformed, misinformed, and incomplete. The gap between the map and reality looms large, and the decisions made by the inexperienced suffer from it.

"Strategy is the art of making war upon the map, and comprehends the whole theater of operations. Grand Tactics is the art of posting troops upon the battle-field according to the accidents of the ground, of bringing them into action, and the art of fighting upon the ground, in contradistinction to planning upon a map."
        Baron Henri de Jomini

The inexperienced can only plan based on the mental map, and so at most they can attempt strategy, but have no background for tactics.


I don't believe that the Goo-Web combo is a replacement for experience, any more than 90-day-wonders are a substitute for veterans. I do believe that Google/Wiki/YouTube is a powerful and speedy tool with low-fidelity and zero context. Today's problem solver needs Geezers and Gurus, and needs the Goo-Web to bring in possible sources outside of the evident information horizon.

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Probably unrelated view of the first introduction of books to replace scrolls:

Experience not required : Geezers, Gurus, and Google

Newbies have data and information — answers to who, what, when, where questions.. People with experience have information, knowledge, and wisdom — who, what, when, where plus how and why.

In the past, when the average person couldn't read and didn't have access to stored information (ie, scrolls and books), the only available information resource was older people, people with experience (PWE). PWEs had seen storms, famines, fires, disease, conquest. They'd experienced the problems of life: family problems, birth and death, and relationships. They had direct knowledge of farm blights, epidemics, and knew how to do things. Young people were taught to respect their elders because the Geezers had the corner on amassed experience.

A few finer points: age by itself does not bequeeth wisdom; there are certainly old idiots. Look at-- well, pick a senior Senator. But in the timeframe under discussion, when survival was not as likely as it is today, survival meant that you'd seen things and have some minimum skill set. It wasn't that every Geezer was an oracle; it was that the Geezers were the only information source around. Also, the role of Geezer as infosource was culturally embedded in a agrarian (that is, First Wave) society.

Sidebar: Toffler described the Three Waves (agrarian, industrial, information) which we can call the three F's: Farms, Factories, and Floppies. It may be that the information sources in those three systems are the three G's: Geezers, Gurus, and Google.

The role of the Geezer as infosource seems to have faded from the conventional practice. The challenge of longevity and the mortality of stupidity have decreased. Literacy, publication, and libraries increased. The general level of education and of access to information increased. Look at an average city, consider all the educated people, and look at the body of information they have access to. They may not need the experience stored in the old folks any more.

Once books and education became widespread, experience wasn't the only teacher, and Geezers weren't the only resource. Some people invested in education, and we called them professionals. Others invested in an apprenticeship, and we called them tradesmen. Both the professionals and the tradesmen practiced, gained experience, and became masters of their craft.

This was probably the next phase in information storage and access. First was Geezers. Next, we had Gurus - doctors, plumbers, lawyers, carpenters, teachers, preachers - each making a living by trading on their niche expertise. These new Gurus knocked the Geezers down a notch, and delivered a higher level of expertise. If you couldn't find a Guru, you'd still rely on a Geezer.

Libraries became knowledge repositories, and at the time I'm sure the notion was considered as vague then as the current equivalent (cloud computing) is today. The Gurus were economically viable in cities and towns, places with enough population to justify their specialization. (This echoes Richard Florida's notion of spiky cities in the Information Age.)

There was once a radio comedy series that satirized Gurus called, "Ask Doctor Science". You'd write in your question, and Dr. Science would give you an answer. The show's tagline was:
       He knows more than you do!
       "I have a master's degree....in Science"
If a group of young artists was making that show today, people would be twitter-ing their questions in, and Dr. Science would be typing their questions into Google and IM'ing responses back, while Dr. Science's lab assistant would be snarkily blogging about the old fool.


Now we have the Web. When we go to the doctor's office, or when the furnace man comes to our house, we've already checked the web to see what we can learn. After the Specialist gives us their insight, which was at one time delivered with great haughtiness, now we wait a minute and say, "That's interesting, 'cause on Google I read ...." and the Specialist furrows their brow. I imagine that every Doctor and every technician must see it coming, the moment when the customer begins speaking conversationally and then awkwardly jumps to the Google reference. For some, Google is the first opinion and the Doctor is the second opinion with the prescription pad.



Recent newspapers bring the story of Marc Stephens, a 28-year-old Royal Navy aeronautical engineer, from Cornwall in the UK. Mrs. Stephens was about to give birth and no assistance was available. (We'll leave the National Health for another day.) He Googled his problem, watched a few YouTubes, and delivered the baby. Everybody's doing fine. Do we need midwives or OB/GYN's?

I've adopted Google as a tool. When I have a problem I type it into Google, and chances are somebody else has had that situation and has written about it online. My son was learning to drive and parallel parking loomed as a significant task that he needed to learn. I googled "teach teenager parallel park" and found more help than I needed. I didn't screw up the presentation, my son picked it up easily, and it was a non-event.

If you Google your problem and there's nothing in the way of results, I have two thoughts about your situation: first, you're in trouble, because you're in a rare and possibly unique situation and that's usually problematic; and second, if you figure it out you should blog it, because the noosphere needs the solution.

Google and the Web (Goo-Web ?) are a symbiotic pair. The Web holds the human-created content, which Google indexes and makes accessible. And that's just the current situation - Wolfram-Alpha is about to open up a new meta-level of web-based problem solving.

Between the Web, YouTube, and Google's indexing, there's all sorts of information, knowledge, and wisdom available that a person couldn't access twenty years ago. And remarkably, right now old people are marginalized and warehoused in a way that would have been unthinkable sixty years ago.

Experience, standing on the shoulders of giants, and camaraderie

Last Friday I had the pleasure going to a luncheon with the retirees from my day job. They've been meeting for years, first Friday of every odd month, 11:00 for lunch.

I'm not retired, so I'm not eligible to be among them. B.I. went in March and brought the word back that we're invited. I felt like it was an invitation from the Vatican, a chance to see the old lions, the guys with remarkable experience.




It was like being a bat-boy at an Old Timer's game for the Yankees, a team with a real impressive alumni group. Different retirees show up in different months, this one's in Florida, that one's visiting grandkids, so the mix is always different. You know that back in the day they had the same bumps and frictions that we have today, but they're all past that. They've got nothing to prove, and they're living the dream.

They all looked healthy and happy. These guys have seen it all, they've been through the times that I read about in school. The stories they told weren't war stories ("there I was..") so much as funny interpersonal anecdotes told in the spirit of bonhomie.

I knew most of them from the mid-80's, when I was a noob and they were in their last years, but there were a few that I'd never met. I met one man, F.G. that I'd heard of - my older colleagues always spoke of him with great respect, and it was cool to meet him. There was a elderly gentleman there who'd been a B17 pilot in WW2 before he came to work on the job, he's been retired a long time but it was awesome to see him there. He's been going to retiree luncheons longer than I've been working.

It was a genuine pleasure to see these men. In their day they probably weren't all giants, they worked at it like everybody else — yet somehow, over the course of their long careers and their significant experience they'd become giants. These are the giants upon whose shoulders my generation rides. They taught us our craft and, to a degree, their perspective.

Although the technology has changed, I think they'd be right at home in the current culture. Their expertise is beyond the equipment and software.

It led me to think about experience and camaraderie, and what walks out the door along with a senior person. Then on Sunday I saw the day's Doonesbury:




When I drove away (I had to go back to work, naturally) I realized this was my second-best day at work in 2009, after Bring Your Child To Work Day. I've been jotting down some thoughts on experience and hope to have a few entries soon.