by Dan Heath
The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. New jurors are struck by lawyers’ personalities and factual details and courtroom rituals. Meanwhile, judges weigh the current case against the abstract lessons of past cases and legal precedent. Biology students try to remember whether reptiles lay eggs or not. Biology teachers think in terms of the grand system of animal taxonomy.
Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.
And here is where our classic villain, the Curse of Knowledge, inserts itself. A researcher named Beth Bechky studied a manufacturing firm that designed and built the complicated machinery used to produce silicon chips. To build such machinery, the firm needed two sets of skills: engineers who could create brilliant designs, and skilled manufacturing people who could transform those designs into complex physical machines.
If the firm was to succeed, these two sets of people had to be able to communicate smoothly. But, not surprisingly, they spoke different languages. The engineers tended to think abstractly—they spent their day agonizing over drawings and blueprints. The manufacturing team, on the other hand, tended to think on a physical level—they spent their day building machines.
What’s most revealing for the Curse of Knowledge is what happened when something went wrong on the manufacturing floor. The manufacturing folks would sometimes run into a problem—something didn’t fit or perhaps wasn’t receiving enough power. The manufacturers would bring the problem to the engineers, and the engineers would immediately get to work. Specifically, they’d get to work fixing their drawings.
For example, the manufacturing team might find a part that didn’t fit on the machine. When the team showed the part to the engineers, they wanted to pull out the blueprints and move things around on the drawing. In other words, the engineers instinctively wanted to jump to a higher level of abstraction.
The engineers, Bechky found, made their drawings “increasingly elaborate” in the hope that the enhanced drawings would clarify the process for the manufacturers. Over time, the drawings became more abstract, which further hampered communication.
The engineers were behaving like American tourists who travel to foreign countries and try to make themselves understood by speaking English more slowly and loudly. They were suffering from the Curse of Knowledge. They had lost the ability to imagine what it was like to look at a technical drawing from the perspective of a nonexpert.
The manufacturing people were thinking, Why don’t you just come down to the factory floor and show me where the part should go? And the engineering people were thinking, What do I need to do to make the drawings better?
The miscommunication has a quality that is familiar, no doubt, to many readers who don’t work on silicon chip—making machinery. So how do you fix it? Should both parties learn greater empathy for the other and, in essence, meet in the middle? Actually, no. The solution is for the engineers to change their behavior. Why? As Bechky notes, the physical machine was the most effective and relevant domain of communication. Everyone understands the machines fluently. Therefore problems should be solved at the level of the machine.
It’s easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, like the tappers in the “tappers and listeners” game. It can feel unnatural to speak concretely about subject matter we’ve known intimately for years. But if we’re willing to make the effort we’ll see the rewards: Our audience will understand what we’re saying and remember it.
The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.
Concrete Allows Coordination
In the last chapter, we closed with two unexpected slogans that were used to motivate and coordinate large groups of smart people. The slogans were challenges to build a “pocketable radio” and to “put a man on the moon within the decade.” Notice that these slogans are also pleasingly concrete. It is doubtful that Japanese engineers were paralyzed with uncertainty about their mission, or that much time was spent at NASA quibbling about the meaning of “man,” “moon,” or “decade.”
Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency. Consider a software start-up whose goal is to build “the next great search engine.” Within the start-up are two programmers with nearly identical knowledge, working in neighboring cubes. To one “the next great search engine” means completeness, ensuring that the search engine returns everything on the Web that might be relevant, no matter how obscure. To the other it means speed, ensuring pretty good results very fast. Their efforts will not be fully aligned until the goal is made concrete.
When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plane in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia. (The 4-22 runway was chosen for its length—less than a mile, which was much too short for any of the existing passenger jets.) With a goal this concrete, Boeing effectively coordinated the actions of thousands of experts in various aspects of engineering or manufacturing. Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.”
The Ferraris Go to Disney World in the R & D Lab
Stone Yamashita Partners, a small consulting firm in San Francisco, was founded by Robert Stone and Keith Yamashita, former Apple creatives. Stone Yamashita is a master of using concrete techniques to help organizations create change. “Almost everything we do is visceral and visual,” Keith Yamashita says. The “product” of most consulting firms is often a PowerPoint presentation. At Stone Yamashita, it’s much more likely to be a simulation, an event, or a creative installation.
Around 2002, Stone Yamashita was approached by Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP’s top management team hoped to win a partnership with Disney, and they asked Stone Yamashita to help prepare a proposal that would highlight HP research, and show how it could help Disney run its theme parks.
HP, like many technology firms, generates great research in its laboratories, but that research isn’t always translated into tangible physical products. Researchers get excited about pushing the boundaries of a technology, making products that are complex and sophisticated, while customers generally seek out products that are easy and reliable. The desires of researchers and customers don’t always dovetail.
The “presentation” that Stone Yamashita designed was an exhibit that filled 6,000 square feet. Yamashita describes the gist: “We invented a fictitious family called the Ferraris, three generations of them, and built an exhibit about their life and their visit to Disney World.”
Walking into the exhibit, you began in the Ferraris’ living room, furnished with family photos. Each subsequent room followed the Ferraris through various scenes of their Disney World vacation. HP technology helped them buy tickets, sped their entry into the park, and scheduled their reservations for dinner. Another bit of technology helped them enjoy their favorite rides while minimizing waiting time. Back inside their hotel room at the end of the day, there was a final twist: A digital picture frame had automatically downloaded a picture of them as they rode a Disney World roller coaster.
Stone Yamashita, working with HP’s engineers, turned a message about the benefits of collaboration—what could have been a Power-Point presentation—into a living, breathing simulation. Stone Yamashita put hooks into the idea of e-services. They took an abstract idea and made it concrete
with an intense sensory experience.
Note that there were two different audiences for the exhibit. The first audience was Disney. Disney’s execs were the “novices”—they needed to be shown, in tangible terms, what HP’s technology could do for them. Then there were HP’s employees, particularly the engineers. They were far from novices. Many engineers had been skeptical about the value of Yamashita’s demos. Once the exhibit opened, however, it produced tremendous enthusiasm within HP. It was initially intended to stay up long enough to make the Disney pitch, but, because it was so popular, it remained for three or four months afterward. One observer said, “It became very viral in that others began to ask, ‘Did you see that great thing that the labs team did? Did you know that we could do this? Did you know that they did it in only twenty-eight days?’”
Concreteness helped this team of experts coordinate. A diverse group of engineers, accustomed to contemplating difficult technology problems, suddenly came face-to-face with the Ferrari family. By grappling with one family’s concrete needs—their tickets and reservations and photos—they did something remarkable: They took abstract ideas from their research labs and turned them into a family picture on a roller-coaster ride.
Concrete Brings Knowledge to Bear:
White Things
Grab a pencil and a piece of paper and find a way to time yourself (a watch, a spouse who likes to count, etc.). Here is a do-it-yourself test on concreteness. You’ll do two brief fifteen-second exercises. When you’ve got your supplies ready, set your timer for fifteen seconds, then follow the instructions for Step 1 below.
STEP 1 INSTRUCTIONS:
Write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of.
STOP. Reset your timer for fifteen seconds.
STEP 2 INSTRUCTIONS:
Write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.
Most people, remarkably, can list about as many white things from their refrigerators as white anythings. This result is stunning because, well, our fridges don’t include a particularly large part of the universe. Even people who list more white anythings often feel that the refrigerator test is “easier.”
Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years.
Sure, this is a neat brain trick. But what value does it have? Consider a situation where an entrepreneur used this neat brain trick to earn a $4.5 million investment from a savvy and sophisticated group of investors.
Kaplan and Go Computers
For an entrepreneur, having the chance to pitch a business idea to local venture capitalists is a big deal, like a budding actor getting an audition with an independent film director. But having a chance to pitch an idea to Kleiner Perkins—the most prestigious firm in Silicon Valley—is more like a private one-on-one audition with Steven Spielberg. You could walk out a star, or you could walk out having blown the biggest chance of your life.
And that’s why twenty-nine-year-old Jerry Kaplan was nervous as he stood in the Kleiner Perkins office in early 1987. His presentation would start in about thirty minutes. Kaplan was a former researcher at Stanford who had quit to work at Lotus in its early days. Lotus, with its bestselling Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, became a stock market darling. Now Kaplan was ready for the next challenge. He had a vision for a smaller, more portable generation of personal computers.
He hung around outside the conference room as the previous entrepreneur finished his presentation. Watching the other entrepreneur, he felt underprepared. As he observed, his nervousness advanced toward panic. The other entrepreneur wore a dark pin-striped suit with a red power tie. Kaplan had on a sport jacket with an open-collared shirt. The other entrepreneur was projecting an impressive color graph onto the whiteboard. Kaplan was carrying a maroon portfolio with a blank pad of paper inside. This did not bode well.
Kaplan had thought that he was showing up for an informal “get to know you” session, but, standing there, he realized how naive he’d been. He had “no business plan, no slides, no charts, no financial projections, no prototypes.” Worst of all, the überprepared entrepreneur in the boardroom was facing a skeptical audience that now peppered him with tough questions.
When Kaplan’s turn arrived, one of the partners introduced him. Kaplan took a deep breath and started: “I believe that a new type of computer, more like a notebook than a typewriter, and operated by a pen rather than a keyboard, will serve the needs of professionals like ourselves when we are away from our desks. We will use them to take notes, send and receive messages through cellular telephone links; look up addresses, phone numbers, price lists, and inventories; do spreadsheet calculations; and fill out order forms.”
He covered the required technology, highlighting the major unknown: whether a machine could reliably recognize handwriting and convert it into commands. Kaplan recounts what happened next:
My audience seemed tense. I couldn’t tell whether they were annoyed by my lack of preparation or merely concentrating on what I was saying…. Thinking I had already blown it, and therefore had little to lose, I decided to risk some theatrics.
“If I were carrying a portable PC right now, you would sure as hell know it. You probably didn’t realize that I am holding a model of the future of computing right here in my hands.”
I tossed my maroon leather case in the air. It sailed to the center of the table where it landed with a loud clap.
“Gentlemen, here is a model of the next step in the computer revolution.”
For a moment, I thought this final act of drama might get me thrown out of the room. They were sitting in stunned silence, staring at my plain leather folder—which lay motionless on the table—as though it were suddenly going to come to life. Brook Byers, the youthful-looking but long-time partner in the firm, slowly reached out and touched the portfolio as if it were some sort of talisman. He asked the first question.
“Just how much information could you store in something like this?”
John Doerr [another partner] answered before I could respond. “It doesn’t matter. Memory chips are getting smaller and cheaper each year and the capacity will probably double for the same size and price annually.”
Someone else chimed in. “But bear in mind, John, that unless you translate the handwriting efficiently, it’s likely to take up a lot more room.” The speaker was Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, who helped the partnership evaluate technology deals.
Kaplan said that from that point on he hardly had to speak, as partners and associates traded questions and insights that fleshed out his proposal. Periodically, he said, someone would reach out to touch or examine his portfolio. “It had been magically transformed from a stationery-store accessory into a symbol of the future of technology.”
A few days later, Kaplan got a call from Kleiner Perkins. The partners had decided to back the idea. Their investment valued Kaplan’s nonexistent company at $4.5 million.
What transformed this meeting from a grill session—with an anxious entrepreneur in the hot seat—to a brainstorming session? The maroon portfolio. The portfolio presented a challenge to the boardroom participants—a way of focusing their thoughts and bringing their existing knowledge to bear. It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative.
The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” made it easier for us to brainstorm. When they saw the size of the portfolio, it sparked certain questions: How much memory could you fit in that thing? Which PC components will shrink in the next few years, and which won’t? What new technology would have to be invented to make it feasible? This same process was sparked in Sony’s Japanese engineering team by
the concept of a “pocketable radio.”
Concreteness creates a shared “turf” on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they’re tackling the same challenge. Even experts—even the Kleiner Perkins venture capitalists, the rock stars of the technology world—benefit from concrete talk that puts them on common ground.
CLINIC
Oral Rehydration Therapy Saves Children’s Lives!
THE SITUATION: Each year more than a million children in countries around the world die from dehydration caused by diarrhea. This problem can be prevented, at very low cost, by getting kids the right kind of fluids. How do you get people invested in this idea?
• • •
MESSAGE 1: Here’s an explanation from PSI, a nonprofit group that addresses health problems in developing countries:
Diarrhea is one of the leading killers of young children in developing countries, causing over 1.5 million child deaths annually. Diarrhea itself is not the cause of death, but rather dehydration, the loss of body fluid. Approximately three quarters of the body is composed of water, and if fluid loss exceeds ten percent of total body fluid, vital organs collapse, followed by death. If an episode is severe, as with cholera, death can occur within just eight hours.
To prevent life-threatening dehydration it is necessary to increase liquid intake in quantities sufficient to replenish the fluids and electrolytes lost with diarrhea. The best liquid for this purpose is a blend of electrolytes, sugar, and water, known as oral rehydration salts. ORS restores body fluid and electrolytes more rapidly than any other liquid, and does so even when the intestinal wall is compromised by disease.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: Quick: How solvable is this problem? Suppose you were a health official in a developing nation. What would you do tomorrow to start saving kids?
To be fair, this message appears on a Web page that describes what PSI has been doing to solve this problem. The text doesn’t necessarily reflect how the organization might approach decision-makers to persuade them to act. The information is written in language that creates credibility; there is lots of scientific language and exposition. If the problem sounds too complex, however, that could deter people from trying to solve it.