Fun inversion from Thorndike (1921). The normal angle is: "Why are some people so much better at some things? What are the limits of expertise?" He reframes to: "Why do most people remain so mediocre at things they spend their whole lives doing?"
andymatuschak.org/files/papers/T (p. 178)
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You can tell he's kind of mad about it (particularly see the following page here). I find this a bit odd. In many of the more mundane cases he cites (e.g. handwriting) it probably is sensible to reach some threshold and just stay there!
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But he also cites decision-making as a common "plateau" skill. That's probably worth improving at for many people! It makes me want to add an entry to his list of possible explanations: it may not be obvious that radical improvement is possible.
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You know what virtuosic pianists sound like, so when you play, you'll naturally compare to those mental recordings (and feel painfully how much improvement is possible)! Military officers are trained to make strategic and decisive decisions, but that’s much less salient!
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OK, Silicon Valley types often read The Art of War etc. Not sure to what extent that approximates officer training!
But if you're a small business owner, I suspect that Decision-Making, as an abstract skill, wouldn’t normally appear on the “skill weightlifting” menu.
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So to create opportunities for expert action, it's necessary not only to enable higher levels of performance, but also to increase the salience that radical improvement is possible/desirable. It may also be necessary to structure new contexts which demand that level of expertise!
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...if SV types want something like modern officer training they should at least read WARFIGHTING aka Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 instead
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(there must of course be a lot more to officer training that just one book of course! That's just the one I know exists)
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Being a good businessman (even if you are in charge of a whole business -- ex., "running" a "startup") is by far the hardest way to succeed in business, and one of the least likely to succeed, so for these folks decision-making skills don't matter as much as the illusion...
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Business is like war in that way: if you have skin in the game you have already lost (or are doomed to lose) because the game is to minimize skin (grow big enough that the firm as a whole is insulated from all mistakes by massive resource hoards).
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David deming has shown that decision making is becoming increasingly important as a skill for wages and long term earnings too. Wrote about it a bit here
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Generally the problem is that there aren't many easy ways to wargame SB decision-making until you get to a point where you start developing the fingerspitzengefuehl. Obvious use case; lack of a good game is puzzling and probably v. significant. Kanban, Pret are not quite it.
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Recent Cedric from Commoncog post referenced Agricola, which was a little surprising and then not. It's still only closer, not quite It IMO.
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I think, for small business owners/operators, the more relevant link is the Permanent Equity checklist I included near the end of the post: permanentequity.com/writings/table
It's really a syllabus for what you need to do to run a business well.
