3/ That's an excerpt from her chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Expertise, a chonky book that I shouldn't have any right in owning.
The excerpt was so compelling I dove into Lia DiBello's entire publication history.
Conversation
4/ What I found: DiBello has spent her entire career extracting tacit mental models of expertise from business experts.
To my surprise, she hasn't published as much, but that's mostly because she has spent the bulk of the past 20 years consulting for companies.
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5/ So what is that model? Glad you asked.
The basic idea is this:
Business expertise consists of two main things — domain-specific mental models, and a property called cognitive agility.
The domain-specific mental models map to a core shared model of business expertise.
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6/ That core shared mental model is basically a triad. For convenience we'll name it first, before diving in:
a) Supply
b) Demand
c) Capital
This is taken from her 2010 chapter in Informed by Knowledge (snippet below):
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7/ It's important to understand that this triad is extremely general in nature. How it is expressed is radically different, depending on the industry.
So, for supply — factors involved in effective ops looks different in a yoghurt company vs a mining company vs a SaaS.
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8/ The key marker of skill is in the ability of the businessperson to intuitively understand how changes in one leg of the triad affects the other two legs.
This also explains how a good businessperson is able to recognise another good businessperson:
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9/ So for instance, if there's a change in the capital environment, how does that affect competition? (The market — the demand leg of the triad).
And what changes must the company make? (This is supply).
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10/ DiBello also uses the names leadership/strategy/finance. To map it to our previous terms:
Supply — Leadership (factors that affect operations)
Demand — Strategy (factors that affect the market)
Capital — Finance (factors that affect business finance or access to capital)
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11/ How does this intuitive understanding of the triad express itself? DiBello's insight is that it allows the businessperson the ability to a) notice cues that novices do not, and b) predict changes as a result of those cues in each leg of the triad.
This was a profound insight
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Replying to
Great thread!!! Lots to think about.
Dunno if you've read much of the stuff on the Naturalized Decision Making / Heuristic Bias debate in decision psychology, but I think you'd love it.
Here's a piece by Kahneman and Klein on the subject:
emcrit.org/wp-content/upl
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