Was listening to 's 'Playbook' episode earlier today, which summarises lessons from over 200 company deep dives. I felt distinctively uncomfortable with the approach. Some of the lessons felt ... over-fitted to the specific historical moment.
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But then so why do I still listen to Acquired, if I disagree with the 'lessons learnt' approach to reading/learning about history?
The answer: history is useful, but not in the way we usually think about it.
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Business is an ill-structured domain. Ill-structured domains are defined as a domain where the way concepts show up are highly variable.
So: scale economies seem easy to understand at a concept level. But how do they ACTUALLY show up in the real world? Do you know?
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Having this understanding is not a ‘nice to have’. If you’re up against a scale player, it helps to know all the various ways scale advantages ACTUALLY work, and all the ways they’ve been destroyed in the past.
Notice what I’m saying is different from ‘lessons learnt’.
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I’ve covered this idea in another thread.
The tl;dr is that Cognitive Flexibility Theory is a theory of adaptive expertise in ill-structured domains. It explains how experts reason when cases are complex and everything is context dependent.
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1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise.
Yes, I know how that sounds like.
No, this isn't hype.
There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
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But ok, let’s use a quick example from the Acquired podcast.
In the Playbook episode, they use Morris Chang’s life story in Texas Instruments and TSMC as an example of “it’s never too late to start a billion dollar company” — Chang started TSMC in his 50s.
This is … trite?
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I mean, yes, it might be a good lesson to draw. But it depends on the industry, the time, and the context! It probably mattered that Chang was viewed as a legend in the semiconductor industry, thanks to his work at Texas Instruments.
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The more interesting question to ask is: what set of concept instantiations does this story give us?
Let’s back up a bit. CFT tells us that experts in ill-structured domains reason by comparison to fragments of prior cases. Why?
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Well, because the way concepts show up are so context-dependent, it’s easier to compare by deep analogy to OTHER cases (that are concept instantiations) instead of by reasoning from underlying principle.
So Chang’s story is an opportunity to add to a store of cases in our heads.
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I wonder... is there a correlation between people who are good at this fragmentary parallel cognition, and fox/hedgehog paradigm?
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Good question! Truthfully, I don’t know. Will have to be on the lookout for examples.