It Depends, but on WHAT?

Most people who are skillful at a subject typically rely on their gut intuitions to make decisions about their craft. Anyone who has read George Leonard’s excellent book on "Mastery" will understand this as unconscious competence - something that usually takes a few thousand hours of active study in any worthwhile field.

The problem for the rest of us is how to make decisions while we are still consciously incompetent (we have to think about what we’re doing and we still can’t get it right!).

Well, the good news is that experts don’t actually use very complex criteria when making their decisions. In Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd and the ABC Research Group have shown that people with experience in a field typically use a relatively small number of simple rules to drive their behavior – even though the rules have been abstracted from thousands of hours of study and experience.

One of my goals for this blog will be to posit some heuristics that we can all play with and see how they work. I don't know if they’ll be right, but if they spark a debate I'm pretty sure they’ll allow us as a group to come up with some rules of thumb that’ll make it easier for people to make these decisions down the line.