Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World Quotes
"Our advantage over our ancestors is from the cradle to the grave."
"The huge Raven’s gains show that today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so."
"We have grown up in a world of classification schemes totally foreign to the remote villagers; we classify some animals as mammals, and inside of that class make more detailed connections based on the similarity of their physiology and DNA."
"Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible."
"Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains."
"The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one."
"The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training."
"One should make great use of analogies, my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the secrets of nature."
"Relations are really hard for other species."
"Our ability to think relationally is one of the reasons we’re running the planet."
"The most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning."
"For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run."
"If you need a large force to accomplish some purpose, but are prevented from applying such a force directly, many smaller forces applied simultaneously from different directions may work just as well."
"Human intuition is not very well engineered to make use of the best tools when faced with 'ill-defined' problems."
"In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous."
"The trouble with using no more than a single analogy is that it does not help battle the natural impulse to employ the 'inside view'."
"Our natural inclination to take the inside view can be defeated by following analogies to the 'outside view'."
"Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes."
"If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario, the more likely you are to say that scenario you are investigating will occur."
"Bent Flyvbjerg has shown that around 90 percent of major infrastructure projects worldwide go over budget."
"The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies."
"Following their private-equity-investor experiment, the outside-view researchers turned to the movie business."
"Instead of predicting what you might like, they examine who you are like, and the complexity is captured therein."
"Think back to the types of intuitive experts that Gary Klein studied in kind learning environments, like chess masters and firefighters."
"Generating new ideas or facing novel problems with high uncertainty is nothing like that."
"The good news is that it is easy to ride analogies from the intuitive inside view to the outside view."
"Before he began his tortuous march of analogies toward reimagining the universe, Kepler had to get very confused on his homework."
"Faced with an unexpected finding, rather than assuming the current theory is correct and that an observation must be off, the unexpected became an opportunity to venture somewhere new—and analogies served as the wilderness guide."
"The most exciting aspect of the studies was demonstrating how easily children could learn to change a specific behavior with simple mental strategies."
"The child who is aggressive at home may be less aggressive than most when in school."
"We learn who we are only by living, and not before."
"We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models."
"Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations."
"We need birds and frogs working together to explore it."
"Empowering a relationship between these two women could end badly."
"The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered."
"The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute."
"As ambiguity and uncertainty increase, breadth becomes increasingly important."
"Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate."
"When a firefighter is told to drop his firefighting tools, he is told to forget he is a firefighter."
"Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable."
"Sometimes, I still struggle with that decision. Something could’ve gone wrong and then it would be a bad decision. Maybe it was luck."
"Like all of you, nobody [at NASA or Thiokol] asked for the seventeen data points for which there had been no problems."
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world."
"If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it. If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it."
"They behave like a collective hedgehog, bending an unfamiliar situation to a familiar comfort zone, as if trying to will it to become something they actually had experienced before."
"NASA’s culture 'emphasized chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.'"
"The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction."
"Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions."
"The chain of communication has to be informal, completely different from the chain of command."
"I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we’re trying to make decisions, and that’s a sign of organizational health."
"After decisions are made, we want compliance and support, but we have permission to fight a little bit about those things in a professional way."
"Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections."
"On Saturday, you don’t have to be completely rational."
"Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills."
"Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser."
"No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors."