I mostly publish podcast notes directly to Twitter these days, but when the notes aren’t well suited to that format I’ll continue to share them here.
Host: Cedric Chin @ Commonplace Expertise
Guest: Lia DiBello (LDB) – cognitive neuroscientist / business consultant
Concept of strategic rehearsal – how to accelerate acquisition of expertise in different industries
LDB – obsessed with cognition, expertise
4th generation entrepreneur family
“Business is cognition in action”
Cognitive agility is the new basic skill
Humans never stop changing
We actually grow new neurons all your life
In business, you can tell if you’re successful or not, good way to test & validate science
2008 NSF study – companies have similarities, business is a closed system like chess
Chess masters are all extremely different, but play with same boards and pieces, and they recognize other masters
What makes business superstars superstars?
Who are one trick ponies, and who does well even in down markets?
Businesses only have 3-4 organizing forces
Talented people are very good at managing / organizing these forces
Each force can be complicated by and affect each other
1. Capital market – access to capital
2. Market (Demand)
3. Supply environment
A “One trick pony” leader is usually good at one leg but not all 3 – and usually that’s sales
Most transferrable skill is capital (#1) – availability of cash, how capital markets work
Hardest leg is #3 supply (operations)
CC – “The Outsiders” – Thorndike – profiles CEOs who are good capital allocators – every single one had a strong operator as second in command
“Business expertise is a form of distributed cognition”
Examples
-Biotech company where person who really understood the problem was in the wrong role
-CEO who saw financial crisis coming, but all of executive team had blindspot
In Europe, older / more established cos have important aristocratic and family connections – but often business acumen is lacking
We really don’t know ourselves
We didn’t evolve to have self knowledge – probably what keeps us going every day
Developed tool – Profiler – to collect data on individuals and teams – online business cases that they work through, simulate scenarios as CEO, predict outcomes
People who don’t do well at these predictions tend to be weak in one of the 3 legs
In their work w/ clients —
Problem is usually not what they think it is
Opportunity (upside) is usually larger than what they think it is
Client work – Drug company thought they needed more drugs in pipeline
They found that pipeline wasn’t issue, it was bench chemistry / science – was really inefficient – automate some of earlier chemistry, have talent work on later stage work
Client work – Midwest foundry – believed problem was China – recommendation was to focus on the things that China can’t do, focus on specialty business
Did strategic rehearsal – gamified it – use ERP system, only make what you can sell, and must be on-time
Many didn’t understand concept of lead times, and were just making things to seem busy, didn’t understand costs of unsold / over made stuff
Effectively taught them principles of just-in-time manufacturing
We operate with a dominant framework – theory of mind – your brain on autopilot once you get good at something, saves energy
Shape of schemas is determined by environment, education – people who work together share common schemas, goal driven, look around and learn from others
SR interferes with those pre existing schemas – build environment that has high symbolic density, force you to make lots of decisions, 15 minutes with 60 decisions, doing it as a group, no time to stop and think
Autopilot takes over, replicate your bad habits, mistakes – it hurts to experience this so viscerally
Next day, start over from scratch, super dis equilibrated, no longer on autopilot, now new better ideas come to fore
Piaget – genetic epistemologist – levels of expertise emerge like a biological function, assimilate + accommodate, expand repertoire + schema, organize implicit theory
Vygotsky – all knowledge formed by culture, Marxist, shaped by social environment, memorize thru language all the concepts, practice / dialectical process with others to develop meaning and deep understanding
Expertise is in middle of these two
If you go to baby, first concept is grasping – it’s first malleable concept – one finger is ok, two fingers is surprised, then squeezing gets used to it, then three fingers, etc
All our concepts start with our hands, working with them
What’s general form of strategic rehearsal
-Knowledge extraction
-Extract default model
-Pick a goal to construct the right mental model
-Look at financial indicators – compare to competitors – where is it underperforming – identify the problem / constraints and remove them and see what potential outcome would be
-13 proprietary factors
re: Diversity training – lectures and quizzes don’t work – but simulations with immediate feedback work much better (shown that it takes just 45 minutes to change behavior!)