Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building – a perfectly standard building with nothing out of the ordinary.
As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses. Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below.
Later, when Klein asked the commander how he knew something was about to go terribly wrong, the commander put it down to ‘extrasensory perception’. That was the only thing he could come up with to explain a life-saving decision, and others like it, that seemed to emerge from nowhere. Klein was too much of a rationalist to accept the idea of ESP, but by now he had begun to notice equally perplexing abilities among other expert decision-makers. They seemed to know what to do, often without knowing why.
One of Klein’s co-workers, who had spent many weeks studying the neonatal unit of a large hospital, had found that experienced nurses were able to diagnose an infection in babies even when, to outsiders, there seemed to be no visible clues. This was not merely remarkable, but often life-saving: infants at an early stage of life can quickly succumb to infections if they are not detected early.
Perhaps the most curious thing of all was that the hospital would perform tests to check the accuracy of the nurse’s diagnosis, and occasionally these would come back negative. But sure enough, by the next day, the tests would come back positive – the nurse had been right all along. To the researcher this seemed almost magical, and even the nurses were baffled by it, attributing it to ‘intuition’ or a ‘special sense’.
What was going on? Can the insights gleaned from sport help to unlock the mystery?
Think back to Desmond Douglas, the Speedy Gonzales of English table tennis, who could anticipate the movement of a table tennis ball by chunking the pattern of his opponent’s movement before the ball was even hit. Think, also, of how other top performers in sport seem to know what to do in advance of everyone else, creating the so-called time paradox where they are able to play in an unhurried way even under severe time constraints.
Klein came to realize that expert firefighters are relying on precisely the same mental processes. They are able to confront a burning building and almost instantly place it within the context of a rich, detailed, and elaborate conceptual scheme derived from years of experience. They can chunk the visual properties of the scene and comprehend its complex dynamics, often without understanding how. The fire commander called it ‘extrasensory perception’; Douglas, you will remember, cited his ‘sixth sense’.
We can get an idea of what is going on by digging down into the mind of the fire commander who pulled his men out moments before the floor caved in. He did not suspect that the seat of the fire was in the basement, because he did not even know the house had a basement. But he was already curious, based upon his extensive experience, as to why the fire was not reacting as expected. The living room was hotter than it should have been for such a small fire, and it was altogether too quiet. His expectations were breached, but in ways so subtle he was not consciously aware of why.
Only with hindsight – and after hours of conversation with Klein – was it possible to piece together the sequence of events. The reason the fire was not quenched by his crew’s attack was because its base was underneath them, and not in the kitchen; the reason it was hotter than expected was because it was rising from many feet below; the reason it was quiet is because the floor was muffling the noise. All this – and many more interconnecting variables of indescribable complexity – was responsible for the fire commander taking the life-saving decision to pull his men.
As Klein explains, ‘The commander’s experience had provided him with a firm set of patterns. He was accustomed to sizing up the situation by having it match one of these patterns. He may not have been able to articulate the patterns or describe their features, but he was relying on the pattern-matching process to let him feel comfortable that he had the situation scoped out.’
A set of painstaking interviews with the nurses in the neonatal unit provided the same insights. In essence, the nurses were relying on their deep knowledge of perceptual cues, each one subtle, but which together signalled an infant in distress. The same mental process is used by pilots, military generals, detectives – you name it. It is also true, as we have seen, of top sportsmen. What they all have in common is long experience and deep knowledge.
For years, knowledge was considered relatively unimportant in decision-making. In experiments, researchers would choose participants with no prior experience of the area under examination in order to study the ‘cognitive processes of learning, reasoning, and problem solving in their purest forms’. The idea was that talent – superb general reasoning abilities and logical prowess – rather than knowledge makes for good decision-makers.
This was the presumption of top business schools and many leading companies, too. They believed they could churn out excellent managers who could be parachuted into virtually any organization and transform it through superior reasoning.
Experience was irrelevant, it was said, so long as you possessed a brilliant mind and the ability to wield the power of logic to solve problems. This approach was seriously misguided. When Jeff Immelt became the chief executive of General Electric in 2001, he commissioned a study of the best-performing companies in the world. What did they have in common? According to Geoff Colvin in Talent Is Overrated, ‘These companies valued “domain expertise” in managers – extensive knowledge of the company’s field. Immelt has now specified “deep domain expertise” as a trait required for getting ahead at GE.’
These insights have not just become central to modern business strategy; they also form the basis of artificial intelligence. In 1957 two computer experts created a programme they called the General Problem Solver, which they billed as a universal problem-solving machine. It did not have any specific knowledge, but possessed a ‘generic solver engine’ (essentially, a set of abstract inference procedures) that could, it was believed, tackle just about any problem.
But it was soon realized that knowledge-free computing – however sophisticated – is impotent. As Bruce Buchanan, Randall Davis, and Edward Feigenbaum, three leading researchers in artificial intelligence, put it: ‘The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge. Programmes that are rich in general inference methods – some of which may even have some of the power of mathematical logic – but poor in domain-specific knowledge can behave expertly on almost no tasks.’
Think back to the firefighters. Many young men and women are drawn to the profession because they think they’re good at making decisions under pressure, but they quickly discover they just can’t cut it. When they look at a raging fire, they are drawn to the colour and height of the flames and other perceptually salient features, just like the rest of us. Only after a decade or more of on-the-job training can they place what they are seeing within the context of an interwoven understanding of the patterns of fires.
The essential problem regarding the attainment of excellence is that expert knowledge simply cannot be taught in the classroom over the course of a rainy afternoon, or indeed a thousand rainy afternoons (the firefighters studied by Klein had an average of twenty-three years experience). Sure, you can offer pointers of what to look for and what to avoid, and these can be helpful. But relating the entirety of the information is impossible because the cues being processed by experts – in sport or elsewhere – are so subtle and relate to each other in such complex ways that it would take forever to codify them in their mind-boggling totality. This is known as combinatorial explosion, a concept that will help to nail down many of the insights of this chapter.
The best way to get a sense of the strange power of combinatorial explosion is to imagine folding a piece of paper in two, making the paper twice as thick. Now repeat the process a hundred times. How thick is the paper now? Most people tend to guess in the range of a few inches to a few yards. In fact the thickness would stretch eight hundred thousand billion times the distance from Earth to the sun.
It