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THOSE WIELDING HAMMERS SEE ONLY NAILS
Déformation Professionnelle
A man takes out a loan, starts a company, and goes bankrupt shortly afterward.
He falls into a depression and commits suicide.
What do you make of this story? As a business analyst, you want to understand
why the business idea did not work: was he a bad leader?
Was the strategy
wrong, the market too small or the competition too large? As a marketer, you
imagine the campaigns were poorly organised, or that he failed to reach his target
audience. If you are a financial expert, you ask whether the loan was the right
financial instrument.
As a local journalist, you realise the potential of the story:
how lucky that he killed himself! As a writer, you think about how the incident
could develop into a kind of Greek tragedy. As a banker, you believe an error took
place in the loan department. As a socialist, you blame the failure of capitalism.
As
a religious conservative, you see in this a punishment from God. As a
psychiatrist, you recognise low serotonin levels. Which is the ‘correct’ viewpoint?
None of them. ‘If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails,’
said Mark Twain – a quote that sums up the
déformation professionnelle
. Charlie
Munger, Warren Buffett’s
business partner, named the effect the
man with the
hammer tendency
after Twain: ‘But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a
perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple
models. And the models have to come from multiple disciplines – because all the
wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.’
Here
are a few examples of
déformation professionnelle
: surgeons want to
solve almost every medical problem with a scalpel, even if their patients could be
treated with less invasive methods. Armies think of military solutions first.
Engineers, structural. Trend gurus see trends in everything (incidentally, this is
one of the most idiotic ways to view the world). In short: if you ask someone the
crux of a particular problem, they usually link it to their own area of expertise.
So what’s wrong with that? It’s good if, say, a tailor sticks to what he knows.
T h e
déformation professionnelle
becomes hazardous when people apply their
specialised processes in areas where they don’t belong. Surely you’ve come
across some of these: teachers who scold their friends like students. New
mothers who begin to treat their husbands like children. Or consider the
omnipresent Excel spreadsheet that is featured on every computer: we use them
even when it makes no sense – for example, when generating ten-year financial
projections for start-ups or when comparing potential lovers we have ‘sourced’
from dating sites. Excel spreadsheets might well be one of the most dangerous
recent inventions.
Even
in his own jurisdiction, the
man with the hammer
tends to overuse it.
Literary reviewers are trained to detect authors’ references, symbols and hidden
messages. As a novelist, I realise that literary reviewers conjure up such devices
where there are none. This is not a million miles away from what business
journalists do. They scour the most trivial utterings of central bank governors and
somehow discover hints of fiscal policy change by parsing their words.
In conclusion: if you
take your problem to an expert, don’t expect the overall
best solution. Expect an approach that can be solved with the expert’s toolkit. The
brain is not a central computer. Rather, it is a Swiss Army knife with many
specialised tools. Unfortunately, our ‘pocketknives’ are incomplete. Given our life
experiences
and our professional expertise, we already possess a few blades.
But to better equip ourselves, we must try to add two or three additional tools to
our repertoire – mental models that are far afield from our areas of expertise. For
example, over the past few years, I have begun to take a biological view of the
world and have won a new understanding of complex systems. Locate your
shortcomings and find suitable knowledge and methodologies to balance them. It
takes about a year to internalise the most important ideas of a new field, and it’s
worth it: your pocketknife will be bigger and more versatile,
and your thoughts
sharper.
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