I have been engaged in a lot of conversational debate on
social media, sometime quite contentious, on the Kahneman model of System 1 and
System 2 thinking. I am sure most of you
have a sense of what these are, but just to get us all on the same page: System
1 is an intuitive and associative processes that is based on recognition. It feels effortless and instinctive. We are in the middle of an experience and
just “know” what to do. In contrast,
System 2 is deliberate and analytical.
It takes cognitive resources, effort, and focused attention.
The easy debate is when and where System 1 and System 2 type
thinking dominates the decision making process.
System 1 is where we usually start out.
In an easy situation, when we are under time pressure, or when
experience tells us what decision/response will work to an acceptable level, we
do it. We never need to put forth the
effort of System 2. But when the
decision is personally important, we have time to think, and experience fails
us, we recruit our deeper cognitive faculties and engage in System 2 thinking.
But there are a lot of details that remain quite
contentious, at least as I have seen in recent debates. How these two systems really work is hotly
debated. What triggers the shift from
one to the other? Can one be called “better”
than the other? Or more rational? Generally, these conversations use examples
from typical human factors decision making domains such as aerospace, military,
and healthcare. But today, I want to move over to the domain of
entrepreneurship. This is an area that
human factors professionals don’t often focus on.
As many of you know, I spent many years directing a
university entrepreneurship center where I helped faculty, students, and
members of the community start businesses based on their science, technology,
and design ideas. As part of this work,
I had to study the thought leaders in entrepreneurship and startup management
and new venture business strategy. Many
of these experts were quite adamant that they key to success was to use the
approach of "ready, shoot, aim". Better to do something immediately and fix the
deficiencies in version 2. But what they
don't say, perhaps because they don’t know about human factors, is that this
only works when you have built up enough of an information arsenal that
"ready" has an imbedded "aim" in it. These are expert decision makers who can
recognize details about the situation without thinking about it. So they are aiming, they just don’t realize
it. Giving this same advice to novice
startups can be fatal. Since many of the
Center’s clients were technical experts but entrepreneurship novices, they
needed to “aim.” The ones that came in with
the latest new venture bible tucked under their arms were much more likely to
fail. It was part of my role to convince
them that aiming was much more important than their book suggested.
Since then, I have continued to consult in this area so I have
seen many attempts by people with great ideas to create a company from nothing
except sweat equity and desire. Some of
these founders have some pretty good insights on how to start a company. But
they are often swayed by this “ready, fire, aim” idea. I think it is perhaps the best value I can
add to explain what System 1 thinking is and why they don’t have it in this
case. So we sit down, roll up our
sleeves, and do some “aiming.”
