Ambiguity effect
Have you heard of Ambiguity effect? It’s a cognitive bias. According to the Wikipedia page, the effect implies that people tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.
Here is a citation from the same page illustrating an example of how the effect works :
> As an example, consider a bucket containing 30 balls. The balls are colored red, black and white. Ten of the balls are red, and the remaining 20 are either black or white, with all combinations of black and white being equally likely. In option X, drawing a red ball wins a person $100, and in option Y, drawing a black ball wins them $100. The probability of picking a winning ball is the same for both options X and Y. In option X, the probability of selecting a winning ball is 1 in 3 (10 red balls out of 30 total balls). In option Y, despite the fact that the number of black balls is uncertain, the probability of selecting a winning ball is also 1 in 3. This is because the number of black balls is equally distributed among all possibilities between 0 and 20. The difference between the two options is that in option X, the probability of a favorable outcome is known, but in option Y, the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown (“ambiguous”).
People have a greater tendency to select a ball under option X, ( where the exact number of a winning ball is clearly known ) rather than option B ( where the exact number of a winning ball is unknown ).
I think this effect can be extended or generalized a little bit as follows: “people favors what they think they know and disfavors what they think they know less or is ambigous”. I often find many people say some negative opinions toward concepts or ideas with which they are not so familiar. (Including myself. Almost no one might be free from this bias) This may mean that people’s decision making process can be greatly affected by their knowledge of related problems or concepts.
Think about every meeting being held at your organization. The issues or subjects in the discussion are clear to every attendee? In that context, we can break instances of meetings into 3 possible cases. 1. Every member in the meeting understand more or less the problem domain. 1. Every member is ignorant of it. 1. Imbalance of knowledge - Some understand more or less and the others don’t.
In my opinion, the best case is all members in the discussion know more or less the problem domain or related contexts. The 2nd best is all members are ignorant. The worst is imbalance of knowledge; Some know more or less, the others know little… Why?
First of all, you need to understand discussions with knowledge imbalance highly likely happen day to day basis at your organization. Employees are all busy and some of them are lazy. Some have a wide range of knowledge but others don’t. Various casual and informal discussions happen day to day in your organization and some people may consider them trivial and unimportant. So some people read something in preparation for the discussion, but some don’t do anything and just join the discussion with their preexisting knowledge only. So discussions with knowledge imbalance happen more often than not.
If you don’t understand some particular issues in discussion, you likely come to be subject to the ambiguity effect and as a result, you might show some favor or disfavor toward that particular issues. But no matter how trivial the discussions are, sometimes your comment or mention may matter regardless of your awareness. The worst case is, when you are responsible for the decision making but you have little knowledge of the problem domain. In that case, little will protect you from the ambiguity bias and that may lead to a bad decision, which may hurt you or your organization sometime later on.
Danger of discussion with knowledge imbalance
I remember a particular discussion I had when I was working for a game studio a few years ago. I was discussing with another coworker which technology should be adopted and implemented for solving some specific problem at the moment. I supported one technology and he supported another. During the discussion, I suddenly detected some pattern from his argument. He used to say “I don’t know much about those technologies, but blah blah blah…”. He repeated that pattern of saying several times, and clearly, it seemed he really knew little.
While I was trying to cite supportive facts from materials that I’d read and my personal experience (I even played a game that implemented the technology in the discussion to figure out how it works in the actual games), he didn’t give me any of such things. Even though he was clearly admitting that he had less knowledge of those technologies, he stubbornly kept sticking to his view and denying my view. But without any of supportive facts or citations, his argument was far from convincing. That behavior totally didn’t make sense to me and I realized that the discussion itself was unproductive at all. It really wondered to me because he usually liked analytic thinking for his other jobs and I considered him as more of a logical guy. But his logic at the discussion was not logical to me.
I’m not sure whether he was driven by some cognitive bias such as the ambiguity effect. But what is clear to me is discussing something without prior knowledge is so much unproductive and even dangerous. No prior knowledge means it is highly likely that we are subject to those cognitive biases. Less knowledge means we may be driven more by our prejudice or personality or other hidden motives (e.g., I hate him and I don’t like he has some initiative) I find many aggressive “opinion push forwarding” people (including myself) exist out there. And human’s behavior looks reasonable mostly, but not always like my previous coworker. This kind of personality things or unstability of human natures may make our communication complicated and out of its right track when we discuss something with each other.
In my opinion, discussions might be most unproductive or dangerous when some have prior knowledge and some don’t, I think it’s rather safer when all members in a discussion know little about the discussion subject. (It may sound stupid, though…) In that case, it is likely that the decision making may be put off until everyone gets familiar with the problem domain. It’s safer because no decision might be made carelessly. But in the case of knowledge imbalance, sometimes it’s not clear who understands and who doesn’t. And someone “invisibly” driven by biases may affect the decision making. The consequent decision may not end up good because one can hardly say that decision has been made in an optimal way.
Also, there is another cognitive bias called Curse of knowledge which, at this time, have some bad effect on those who have prior knowledge. The curse of knowledge bias may even more increase the discrepancy of perceptions between those who have prior knowledge and those who don’t. So it may make the problem even worse.
Practice of 5 minutes meeting
Mr. Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, a big e-commerce and Internet company based on Japan, pushed forward a practice of carrying out 5 minute meetings that originally used to be one hour meetings. Before making that decision, he noticed that 55 minutes of an usual meeting were being taken up by various explanations. So he made members who were supposed to give a presentation at the meeting submit their written materials in advance of the meeting. Most of the people write down what they want to say in preparation anyway, the submit would hardly be an additional burden for them. Of course, other meeting members are required to read all the materials before the meeting, but it can be done using various spare time such as commuting time.
You may guess the main motive of that practice is time-saving. I agree with you. But In my view, on top of that, there is another benefit. It is making meeting attendees equip themselves with some prior knowledge in advance of the discussion so making the discussion at its right track. At traditional casual meetings where significant time might be spent for explanations, we can be hardly sure of how each attendee would quickly and deeply understand topics and issues from that brief explanations. Maybe the discussion subject is more important or sensitive than it might look and it involves other subtle issues or surroundings. But ideally speaking, attendees need to quickly catch that sort of hardly visible context under 20~30 minutes or so. That means we highly likely have various ambiguities here and there with regular meetings we attend everyday. However, at many meetings, right after the explanation stage, people may need to dive subsequent stages of discussion and decision making! Doesn’t that sound risky to you?
Preventing too early discussion and decision making
Traditional meetings where some materials are handed out and someone explains over them, may increase risk of knowledge imbalance. Humans are all different. During limited time span, some issues may be clearly visible to some people, but may not be to others. In that case, those who don’t have clear knowledge may be subject to the ambiguity effect, in the mean while, those who have clear knowledge may be subject to curse of knowledge effect. And those biases are much more tough than you may imagine and hard to resist. You can tell how they are tough and hard to overcome when you view many psychological experiments and surveys yourself. The biases keep disturbing the communication and make people favor or disfavor a particular decision making factor more than necessary and consequently, the discussion highly likely may not end up an optimal and desirable way.
One of the solution to this problem might be the practice of five minute meeting introduced earlier. But the practice may work at Rakuten because the most powerful person in the organization is initiating it. Unless powerful people in your organization care so much, I think it’s not so easy to initiate this sort of practice. How do you effectively enforce your boss to read related materials in advance of the meeting?
Introducing this kind of practice is more of trying to change organizational culture in my view. Think about whether your organization’s decision making process is carefully designed and considers this kind of risk. If people in your organization attend casual style of meeting or discussion everyday and try to wrap up everything in just one meeting, that is your organizational culture. And that means they don’t care. And the rooted culture can’t be changed so easily.
You can argue that nonetheless, it’s hard to say that every casual meeting has some risk because communication skills of the attendees may affect the discussion quality. People of good communication skills and good insights may discuss well whatever topic they encounter. That may be a good point. But does your organization have so many of those people? People of good communication skills are generally free from cognitive biases?
I don’t know. But still anyway, generally speaking, it is a lot safer that we don’t walk on every stage (explanation, discussion, decision making) in just one meeting or discussion. And we need to carefully see and evaluate if it’s the right time for discussion. Too early discussion might be harmful. Someone who highly values a quick decision making process, may be against my idea, but I think multiple steps of discussion, especially when it deals with sensitive issues, really is necessary in terms of risk management.
Anyway, I think we need to understand how important is that we equip ourselves with enough prior knowledge and investigate related things on our own before diving into discussions. And if the discussions may lead to some kind of decision making, it comes more important. In terms of long term solution, this problem might be where knowledge management can help. At organizational level, individual person needs to cooperate the policy or process of organizational knowledge management if it ever exists. At personal level, it is necessary that you efficiently manage your knowledge required for your job or other related context. And if it’s possible, sharing your knowledge helps.