Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes

Author:Jamie Holmes
Language: spa
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780385348379
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-10-12T14:00:00+00:00

IN 2014, CHRISTOPHER Myers and his colleagues (including Francesca Gino) published a series of experiments investigating when people learn from failure and when they don’t. Their studies shed light on the deeper reason why letdowns can send helpful signals, while triumphs can send harmful ones. Myers’s group described the key variable as the “ambiguity of responsibility,” or the degree to which the causes of an outcome are unclear.

In one study, the researchers asked participants to pretend that they were members of a race-car team. Facing the risk of engine failure due to a gasket malfunction, the subjects had to decide whether to go ahead with an upcoming race. They were told that the gasket had failed during a certain number of races, but (as the experiment was conducted online) they had to click on a link for “additional information, if needed,” to learn how many times the gasket hadn’t failed. Clicking the link would let them in on a truly dire statistic: there was a 99.99 percent chance of gasket failure. After choosing to race or not, subjects were informed that their decision paralleled the one engineers faced before the fatal 1986 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Seventy nine percent of the subjects made the mistake of electing to go ahead and race, generally because participants failed to seek out the additional information.

Myers and his colleagues then asked people to name the key factor that led to their decision and explain why. Here was the ambiguity of responsibility in action. Participants who failed might blame the experimenters for withholding vital information by requiring them to click the link. Or they could excuse themselves by pointing out that a race-car engine malfunction is safer than an O-ring failure in a shuttle.

In the second part of the experiment, the researchers sent the same participants another challenge the following week. This time the subjects were asked to play the role of a security analyst and identify a potential terrorist threat. Just as with the race-car question, they had to actively seek out additional information to answer correctly. Would people who took responsibility for flunking the race-car puzzle do better this time? In fact, subjects who had blamed themselves for their race-car error had a 40 percent chance of correctly identifying the terrorist threat. Those who had first blamed external factors had a 15 percent chance.

The study mirrors what Ducati learned after its 2004 failures. First, the engineers were forced to admit that they’d made mistakes. The GP4 hadn’t performed up to expectations, and now they had to find out why. They also had to uncover where their design decisions had gone awry. They discovered that they’d started the design process too late, giving themselves too little time to test and experiment. Adjusting, they began designing their 2005 model, the GP5, in March 2004, more than a year ahead of time. They would also complete it sooner. Ducati would begin work on the GP6 a year and a half before the 2006 season.

Another realization Ducati engineers came to was that they needed a more adaptable bike design.

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