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During my school holidays, I used to visit my hometown and also the nearby villages. In the 80s and early 90s farms were dominated by use of animals for transport, ploughing, milling etc. I used to jokingly refer to as being in a self driving car as the bulls when leaving the farm will always go by default to the home without anyone controlling them. On narrow roads, the bulls drag the cart to the side and give way for the oncoming traffic.

Human and animal power was so intertwined in the life that when mopeds and tractors became affordable and available, a few people started switching to it once they gave a try and saw the promise. Mopeds helped to ferry small loads very far and frequently, helped supply on demand mobility. Tractor’s raw power was visible when it was able to till big swathes of land in the first of half of the day.

It was a dream to adopt technology and reap the benefits, but it was often short-lived. A majority of the village population lived a cycle of food – work – entertainment until they became too ill. They visited a doc only when major ailments arise, often getting very late treatment for preventable diseases. This mindset went into use of vehicles. No one cared to do pre-emptive maintenance, rampant misuse of kerosene as fuel because it was cheaper due to rationing.

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When I visited a farm one summer, I noticed a tv program on how to get the best out of your tractor and a few people watching very eagerly. The tips were simple, it was educating on using the right gears. A good portion of them were selecting a high gear and keeping it that way instead of starting low and shifting up when needed. A more shocking thing I learnt was on the maintenance, no one was informed enough that coolant, brake oil and engine oil needs change or topup. The list went on, not a single person in the village fixed their tractor until it ground to a halt just like how they were using animals on the farm. Using a tractor meant slowing down in many areas whereas it was supposed to speed up and ease things.

The next generation picked up these issues and fixed it; I thought that is it, until I visited a farm in Europe later that used tractors that had features like GPS navigation and auto steer for precise tilling and planting reducing a lot of human labour needed to take care of large farms. This came with an even steeper learning curve, but with far greater productivity. Technology isn’t usually additive like a telephone enabling anyone to make calls; it is sometimes a multiplier which requires the baseline capabilities to be higher to reap large benefits.

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A doctor whom I met, was upset about dealing with a lot of people coming to clinic equipped with wikipedia and LLM generated knowledge. Years of education and practice puts a doctor in the zone of unconscious competence, but for an expert beginner with no formal education or practice it is just a fact in some context without reflecting what is in hand. The doctor’s intuition will be right and often arrived without conscious thought, asking them to explain in detail may prove counter effective, in some case make the doctor doubt their judgement and end up treating poorly.

Let us take a few other examples from other domain. If you have come across the Monty Hall problem, where a host in a game shows 3 doors to a contestant, behind 2 doors are goats and the remaining 1 door with a huge reward. Once a door has been chosen, the host will open a door which has a goat behind it and give the contestant an option to switch the door if they think they would have made the wrong choice. If we do not think deeply, we think the odds are always 1/3rd irrespective of switching or not. In reality the odds are 2/3 if you switch and that has even stumped degree holders in math.

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Another counter intuitive one is bank teller queue management. I read at this blog, which mentions that an average five hour waiting time to service a customer can be reduced to 3 minutes to just by adding one teller extra. That is 90x productivity jump by doubling cost yet a lot of decision makers won’t believe the expert who analyses the situation and recommends them the solution because it does not make sense for a non expert. The example is dramatic but can happen in real situations as well.

When I observe a lot of people with expertise, their unconscious competence helps them navigate with ease without even thinking about it. The moment you question their judgement, their instincts take a back seat and suddenly their competency goes down. I was at a restaurant, I requested a cook for fried eggs. The cook asked if I wanted both sides to be cooked, and I said “yes, but don’t break the yolk”. The cook left out a nervous laughter and when turning the eggs to the other side, the yolk broke. I disrupted the cook’s flow just by doubting their ability.

This happens frequently at work. Decision makers who are expert beginners often want to get into the details, what this does is, it interrupts the flow mode of expertise. Explaining the solutions and decision making process which would otherwise be unconscious nature, requires a good deal of effort and often leads to sub optimal solutions. If you have an expertise on some area and are tasked with solutions, then keep in mind that you have to explain your decisions to people who know details at a surface level. People are naturally curious and LLMs feed their curiosity a great deal.

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For this reason, whenever I come up with solutions, I make it a multi step approach. This is I learnt from many different sources which help you harvest your unconscious competence.

Step 1 – Read the problem statement, re-read and think very hard to solve the problem. Too often no solution emerges, but all of a sudden when you are at a break, a solution emerges and when it happens immediately write it down. Beware, this solution is ephemeral and its details vanishes within a few minutes. Keep noting down the solutions that pop up at odd times like driving, cleaning etc.

Step 2 – Find reference material from internet and previous assignments to back your solutions. If it is a novel solution, dive deeper to explain but do not change the solution because you can’t find explanations.

Step 3 – KYEB (Know Your Expert Beginners) and be equipped with ELI5 answers to anticipated questions to impart confidence of the solution.

Before presenting your solution, establish your credentials which helps setting the right expectation using info from the KYEB research. This helps to present your views as an expert without getting into a loop of explanations and doubts. For the doctor’s case I discussed at the beginning, I recently see a few doctors have a dossier to quickly explain their decisions and cut short the questioning from the patients. We also will be expert beginners at many topics, the best we can help there is to let the experts do their job.

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Stock markets are at high, keeps breaching previous highs every now and then. Economy should be doing well and life should become easy right. I was surprised to see that instead of life becoming good, experiences all around are either stagnant or deteriorating.

Some of the recent experiences I have reflect the new trend. I went to a speciality restaurant for a good dining experience. This was an upscale restaurant chain which gave fantastic dining experiences before for our family. When we went in, we noticed that the restaurant has split into two distinct cuisines (Chinese and Bengali) within the same space with just some seating demarcation. The special food is going to be cooked in the kitchen by the same set of cooks. The ambience had a worn down look with paints peeling and seats torn. When we received the menu, we immediately noticed that the prices have increased by 25-30% and the portion sizes have come down 25-30%. The waiter had no idea on what the menu is about, had no suggestions on how to go about a multi-course meal. In the end, the experience on dining big was just on the bill amount, nothing else. It would have been a better experience having the food from a cheap takeaway and eating it while watching TV at home.

Similar heart burning experiences everywhere. Cabs are not assigned to you during peak hours unless you pay a hefty premium for the same cab. Mobile apps are misusing the notifications feature to deliver ads. OTT subscriptions downgrading you in the middle of the subscription plan to serve more ads. Grocery delivery is sending bad quality produce for regular delivery and introducing a premium feature for fresh produce. The list goes on.

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The push from success to excess is evident even in non consumer space. I noticed a recent trend, many executives are asking for a template/runbook based execution so that they can do a lot with very little or no training to the people doing that job. In short they want jobs to be in black & white and easily doable by gig workers who can be onboarded and off-boarded at will just like food delivery. This kind of thinking harms in many ways, one – it starts to increase the need of people who are good at parroting not an original thinker, the other is infusion of a blandness and mediocrity in everything; check for thermometer in amazon for proof. It is not just limited to every day items, even cars start to look the same across brands.

Executives think that they are special and can bring in insane profits by making people do exactly what they say, which may be true in the short run. History says that the best advancements came from grounds up not from top down. The cognitive load that it causes on the executives who do not want their workforce to think because it hampers their execution is huge, it will cause a flameout, momentarily burning bright before failing. Resilience and collective wisdom is poorly understood because it has a very long learning horizon. Being resilient will even come across as inefficient in the short run, but will prevent uncle points.

The more from less mindset that happens through grabby nature instead of advancements and innovations is hard to curtail now, it may be a cycle in the economy. We may have to weather it out before it improves again.