Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [94]
In effect, this is also the lesson of thinkers like Scott and Hayek, whose proposed solutions also advocate that policy makers devise plans that revolve around the knowledge and motivation of local actors rather than relying on their own. Planners, in other words, need to learn to behave more like what the development economist William Easterly calls searchers. As Easterly puts it,
A Planner thinks he already knows the answer; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors … and hopes to find answers to individual problems by trial and error.… A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.32
As different as they appear on the surface, in fact, all these approaches to planning—along with Mintzberg’s emergent strategy, Peretti’s mullet strategy, crowdsourcing, and field experiments—are really just variations on the same general theme of “measuring and reacting.” Sometimes what is being measured is the detailed knowledge of local actors, and sometimes it is mouse clicks or search terms. Sometimes it is sufficient merely to gather data, and sometimes one must conduct a randomized experiment. Sometimes the appropriate reaction is to shift resources from one program or topic or ad campaign to another, while at other times it is to expand on someone else’s homegrown solution. There are, in fact, as many ways to measure and react to different problems as there are problems to solve, and no one-size-fits-all approach exists. What they all have in common, however, is that they require planners—whether government planners trying to reduce global poverty or advertising planners trying to launch a new campaign for a client—to abandon the conceit that they can develop plans on the basis of intuition and experience alone. Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.
This seems like an easy trap to avoid, but it isn’t. Whenever we contemplate the question of why it is that things turned out the way they did, or why people do what they do, we are always able to come up with plausible answers. We may even be so convinced by our answers that whatever prediction or explanation we arrive at may seem obvious. We will always be tempted to think that we know how other people will react to a new product, or to a politician’s campaign speech, or to a new tax law. “It’ll never work,” we will want to say, “because people just don’t like that kind of thing,” or “No one will be fooled by his obvious chicanery,” or “Such a tax will reduce incentives to work hard and invest in the economy.” None of this can be helped—we cannot suppress our commonsense intuition any more than we can will our heart to stop beating. What we can do, however, is remember that whenever it comes to questions of business strategy or government policy, or even marketing campaigns and website design, we must rely less on our common sense and more on what we can measure.
But measurement alone is not enough to prevent us from misleading ourselves. Commonsense reasoning can also mislead us with respect to more philosophical questions about society—like how we assign blame, or how we attribute success—where measurement may be impossible. In these circumstances too we will not be able to restrain our commonsense intuition from coming up with seemingly self-evident answers. But once again, we can suspect it, and instead