Assumptions and Mindset

Tacit Knowledge and the Might of Assumption

Way back Erwin Polanski wrote a small book on Tacit Knowledge, and in it he gave a little example of what tacit knowledge is. A man goes into a very dark cave armed only with a stick. Using the stick, he explores the cave and when he comes out his knowledge of the cave is in very large part formed from his prodding about with the stick. The stick had acted as a conduit and any image or map that the man has imagined will have been strongly created via the stick. If the man had used his hand instead, he might well have constructed a rather different map.

We now know that as we encounter anything new or novel we seek to understand it using our prodigious memory banks which cannot be divorced from our feelings about both our external and internal environment. So if we had never entered a cave prior to the one we explored with a stick, what went into our memories will most likely remain a benchmark on the nature of caves.

Years back while teaching design students I created a brief exercise to help them understand the power of previous experiences of places and the assumptions we make about them. The exercise was to help my students get a better understanding of how a client will go about understanding a drawing and description. The task was to make a perspective drawing using a text written by an architect about the detailed design of the staircase and a bookcase in his home. I made it clear that they would be judged on their accuracy of interpretation and I told them they had to make do with the text and a very basic plan  – I was withholding the photographs. The perspectives were consistently well drawn, and the staircases and bookshelves were always plausible. However, over the years there were always as many interpretations as there were students: no visualisations were ever the same, indeed they varied enormously.

Recently Antonio Demasio wrote (pp 96/97, The Strange Order of Things):
“The same storyline – the same protagonists, same place, same events, same outcome – can yield different interpretations and thus have different meanings depending on the way it is told. In neutral terms, the order of the introduction of objects and events and the nature of the respective descriptions relative to magnitude and qualification are decisive for the interpretation we make of the narrative, for how it will be stored in memory, and for how it will later be retrieved.

We are incessant narrators of stories about almost anything in our lives, mostly about important things but not only; and we happily color our narratives with all the biases of our past experiences and our likes and dislikes.”

I cannot stress too much as to how all the above is really so very crucial to the effective management of innovation, probably in all its aspects but particularly at the beginning when all imagining is about an effect in the future. We really do need to devote more time for exploring the range of tacit assumptions that we cannot help but make.