The African Enterprise (Transient expertise trap, Automated/mediated behaviour)
Hi friends,
Greeting from Abuja.
I have an essay and a podcast episode to share with you this week.
I published an essay, Transient Expertise Trap, that explains the tendency of people to speak declaratively and project expertise on topics that have only superficial knowledge of. This tendency then extends into quick dismissal of counter-opinions to the cherry-picked ones they've used as the basis of their expertise; which leads into the transient expertise trap.
This trap is based on an idea that runs counter to Paul Saffo's maxim of strong opinions weakly held. it's when premature opinions are strongly held. And when people think of access to information as the end goal instead of a means to an end. So, what is it about the transient expertise trap? why do transient experts have to reverse ferret? and how to balance out transient expertise?
And the Pod is back.
I just published a conversation with Kristin Wilson, strategy/operations consultant at Spurt Group.
Spurt Group are African Business Growth Partners whose work leverages digital and social technologies to help supercharge growth for business owners. They focus on providing business expertise to small business owners to help them propagate and navigate growth.
We talk about what Spurt is and what she does at Spurt, the importance of intentionally leveraging support for small businesses, function and form in the growth prospects of a business, how support could be the difference between effective and wasteful resource management, the importance of context in business building, and polish.
Coolest things I learned this week
Automated vs Mediated Behavior
Although our brains find predictability reassuring, it strives for novelty. It gets excited when it can assimilate new facts and discoveries. It's in that desire for novelty that humans find the ability to innovate. Hence, our brains retain two sets of behaviors. One for predictability and another for novelty. And these two behaviors are Automated and Mediated.
With automated behavior, we can gain expertise. As well as save energy in knowing what to do, when, and how. The brain requires lots of energy in the millions of computations it does to keep us moving. With automated behavior, it can save some energy when we do things we're used to. Eating, Walking, specialists doing what they do, and so on. This behavior is tasked with executing ideas not bringing them to life.
To bring ideas to life, we use Mediated behavior. This behavior, according to David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt in Runaway Species, is the neurological basis of creativity. Unlike automated behavior, this one can improvise and adapt more readily to changing conditions.
We need this mediated behavior because of the Automation Paradox.
The automated paradox is that the very effectiveness of automated systems leads to a dependence on them. Over-reliance on automated behaviors leads to an inability to generate novelty which is the core basis of creativity and innovation.
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Offshore
The word offshore is popular in finance to refer to money, transactions, institutions, and properties that are legally nowhere. But it was interesting to learn about the origin of the term.
British teenagers, at a time when only the BBC could legally broadcast in the UK, wanted to hear exciting new pop artists like Nero and the Gladiators. But this sole broadcaster was reluctant to play the tunes. With this reluctance, savvy shipowners saw an opportunity. They moored their ships outside Britain's territorial waters, set up radio equipment, and broadcast pop music from their position outside the reach of UK authorities but close enough to British listeners.
Initially, these broadcasters were called pirates, but then they were called something more literally accurate: Offshore. Accurate because they were just outside the UK authorities' jurisdiction. They were physically present, people could easily find the broadcasts, but they were legally absent hence could not be shut down.
Over time, this moniker applied to financial transactions.
h/t Moneyland by Oliver Bullough
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Rewards are tied to Surprise
Our brains are hardwired to enjoy surprises and new experiences.
In fact, our neurotransmitters involved in reward are tied to the level of surprise: there is a lot less activity in the brain when rewards are delivered at regular, predictable times; than the same rewards delivered at random, unpredictable times.
Functional MRI research has also revealed that we process new stimuli differently than stimuli we've seen just one other time. Our brain releases more dopamine in this case.
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Skeumorphs in mobile phones
Skeumorphs are objects that retain design cues from older objects. They are used to make something new feel familiar to speed understanding. For example, digital recycle bins look like trash cans.
In Smartphones, there is a host of Skeumorphs that help bridge the gap between different eras of telephony design:
To place a call, we touch an icon of an old phone handset with an extruded earpiece and mouthpiece – a profile that departed the technology landscape long ago.
The camera on your smartphone plays an audio file of a shutter sound, even though digital cameras don’t have mechanical shutters.
We delete the zeros and ones of our apps by dragging them to the “trash can.” We save files by clicking on the image of a floppy disk – an artifact that has gone the way of the mastodon.
We purchase items online by dropping them into a “shopping cart.” Such ties create a smooth transition from the past to the present. Even our most modern tech is tethered with an umbilical cord to its history.
h/t Runaway Species by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
That’s it for this week.
If you have any thoughts or questions, hit reply and we can have a chat. And if you enjoyed it, share it with friends.
Till next week,
Kelvin