The ever-aspiring mind reader

Visionaries and innovators has traditionally been praised over their ability to think and act in ways that no one had ever thought or acted before, and justifiably so, since you cannot reach new places by just following the same old paths. That is where the irony of the phrase "great minds think alike" comes into play: it is nothing but a flattery device to congratulate someone who had the same idea as ourselves. But this phenomenon is not all that rare in the end. When two people (or more) spend a lot of time together they end up having a big trove of shared memories as well as a number of different situations where they have interacted and experienced the other. The common culture that they end up building produces well-known effects such as inexplicably funny inside jokes or completing each other's sentences. However, it rare to reach that level of mental intimacy.

The other day a friend of mine commented on Facebook about the figure of the "dream salesman": some who, being in a position of power (typically a department boss), spends their time devising grand projects that usually do not take into account the overall goals of the organization they are supposed to serve and, even worse, disregard every kind of resource constraint. They come to you to speak "in confidence", throwing hazy ideas about how great it would be to have a corporate micro website that would provide certain kind of information. Of course, in those hypothetical terms it is very hard to find hard evidence to the contrary, so you politely agree and the conversation goes on to a different subject. The problem arises when, a week or two later, they catch you in the corridor and ask nonchalantly "how is the micro site going?" and you turn all the colors of the rainbow trying to find an answer that does not get you fired on the spot. Evidently, you did not get direct instructions to do the job, no specifications of what it would consist of, no timeline and no resources, but the fact that you politely agreed on their daydream somehow makes you responsible for making it happen as long as they are concerned. You never knew that their intent so serious, they never imagined that the order would be anything less than clear. The problem lies, as is often the case, in the communication.

Photo: Matias Letelier

Yesterday evening I witnessed another example of insufficient (or inefficient) communication that could clearly be classified as part of the "curse of expertise". Trevor, who is an avid player of League of Legends, asked Jason, who is a casual player, to join in a match with three other friends so that they could form the mandatory 5-strong team with all known players (otherwise you get assigned random players until you complete the team but that is obviously much less likely to work). Jason, in spite of being three years older, admits Trevor's proficiency in the game so he humbly asked which object he should focus on (there seems to be a number of collectible objects that improve the performance of each player or even the team as a whole) and Trevor asked him to get something and they started the match. About half an hour later, Jason came to me complaining that there was no way to make Trevor happy: on top of accepting to join the team and following the instructions on which object to pursue, he had been scolded for focusing too much on the object. Trevor argued that "everyone" knows that after you have two or three objects of that kind you should change to collecting a different type to complement your previous bounty. Jason, not been such an expert, kept gathering objects of the same type even if the additional ones were not that useful anymore. If only they had managed to speak about it.

Communication is a difficult trade-off between the amount of information you provide and what you withhold. If you provide information that is already known, you are cluttering the communication and other important yet-unknown points can go unnoticed in the deluge of useless words. On the other hand, providing too little information on the assumption that the other person knows the rest can lead to a serious misunderstanding, as in the two cases referred above. If only we could gauge how much information we need to provide in each case...

Unfortunately, mind reading does not work as of today. People with a common history might be able to predict each other's reactions with a high level of accuracy but it is only based in past experiences, if a situation is markedly different from every one on record, the predictions are likely to be worse. In the case of total strangers, mentalists rely on a combination of observation capabilities, educated guesses and a good deal of Barnum effect to perform jaw-dropping divination feats. For the rest of us, there is no way around trying to figure out how much the other knows, to avoid insulting them by providing too much information, and to ensure that every necessary detail is available when they need it. Perhaps someday we will develop the technology to verify if someone has understood precisely what we mean, but until then we will all continue to be ever-aspiring mind readers. How your experience in that sense? Have a nice weekend.