While on holidays the last couple of weeks I have tried to step back a little from the daily flow of postings on Red Planet Dust and my underlying investigations into what I have come to call “collaborability”. Just to let it sink in, to let my brain process what I have been pondering about for the last couple of months.

Supporting my evolving ideas is the notion that humans in general only have limited mental abilities where many abilities are unevenly spread over individuals. To understand how we collaborate (directly and indirectly) a fair/clean view on the abilities people have (or not have) needs to be explicated. I have covered all kinds of aspects of these (dis)abilities at Red Planet Dust in relation to e.g. decision making, or the effects from Big Data, or on what I regard strategy development is about.

I ran in to the term “illusion of understanding” in a newspaper article (NRC, 3 may 2013 page 17 “We all think we understand politics” referring to a research paper from psychological scientist Philip Fernbach of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his co-authors “Extreme Political Attitudes May Stem From an Illusion of Understanding“):

[Translated from Dutch by RPD] People often think they understand how certain things work, until you ask them to explain it further.
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The interesting thing about this new research [by Fernbach, RPD] is that if you destroy that illusion of understanding, the confidence that people have in their opinions is also destroyed,
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It is wise to show people how little they actually understand, the researchers conclude their article. That acts as a counterweight to all mechanisms to ensure that we bury ourselves in extreme positions: we are inclined to seek and process information in a way that supports our own opinion, we mainly frequent with peers and generally think that others just hold the same such extreme views. The illusion of understanding is best addressed for what it is: an illusion.

I am delving into pretty complex ideas, if I may say so myself, potentially having a wide range of consequences, based on numerous assumptions and opinions that sound solid to me. I am even convinced that I am on to something really worthwhile. But, am I not a victim of an “illusion of understanding” my self? The realisation of my fundamental limitedness has made me uncomfortable to such an extend that it regularly inhibits me of thinking through the very concepts I am trying to explore.

The holiday break from the almost daily flow of postings at Red Planet Dust made me realise that I have to break this inhibiting recursive loop. I need to make a big step into the dark as to make progress with collaborability.

I am back at my post at Red Planet Dust realising that I have to overcome myself if I want to create the foundations for my theory on “collaborability” and to translate this theory to practical use and consequences.