151: It's never lupus

What can a fictional, addicted, borderline-unbearable doctor show us about stalled strategy projects?

When we have a small baby, our TV diet needs to be relatively unchallenging, and we recently rediscovered House. And got talking about how their "differential diagnosis" — that whiteboard full of things the disease might be — is basically our Signals > Stories > Options stuff but with apparent misanthropy and a gammy leg.

In this one we feel our way through what happens when you stop trying to be right and start trying to be interestingly wrong. Featuring split-brain patients, a red herring tomato sauce, and tfw a video camera destroys all your assumptions about how you're dancing.

• Why the first story you settle on almost always blinds you to everything else
• Why "the problem is a lack of X" is smuggling in a pre-determined solution. Dig more ("imagine you have X, now what happens?")
• Performative ideation and how to tell the difference between a real differential and people making noises in a workshop
• Everybody lies, and it's often got nothing to do with active dishonesty
• The illusion of explanatory depth ... go on then, you draw a bicycle from memory and see how you get on
• Knowledge shields and the painful, essential, wondrous experience of watching yourself on video

For anyone who's ever sat in a meeting where everyone's certain and the ideas feel like they're on predetermined rails.

References

• House M.D. (TV series) Dr Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie; Dr Wilson as the Watson figure
• Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, cited as House's explicit origin
• Signals > Stories > Options — Crown & Reach method — https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/signals-stories-options
• Gary Klein's Data/Frame model of sensemaking; expert vs. novice pattern recognition
• First-fit pattern matching, attributed to Klein in the episode; more commonly Snowden's framing
• Knowledge shields, a concept from naturalistic decision-making; source is Accelerated Expertise (Hoffman, Feltovich, Klein, Klein, Andrews, Fiore, Moon)
• Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History, nice examples of the illusion of explanatory depth https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology
• The illusion of explanatory depth, including the toilet study (Rozenblit & Keil) and the draw-a-bicycle test (Rebecca Lawson)
• Split-brain research – corpus callosum severance, confabulation across hemispheres (Michael Gazzaniga's work, though not named in the episode)
• Matt Lerner, friend of Tentacles, ran an experiment on AI-generated marketing suggestions for Lindy Hop https://www.systm.co/post/can-chatgpt-replace-customer-interviews
• Marks & Spencer Collection olive oil ice cream — unsponsored, regrettably
• Lindy Hop — our dance practice, video-recording story

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

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