Living in a bubble, the unavoidable one, makes us misjudge what are the most complex things we have to face. We think that some technical (software/hardware) problems are the most convoluted ones, but actually, everyday things like traffic or sales are way more complex.
If you deal with software development, you have to be more analytical about dependencies and scale than salespeople or taxi drivers. But you're not in a more convoluted environment. It's just a difference in awareness.
A good example of fucked-up awareness is people who eagerly try to figure out and use extremely nuanced events, with confidence that it will do something positive, for sure not harm, just because they acquired some spreadsheet of data. Imagine management people trying to find out what their potential clients really want, by looking at surveys.
Now let's look at one salesman. He knows that he can select and call ten different prospects and get “no” from nine of them (maybe even all ten in a row). He will keep trying. He will adjust the course — build new heuristics — every time he notices a pattern. However, he will never figure out a theory that universally explains what makes people buy, so that he can predict decisions, or call only those who will almost for sure say “yes”. And this is OK — he will do well anyway. People like him don't bother to do much calculation or predictions. It's impossible to figure out all the stuff that's going on in this kind of situation. They just progressively iterate, tinker, observe and judge. And they accept that they will never know everything.
Just because your environment is complicated doesn't mean that you need to understand all its aspects to get by. It's about iteration and a couple of good heuristics — not predictiveness. On the other hand, learning something commonly known as hard and complicated doesn't mean that your abilities to predict the future are now greater. In the big picture, it's just a bird shit – far from what you need to process to get all the nuances of a market.
2018-06-01