Introduction

Aging is a frightening process, humbling us at times, especially when we're not ready. "This will be an important project." Then a few seconds later, "By the way, what was it that we were just talking about?" And it's not just temporary lapses of memory. It's that thoughts are there yet in incomplete form. "You look very familiar. I'm sure we've met before. Tell me your name, what it is you do, and where I know you from." Then there's the (not) keeping up with our younger peers. For example, while at a workshop finding yourself lingering on a point made perhaps 15 or 20 minutes earlier because it tied into some of your own thinking, spacing out totally on the ebb and flow of the discussion as a consequence, while the rest of them are miles ahead.

How do we cope with it? I think it's helpful to look at other contexts. The "face problem," for example, comes up over and over again and not just because we're getting old. Watching a TV program, a new character appears on the screen. By intuition, a sudden feeling of affinity for the situation, the face becomes compelling. It's a familiar face, but from where? Is it from another show or perhaps a movie? That's probably it. But precisely what movie was it?

This has been happening to me often as of late. I've gotten into the habit of watching DVDs of TV series while riding the stationary bike, a necessary distraction to get me through the exercise. I've watched through all the seasons of West Wing (twice) and 24 (also twice). Actors in one appear in the other. Other actors appear whom I know from the movies. In the first episode of 24 Season Four there's a computer hacker, not a regular on show, named Andrew Paige. He's a friend of Chloe O'Brian, the main techie who always comes to the aid of the protagonist, Jack Bauer. Rather quickly during the viewing, maybe within a half-minute, I guess that the guy playing Andrew Paige is the same person as the Kid in Witness, Samuel Lapp. Witness is 20 years earlier and he was a pre-teen in that movie, Amish to boot, but they sure seem to me to be the same guy, even though I'm not aware of seeing the actor in other things. (I did watch Witness on TV not too long ago.) So right after getting off the bike, still sweaty, I go to the computer and find the episode of 24 via Google. A few moments later I have my answer; I was right.

Why was I compelled to do that? I'm not sure, but it definitely was fun. And it was empowering. As a result I start to look for other connections of this sort. I guess that the first really evil character in 24, Nina Myers, is played by the daughter of the woman who married the football player Alex Karras. To me these two seemed to have the same body type and were similar facially. But it turns out, this was a bonehead play. The wife of Alex Karras is the actress Susan Clark. Nina Myers was played by Sarah Clarke. (Note the "e" at the end of the name.) There is no relation.

Undeterred, a while later I guess that the person who plays the lead Terrorist holding hostages at an Airport in California in 24 Season Five is the same person who plays the Photo Journalist in the West Wing Season 5 episode Gaza. Their speaking voices were entirely different, but actors can do various dialects so I let that slide. Their head shapes were similar and the physical way they acted also seemed similar. By now, you must realize that they are two different actors, another wrong guess. But this one I don't believe was so bonehead. Short of looking them up in the Internet Movie Data Base, there really was no way for me to tell one way or the other.

There are some lessons to take away from this experience. First, I definitely cared about identifying these matches, although the consequence for anything else was nil. Caring was entirely an act of self-expression, something that pleased me, the joy of knowing if you will. Second, when we guess sometimes we're right, other times not. In baseball a batting average of .333 makes you an all-star. I'll take it. Third, and most importantly, intuition triggers it all. What is the source of that intuition? I'm really not sure. But I do know I'm constantly on the alert for that spark. Feeling it is a source of vitality.

Matching faces for actors on TV or in the Movies is one thing. My claim is that these lessons are helpful for matching faces with acquaintances, even if the spark doesn't come so quickly, maybe because we're getting older. There is a method to the madness. The method is to look for an intuition, not of the face itself, that's where we're stumbling and likely to continue to stumble. No, look for an intuition about the context where the face might have appeared. Identify the context. That might be easier. If the context is known, then tying the name to the face might not be that hard.

This happened recently. I was in line at the Airport for an American Airlines flight from Champaign to Chicago. My ultimate destination was Boston, but all the flights out of Champaign go through some hub. Behind me in line was a face that was familiar but I couldn't place him. So after a minute or two I admitted my ignorance and asked him who he was. What would have happened if I had passed him walking in the airport, I going out on a departing flight, he recently having arrived on an incoming flight. We wouldn't have stood together and I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work up my nerve to ask him. It would have bugged me - who is that guy? I know him. I'm the type of person who lets such nagging questions trump all other items on my personal agenda. Until I get it resolved, it's hard for me to work on anything else. How would I resolve this dilemma?

This, I suppose, would be the chain of thinking, though it might not be so linear in practice. First, he must work for the University as I do. How else would I know him? Second, we must have served on some committee together. I serve on a fair number of committees and meet a lot of people that way. Then, having gotten that far, I'd stop doing it all in my head and go to my email. I'd search there to see what committees I've been requested to serve on the past few years. As it turns out, I served with this guy on a Library committee. I'd find an email for members of that committee about committee work and with that I'd see his name in print. There's no guarantee that at that point I'd be able to do the match, but clearly I'd have more clues to do so. Usually with a a few clues the picture begins to fill in. The intuition to look at my committee membership is not directly suggested by seeing the face. Doing so is what I'd call making a "good guess." This book is about good guessing.

Let me talk about a related guess, one I can't readily confirm, but one I believe to be true. I used to think that some faculty my age (early to mid 50's) turn their attention to teaching because their research agenda starts to wane. That may be true in some cases. But I'm coming to believe that the aging process itself makes these faculty better as teachers. The good guessing they have to do in order to cope is what they want their students to be doing in order to learn. So these more mature faculty can identify with their students in ways a 30-something faculty member can't. Thoughts come too quickly to the 30-something, who therefore can't personalize the student struggles. The older faculty member can. There is both insight and empathy. I hope this book contributes in those two dimensions.

* * * * *

As a college student in the 1970s I saw a schlock French film with its own peculiar charm, Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000. One piece of the film that stuck was the metaphor with blood sausage, really the links in between, to represent "gaps in time," the moments when we come to new understandings, the AHA! moments so to speak. Those moments fascinate us all.

Like many college aged kids, at around the time I saw the movie I spent a lot of inner energy thinking about the "meaning of life" questions. I suppose most kids put their own twist to these questions, to have the answers speak to their own circumstance. I wanted to understand the nature of confidence, particularly confidence in intellectual ability. (My ability was okay, but my confidence was shaky.) When I had the chance I queried peers on this issue. (It's not the sort of question you can pose at the beginning of a conversation. You need to have the flow going for some time and then allow the question to be part of the larger discussion.) By and large the guys I talked with were confident. But I never got an answer as to why they felt that way.

You learn about what's valued by the put-downs people use. The ones I recall are "that's intuitively obvious" and "you are such a patzer." What's the opposite behavior? I know at the time I was hugely impressed by people who could quote large passages from Shakespeare, because I couldn't do it. But the ability to quote the Bard isn't enough. The opposite of the put-downs is the ability to quote in context where the quotation sheds insight on the situation at hand. In other words, what was valued was being clever, not cutesy clever but ingenious clever. So my meaning of life question really translated into, "where does cleverness come from?" Was it mostly luck and circumstance, the solution already at hand simply waiting for a situation to apply it, or was it a matter of self-expression, a property of the individual, perhaps manifest by force of will. (Coincidentally, while writing this introduction David Brooks had a column about Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers, where Gladwell makes a reasoned argument for serendipity while Brooks mildly objects arguing that there is still room to believe in the force of will of the talented individual.)

After having put that question aside I returned to it recently, but given my current focus on teaching and learning I posed it differently. Can cleverness be taught or learned via self-study? Fundamentally, cleverness is about "seeing" what others do not and then acting on that vision to achieve some end, the action potentially serving to illustrate the insight to others. Even for the brightest among the very bright, the view is achieved via a series of steps, sometimes with back tracking, and at each step there is .... guessing. Understanding that much and then invoking John Dewey, shouldn't it be that if kids do a lot guessing in context they'll learn to be clever? That's my guess.

On one level, this is a a trivial assertion. An early kid game that my family liked is Connect Four (you can play the computer online by following the link). If each move the kid makes is a guess, then it is certainly true that the kid gets more proficient in play with experience, so in that sense guessing does lead to cleverness. But that's a very limited view of the word. What about across domains? Does gaining proficiency in Connect Four lead to proficiency in other guessing games? My guess is that it does, but that's still not it. I don't want to focus on those games young kids play.

I want to concentrate on more open ended situations, the type where there might be a good approach or several good approaches but how do you tell, and where there certainly aren't "right answers" that you could look up. Cleverness in such cases is often about making connections between things we don't know and things we do, leveraging the latter to get insight about the former. Making these type of connections comes from a type of seeing. In turn, such seeing comes from asking the right sort of framing questions, at least implicitly doing so. I believe that asking good framing questions is the meta skill we want ours kids to develop. Many people can do the analysis once a good question has been posed. We're good at teaching how to do that sort of thing. Who can pose the good framing question? That's the rarer talent and mostly we don't teach to cultivate it.

A 30-something whiz of a faculty member might be able to zero in on a good framing question almost immediately, but mostly I believe that to be a myth. Even extraordinarily bright people find the good framing question (e.g., identifying a research area for them to mine) only after a struggle, part of which is a sequence of guessing, each guess followed by perhaps pain staking verification often leading to a dead end, before a satisfactory answer is found. I do believe, however, that one does get better at it with practice. Further, I believe that guessing at a younger age is good preparation for guessing about framing questions later on. That's the argument qua guessing. In other words, cleverness is an acquired taste.

* * * * *

I've had the opportunity on a few occasions to chat with Executive MBA students and get them to reflect on the difference between the current education they are getting and how it contrasts with what they learned as undergraduates. These students have managerial positions at the companies that employ them and are typically somewhere between their mid 30s and mid 40s. They bring a lot of real work experience to their learning so they have wisdom in articulating their views. Surprisingly, they all said essentially the same thing, which I paraphrase here. "As undergraduates we felt we knew everything. Now we're quite sure we know nothing." It's an interesting sentiment.

Of course, students tend to speak in extremes while the truth is more toward the middle. So I'm going to translate the above in a way that I think is more accurate. Real managerial decision making happens in an environment of high complexity and substantial ambiguity. Making sense of what is going on is a very hard thing which makes plotting a good course of action terribly difficult.

The complex environment can be parsed into things you already know, things you might know but don't know at present, and things you can't possibly know before the fact. This last group of items seemingly becomes more and more critical as the decision maker gets more mature, ergo the sentiment that we know nothing, but really it's less important than the students believe, because the only thing they can do to learn about it is wait till events unfold. The things in the first group are likely things that many people know, so they tend to be discounted in considering choice. The items in the middle group are given short shrift. That's because they're still students and not yet seeing the general approach. It's the items in the middle group where most of the action should be.

Since decisions occur in real time the right sorts of questions are how much information in the middle group should be gathered before making the decision, information gathering being a time consuming activity. But that's still too simple. Information is hierarchical in its importance for making decisions. The real question is what bits of information within the vast field of what might be knowable would be most helpful in making the decision and how much of that needs to be learned. The expert, the good guesser with strong intuition, can answer that question. This is the way the expert manages uncertainty. The expert has also acquired knowledge over time about people's comfort zone with making decisions in an uncertain environment. The decision to make a choice now or wait and gather more information itself can't be answered without knowing individual attitudes toward accepting risk. The expert knows this and can project the issue to others who understand the point less well. There is real value in being comfortable making a choice. The expert can assist with that.

Even armed with such expertise, mistakes are made. We all make typos and other small mistakes. Those are readily corrected and of no consequence. There are other mistakes we make that are more fundamental and of substantial consequence. To manage the complexity we make assumptions and base our analysis and decisions on those. When the assumptions we make are contrary to fact and that fact is either already known or potentially knowable beforehand, we feel we've made a bad mistake and suffer a sense of recrimination - we should have been smarter about it. Such is the plight of the guesser, even the very best of them.

Good guessers learn to live with this, not letting the experience taint their next venture, where the natural optimism that the guess might be right should hold sway. All of it is about having a mature view regarding uncertainty, something that can only be gotten by experience with lots of guessing.

* * * * *

These are three themes, each valuable in its own right, to consider guessing as a path toward learning. Some of the essays in this book will look at the themes in more depth. Others essays will probe different issues related to guessing. Before returning to the Table of Contents, see if you can anticipate the topics. Let's practice what we preach.