# Range ## Metadata * Author: [(Journalist) David Epstein](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B07M6QPRRG * ISBN: 0735214506 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07M6QPRRG * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG) ## Highlights Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. — location: [506](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=506) ^ref-63696 --- Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible. — location: [632](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=632) ^ref-47760 --- modern life requires range, making connections across far-flung domains and ideas. — location: [662](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=662) ^ref-59301 --- “Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task,” she wrote. “It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem.” — location: [712](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=712) ^ref-60118 --- Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface. It is a powerful tool for solving wicked problems, and Kepler was an analogy addict, so Gentner is naturally very fond of him. — location: [1448](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1448) ^ref-57043 --- Most problems, of course, are not new, so we can rely on what Gentner calls “surface” analogies from our own experience. “Most of the time, if you’re reminded of things that are similar on the surface, they’re going to be relationally similar as well,” she explained. — location: [1465](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1465) ^ref-6664 --- In a wicked world, relying upon experience from a single domain is not only limiting, it can be disastrous. — location: [1523](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1523) ^ref-49706 --- This is a widespread phenomenon. If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario—physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician—the more likely you are to say that the scenario you are investigating will occur. — location: [1551](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1551) ^ref-54989 --- The good news is that it is easy to ride analogies from the intuitive inside view to the outside view. In 2001, the Boston Consulting Group, one of the most successful in the world, created an intranet site to provide consultants with collections of material to facilitate wide-ranging analogical thinking. The interactive “exhibits” were sorted by discipline (anthropology, psychology, history, and others), concept (change, logistics, productivity, and so on), and strategic theme (competition, cooperation, unions and alliances, and more). A consultant generating strategies for a post-merger integration might have perused the exhibit on how William the Conqueror “merged” England with the Norman Kingdom in the eleventh century. — location: [1603](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1603) ^ref-2708 --- Dedre Gentner wanted to find out if everyone can be a bit more like Kepler, capable of wielding distant analogies to understand problems. So she helped create the “Ambiguous Sorting Task.” It consists of twenty-five cards, each one describing a real-world phenomenon, like how internet routers or economic bubbles work. Each card falls into two main categories, one for its domain (economics, biology, and so on) and one for its deep structure. Participants are asked to sort the cards into like categories. For a deep structure example, you might put economic bubbles and melting polar ice caps together as positive-feedback loops. (In economic bubbles, consumers buy stocks or property with the idea that the price will increase; that buying causes the price to increase, which leads to more buying. When ice caps melt, they reflect less sunlight back to space, which warms the planet, causing more ice to melt.) Or perhaps you would put the act of sweating and actions of the Federal Reserve together as negative-feedback loops. (Sweating cools the body so that more sweating is no longer required. The Fed lowers interest rates to spur the economy; if the economy grows too quickly, the Fed raises rates to slow down the activity it launched.) The way gas prices lead to an increase in grocery prices and the steps needed for a message to traverse neurons in your brain are both examples of causal chains, where one event leads to another, which leads to another, in linear order. — location: [1612](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1612) ^ref-42244 --- In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context. For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.” — location: [1635](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1635) ^ref-64458 --- Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains. The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose. Those labs were Keplers by committee. They included members with a wide variety of experiences and interests. When the moment came to either dismiss or embrace and grapple with information that puzzled them, they drew on their range to make analogies. Lots of them. — location: [1676](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B07M6QPRRG&location=1676) ^ref-56242 ---