Common sense

Common sense tells us that the world is flat, that the sun goes around the earth, that heavy bodies always fall faster than light bodies, that boats made of iron will sink.

Stuart Chase

For the past 20 years of my career, I met all kind of people. One thing they all had in common was an opinion on "common sense". I heard countless times "This does not make any sense" or "What were they thinking, if they had only used common sense". When I was younger, I was sympathetic to those feelings. In most cases, however, after digging into the details or thinking about alternative solutions, we started understanding why some decisions were made and how certain conclusions were reached.

This experience made me think, why people are so quick to choose to use the “common sense" approach when they face decision making situations and at a later stage this approach happens to be wrong. I concluded the below 3 reasons why it happens.

1.???? "Fog of War"- a term used in strategic games and in military operations. In simple words it means part of the terrain which you have no information about. When people use "common sense" to solve problems without seeing all the variables they reach logical conclusions, but based on the variables they see. In a lot of cases, they do not even know that most of the variables that should be considered are hidden in the "Fog of War".

2.???? Arrogance - most smart people believe they are smarter than they are. Somehow, they feel they can solve any problem with simple logic. There are cases when using "common sense" solves the problem, quickly and efficiently. These are the situations when there is no "Fog of War". These experiences make people arrogant. They start assuming that they can solve any problem. They use the same pattern because it brought them success in the past. For a pity not doing the proper research causes wrong decisions.

3.???? Laziness - using common sense is easy. Just apply logic with deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning and reasoning by analogy and you reach a conclusion. Even if you suspect there is a “Fog of War", you can always hide safely behind the statement "based on the information we had at the time, we made the best logical decision".

My suggestion to avoid the trap of "common sense" is to ask yourself this simple question:

What experience and expertise, I have on the topic on which I must decide?

Depending on your honest answer you will know if you should use "common sense" in this situation or maybe better research and ask for help.