But does Boris know how they REALLY work?

The audience were business types. C this, C that. The agenda had my name against the topic 'Digital Twin Strategy'. 30 minutes. Bish bash bosh. Go.

5 minutes in and the wheels were coming off ( excuse the pun ).Why? It was dawning fast that levels of knowledge were wildly off. Despite best endeavours to actively listen, frame and re-frame, it was clear the subject was too abstract to make the next 25 minutes a positive experience.

Time to reboot the meeting and change the thinking round the table.

"I want you to think about how a bicycle works". I asked them to spend a couple of minutes to ponder this and then score themselves out of of 7. ( 7 being expert level, and 1 being novice ).They gave me a 6, two 5s and a 4.

"Now I would like you to draw a bicycle". ( see below )

I then asked each of them to explain in their words how they thought a bicycle actually worked. ( Let me tell you it sparked some pretty fundamental questions around the room.)

How does the bicycle move when there are no pedals? (one or two had thought of the chain but no pedals).

How do you avoid bumping into people without a way to steer ? (No handle bars? Or a seat in one case).

And yes there is a chain but what mechanism is the chain connected to? (doesn't it need to interact with the wheels to create movement).

Now I got them to reevaluate their depth of understanding based on their 'new found knowledge' of some pretty fundamental concepts of how a bicycle works. We now had a more realistic score - a 4, a 3 and two 2s.

Digging deeper, we asked questions like "what stops the human from falling off?", "what about going up hill? Gears perhaps?" and "when you push the pedal what happens?".

This round of deeper investigation really challenged all of us and we now had a score of just 1s and 2s. Fair to say in 10 minutes we had acknowledged that our illusion of how a bicycle worked was out in the open.

First coined by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), occurs when , “most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.”

Try it yourself. If not with a bike, some other everyday object you use. I particularly like the 'how does a toilet flush' question. Great fun. ( Or 'how does Brexit work?' (sorry Prime Minister).

What the bicycle diversion has done was to reset the knowledge levels around the room, and overcome any lingering illusionary bias but in a non confrontational way. It was fun and there was a much more evident tone of humility and cognitive reasoning.

We had all acknowledged that our approach to the question "we want a digital twin strategy" was totally wrong. Now we had a frame of approach that meant the last 20 minutes were much more objective and that

For me the moral of this little story is this.

In the technology mad world of 'big phrases' like AI, machine learning, big data and digital this and digital that, a little dose of 'illusion bashing' is not a bad thing.

Perhaps every meeting needs to start with a 'bicycle moment' before getting into the matter at hand. Try it.

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.' 

Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense, 2003