Outside perspective: why do we need consultants? Knowledge and Information are not the same thing!

Let’s start with a small game. How focused you are? If you have taken this test before or in case you have seen this video earlier, you can proceed forward but for the rest, please and I repeat please do not proceed forward without seeing this video. The rest of the blog is going to be based on how well or how did you perform in the test. Please view these videos all you have to do is to count the no. of times the white team passes the ball to another player.

Now that you have viewed it, how many times did the white team pass the ball? 11, 12 or 13? Was it more than 13? Wait a min did you see the gorilla in the video? Was there a gorilla? If your answer is no, please view the video once again. Yes and how could you have missed it? Our brain plays funny tricks with us. We are wired to focus, as a part of our evolution we learnt to ignore things in our environment that our brain deems not important. Yes the image did hit your retina but was processed in a very different way. In order to solve a problem there are two things that hold the key:

• Focus
• Information

Conventional wisdom states that the extent of these two attributes would be directly be proportional to your ability to solve a problem. However studies after studies have shown that it might not be the case. We already witnessed the problem with focus. Internal employees are sometimes too focused on certain things to totally ignore the gorillas in the system. Their jobs are very well defined, and they have to count the number of passes every day, a third party consultant comes equipped with this added ability to notice and point out that there are some additional dimensions to the whole issue. And sometimes these additional issues can hold the key to the particular problem we are trying to solve. Now let’s move to information. Without getting into the details of epistemology, information and knowledge are not always directly proportional. The catch is that in order to solve a problem you need the knowledge and not all the information. To explain it further an experiment was carried out by showing two groups (A & B) blurred images of a fire hydrant. Blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For “Group A” resolution was increased in 10 steps. For “Group B” it was done in 5 steps. The final image shown to both the groups was still slightly blurred but identical. Which group do you think recognized the hydrant with a higher success rate? If your answer is group A, you are wrong. The reason? More information sometimes leads to more hypotheses and the more hypotheses you have the more worse of you are about making the correct judgment. Group A for example saw a lot of random noise and mistook it for information. That happens in corporates as well. Employees have a lot more information since they have been working at the organization for a long time. Some of this information cannot be translated into knowledge since that is mere noise. An outside perspective free of this noise might hold the key to the solution.