Why They Don’t “Get It” (Doctoral Studies in Seconds Ep. 2)

In the first installment of this series, I talked about the difference between adaptive and technical challenges as identified by Ronald Heifetz. Adaptive are those challenges where we don't yet have the answer, not because the information doesn't exist, but because it's a new type of problem for which the expertise doesn't exist in the first place. That's a good basis for understanding part 2 in this series of my favorite concepts from my doctoral studies so far, and that is the idea of categorical shifts as a kind of conceptual change. Since these adaptive problems need a different way to think about it, this concept by Michelin Chi of conceptual change seemed to be pretty relevant. She identified 3 kinds of conceptual change in her paper from 2008. Number 1, belief revision. Number 2, mental model transformation. And number 3, categorical shifts. If you're interested in all 3 types, I highly recommend you read her paper. But in the meantime, very quickly, belief revision is most appropriate for those kinds of technical challenges where someone just has wrong information and where that information is easily corrected. An example of a belief revision is something simple like, I used to think that whales were fish, but now I know they're mammals. In a mental model revision, you generally understand correctly how something works. You just don't have a complete understanding. So this would be something like if you think that pressing the gas makes the car go, again, not wrong, but it's actually because of pressing the gas increases airflow, which increases fuel intake, which— all of those other things happen that make it work. I think I need to do some mental model revision on that one. The last one is really important because in my eyes, that last one ties most closely to adaptive challenges and also to what she refers to as robust misconceptions. In other words, beliefs that are very resistant to change. And what she's found in her work is that often happens because someone has miscategorized something about the problem. The example she uses is with energy, heat. Many people can mistakenly think of heat as an entity, as a substance, as something that can be used up. But in reality, heat energy is simply a process. What we feel is heat is the transfer of molecules from one aspect to another. By thinking of something as a substance when it's is actually a process will lead to downstream issues with how you think it works and therefore how you try to solve problems with it. So when we think about how is it that we can think about a new solution to something or help people understand why it is that a new particular strategy might be better, sometimes it means we actually have to examine for ourselves what is the underlying category that they think it is What do we think it is? And where is there common ground between them? How do you do that? This leads to my third favorite concept, which I'll talk about next.