We have been speaking of causation and correlation this week.  We, as humans, believe that our determination of causation is solved by accumulating facts.  Which is why I read voraciously and catalogue my knowledge.  So, that I can have all the data I need at my fingertips- now.  And, still I am not infallible.

I have told you that I am a chemical engineer at heart.  Yes, I am qualified in taxation, medicine, business, management, and more- way more.  But, my outlook and basis stems from my ChemE makeup.  Science and engineering believe that we can solve the issue of causation by accumulating and diagnosing more and more facts.  The process even has a name- reductionism.  We distill all problems into a list of facts and component issues.

Of course, a philosopher would have a different approach.  David Hume, the Scottish Empiricist,  expounded that we humans assume causes are real facts, things that can be discovered and catalogued.  Or, to use one of my favorite quotes: “Many people watched the apple fall, only Newton asked why?”  The issue is that while we “know” that the cause is gravity, we can’t see it.  We see the apple up in a tree.  We see it on the ground later.  We, therefore, “see” the force of gravity that caused the apple to fall from the tree to the ground.  Even though we didn’t.  We invented that “fact” to explain what we saw.

This happens to be right (but just imagine how certain politicians will make use of this- telling us that science knows nothing).  And, that’s true for most of our mental shortcuts that we devise (thankfully).  But, sometimes they don’t.

Consider the experiments of Albert Michotte, the Belgian physiologist and philosopher.  He wrote a book in 1945, The Perception of Causality, which explained many of these concepts.  One of his famous experiments involved a short film depicting a red ball traveling a distance and stopping contiguous to a blue ball, which then begins to travel in the same direction.  Viewers were positive that red ball hit the blue ball causing it to move.  Even though, it didn’t.  This “launching” effect is universal in human visual perception.  Just imagine that this could mean for our business plans- just because we “touched a customer” and he (she) bought our service/product may have no bearing on that result.  They may have come to us to buy it right then and there- from anyone.

This is why we must truly examine our results.  And, why we often can learn more from failure than we can from success.  Because we assume we know why we succeeded- and cannot fathom why our plans failed to achieve success.

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