Cause and effect June 22, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, Action Research , trackbackEric Benson’s stream of consciousness on his blog today:
“The biggest lesson I’ve learned lately is to not learn from experience. Learning is for suckers. Learning from experience is (more often than not) like being a pigeon and learning that spinning in circles will help make the pellets come from the dispenser. Our brains are hard-wired to tie effects to causes (not the other way around) but this only works as a brute force survival method. Other parts of our brains, I think, are much better at judging each individual thing individually, and deciding with a less crude system what to do. This involves some learning from experience, but it’s never of the “I learned to never” or “I learned to always” variety that usually tries to take over our personalities. I think part of the way that I came to learn this was due to my many years at Amazon testing small changes on the website in parallel to see which small change was superior… and slowly coming to the realization that small changes, though they can have big impacts, don’t matter.”
I picked up on this because it bears just a little bit of resemblance to something I was trying to get to grips with in the ILM2 assignment I just handed in:
I also managed to clarify to some extent the problem of drawing conclusions from research, about cause and effect. One case study by itself cannot establish a relationship between actions and subsequent observations - ‘Change this and that happens’ unless further cases can establish a convincing trend, or else the underlying mechanism which links the two in that order can be identified and shown to be happening in the process somehow. It sounds obvious, but from my experience it’s a common pitfall and I feel this is something which Action Researchers in particular need to be wary of.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
No comments yet.