The Fish Outside the School

A group saves you effort. If everyone else is running, there is probably a reason. If everyone picks one road, it may well be safer.

Following the majority is often sensible. Most people do not personally verify the safety of every food, building and medicine. They use the experience and norms of those around them.

At the same time, a group is capable of reproducing an error.

Someone who steps aside sometimes discovers a new route. Sometimes he really is eaten by a predator. Success stories favour the first version and rarely publish interviews with the second.

So independence does not equal being automatically right.

A nonconformist may see an opportunity, notice a collective error, hold better information, simply enjoy attention, fail to understand the risk, survive by accident, and later call it a strategy.

The point is not to “go against everyone” but to keep the ability to check the direction separately.

Before deviating from the group it is worth asking:

• what does the majority know;
• what is the common behaviour based on;
• what data do I have;
• what is the cost of an error;
• can the hypothesis be tested with a small experiment;
• can I see those who already tried and lost.

Leadership sometimes begins with a step to the side. Sometimes with understanding why the school turned after all.

A defective fish is not obliged to be a prophet. Its left fin may simply be working badly.

A cheap test usually exists. Someone who thinks the department prepares its report on Mondays for no reason can skip announcing it at the meeting and instead do it once on a Friday and see what breaks. Sometimes it turns out that Monday was chosen because the data close on Sunday night. Sometimes that the only person who remembered the reason left three years ago. In the first case he has learned the reason, in the second he has found a ritual, and both answers are useful.

The difference between these two cases costs one attempt, not a reputation as a troublemaker. A school of fish is rarely able to explain why it turned, but that does not mean there was no reason.