Have you ever had someone who didn’t understand why something was the way it was so they wanted to rebuild it? The act of rebuilding it helps them understand it, and they end up building something similar. Oftentimes, as a business analyst I was asked to build something only to discover that it had already been built sometime in the past (I called that an “archelogical find”).
And the solution is temporary because the next person or group to encounter that problem or system will have to learn it too. If the first person or group had just learned or kept the original system operating, it wouldn’t have needed to be rebuilt. I call this the “reinvention fallacy”.
The reinvention fallacy is the act of reinventing something to understand it, which can often take the same amount of effort (or more). This is because they either won’t take the time to learn it or they have a bias that because they don’t understand a system, it must be wrong.
Here are a few cognitive biases and psychological tendencies that explain why this happens:
- Ego-Centric Bias: The assumption that because you don’t understand something, it must be flawed or poorly designed. This bias leads to dismissing the value of existing systems in favor of creating new ones.
- Not-Invented-Here (NIH) Syndrome: A tendency to distrust or undervalue solutions or systems created by others and instead prioritize rebuilding or creating something from scratch, even if the existing solution is adequate.
- Curse of Knowledge (Inverse): This occurs when someone lacking knowledge assumes the system is overly complex or broken, rather than recognizing their own learning gap.
- Action Bias: A preference for taking action (e.g., rebuilding a system) over inaction (e.g., learning the existing one), even if action isn’t necessarily the optimal solution. This bias can create a false sense of productivity.
- Dunning-Kruger Effect: In its early stages, this effect could explain why someone underestimates the complexity of an existing system and believes they can create something better without fully understanding the original.
- Reinvention Bias: This is the “grass is always greener” tendency to favor starting over rather than learning or adapting what’s already there, driven by the mistaken belief that rebuilding will lead to better outcomes or deeper understanding.
But what happens when an idea is first getting started? Oftentimes there is just as much resistance to an idea first getting established. We’ll cover that in the next few chapters.
This is chapter 2 of Think Again, available on Amazon Kindle.