A Thought About The Principle of the Hiding Hand

My friend Julianne brought my attention to this article on Albert Hirschman by Malcolm Gladwell  Gladwell focuses on Hirschman's article “The Principle of the Hiding Hand”:
“'We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,' Hirschman wrote:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be."

I wonder if people do in fact often depend on creativity to deal with emerging problems that had not been forecast. In an earlier post today I reflected on the battle of Gettysburg. Surely the generals commanding troops into that battle understood that their plans would only succeed if many of their subordinates creatively solved problems that came up in the course of the battle. Indeed, some historians attribute Lee's loss of the battle to the earlier death of Stonewall Jackson, a general who had always before found creative ways to achieve Lee's objectives.

I have been deeply impressed by "The Science of 'Muddling Through'" by Charles E. Lindblom, which I read in graduate school. It makes the point that experienced administrators don't do exhaustive evaluation of possible alternatives, but rather use their experience to select a few (probably good) alternatives, and use heuristics to select among them. They depend on muddling through to achieve adequate ends as unexpected impediments crop up during the implementation of their efforts.

Indeed, an aspect of expertise is the ability to focus on a relatively small set of critical aspects of a situation and a small set of actions that will probably advance toward an appropriate solution.

Even the most expert chess player does not plan a game in advance, considering how to counter every possible action of his opponent. The expert does see more than I would of the opportunities and dangers in the current position. The expert selects a better set of alternative moves than I would, and explores their implications in more depth than I could. Ultimately, however, the grand master depends on his own creativity to counter and overcome the creative responses of his opposing grand master. I suppose there comparable expertise explains why so many chess games between grand masters end in draws.