Photo by Andreas Fickl on Unsplash
What is common sense?
Is common sense to a manager the same as common sense to a veterinarian? Or to a veterinary technician? Or to a customer service specialist? Or perhaps, most importantly of all, to a client?
Common sense should be knowledge that we all share; however, it is rarely used that way. It is often used as a bludgeon on people for not reading our minds. Common sense is short hand for “you don’t know what I know, and I think you should.” The problem is that we rarely recognize that our own common sense is more often than not a point of view with some additional specialized knowledge.
Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick, talk about the “curse of knowledge.” They outline a simple experiment conducted at Stanford, where by a number of “tappers” were given 120 well know songs to recite using just knocks on a table. “Listeners” would then have to guess which each song was. The Listeners were right only about three times out of 120. What was extraordinary; however, was that when the Tappers were asked whether the Listeners should be able to pick out the song, they replied that they should be able to 50% of the time! The Tappers felt they were being understood more than 47% more than they actually were. The Tappers were hearing the song play along in their heads while tapping it out on the table. The Tappers had knowledge that the listeners did not, and so dramatically over estimated the Listeners ability to recognize the song.
Common sense is a side effect of the curse of knowledge. A team member who may excel in looking after an unhappy customer, or preventing a customer from becoming upset in the first place, may not automatically understand the seriousness of a cat that is straining to pee. Likewise, a veterinarian may not understand the reason why their client is not being immediately shown to an exam room is because of the 12 other people that just walked through the door that the customer service representative is trying to deal with.
Now in both of the above examples, training, proper protocols and procedures, and a commitment to teamwork should solve all of these issues. But when we fall back on common sense, or a lack of it, we are doing a disservice to our team members and even to ourselves. If we replace “common sense” with the words “knowledge and experience” in the phrase “you have no common sense when it comes to dealing with clients” the person at fault switches from being who the phrase is directed to, to the person saying the phrase.
Give it a try – I’ll wait.
Common sense is an excuse for leaving training and continuing education to osmosis. It has no place in management, and really has no place at work at all. Employees are not going to place themselves in shoes of clients without being trained to do so, and they rarely have the knowledge to place themselves in the shoes of managers or veterinarians. Common sense is lazy, overly broad, and does a disservice to the person using it and the person whom it is directed against.
It is time to recognize it for the dysfunctional symptom that it is.
Mike Falconer 