Explore or Exploit?

A discussion I often have is whether to eat out at a new place, or stick to old favourites. If it’s one of our few meals in a new town (say we are on holiday) we very rarely eat in the same place twice; there are plenty of great places out there, and it’s unlikely we’ve found the best one early on. Exploration seems like a good idea here. On the other hand, when we are eating locally, we figure we have a pretty good sense of what’s what, and often go for the best thing we already know. In this case, exploiting what we know may be the best strategy.

The same situation, arises, for example, if you are choosing a new school in a new country, where it might be unwise to accept the first one you like. On the other hand, if you have had two kids go through several happy years in one school, then sticking with it for your third is probably the right thing to do.

This simple conundrum – choosing between what you know and what you don’t – is called the explore-exploit trade-off and it’s surprisingly common (so much so that there is even a rather elegant branch of maths – optimal stopping theory – devoted to these types of problems). Should we…

• …stay living in our hometown or move away?
• …offer new products or stick with existing ones?
• …always read the same genre of books?
• …stick with our existing close circle of friends of seek new ones?
• …pursue a career in depth or hop between careers?
• …hire a very good candidate for a job or hold out for an event better one?
• …deep-dive into specialties, or retain broad but shallow expertise?
• …stick with the current great job or have a new adventure?
• …stick with the new school subject or change, when I wasn’t taken by the first 1, 10, or 20 lessons?
• …marry that boyfriend/girlfriend or dump them?

(The last one is only slightly tongue in cheek – and I wonder for those who marry their first boyfriend/girlfriend; how ever did they ever know?)

Obviously the answer in any given situation will depend on many variables; but the structure of the problem is the same; seek new knowledge and opportunities, or  go ahead on the basis of what you already have. And the crux of the issue is that the very knowledge that would help make the right decision – that is, the experience of the unknown – can only be achieved by actually making the decision in one way, often irreversibly. One way of thinking about the problem is through a metaphor like this: 

The question is, what’s the relative size of the area to the left of the line, and the area on the right of the line? Of course, we can never really be sure, but in case B explore looks to be the right option, whereas case C seems to lean towards exploit. The difficulty arises, of course in cases where you do not even know where the line is – which unlike the example in my first paragraph, are most cases where we face significant choices such as those in the list above.

In his 2019 book Range, journalist David Epstein makes the case for exploration over exploitation; for trying new stuff a lot; and not sticking with what you know, even if it is pretty successful. He starts, however, with the case of Tiger Woods.  Here, early very narrow specialization paid off handsomely. Pushed and coached by his father, Woods started with a putter at seven months – yes really!  At two he was on national TV, driving golf balls with a club almost taller than he was; at three he won an under-10s tournament and at four “his father could drop him off at a golf course at nine in the morning and pick him up eight hours later, sometimes with the money he’d won from those foolish enough to doubt”. Much has been written about Wood’s legendary success; it fits with Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which lauds the relentlessly and aggressively pushy parenting style, and with the idea that early and narrow devotion to a single pathway is the route to success. According to this narrative, it’s all about headstarts for our kids and exploiting what talent they have; exploring alternatives is just a distracting waste of time. It’s an approach that we often see at school; where parents are concerned to plan ahead, and ensure that tuition in Primary School aligns with future dreams of rising to CEO status.

Despite the apparent logic here, Epstein convincingly demonstrates that this is a mistaken approach for most of us; and not just because we lack Tiger’s talents. He shows that many, many people at the top of their field had a much more eclectic approach (Roger Federer being the sporting counterpoint to Tiger Woods) for the simple reason that the narrow approach only works in limited domains. In golf, the problem of hitting a ball with a club is extremely difficult, but it is solved “according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent and similar challenges occurs repeatedly. Drive a ball and it either goes too far or far enough; it slices, hooks or flies straight.” In these constrained, predictable and repeatable situations, deliberate practice with immediate feedback is likely to be highly effective. In terms of the diagram above, it’s suggesting that the field of possible knowledge/skill is finite; the whole rectangle is actually fairly small so it’s possible to ‘move the line’ rightwards by deep drill and practice. But away from predictable sports life’s not like that in most cases. In many cases (see my list of questions earlier) as Epstein says, “the rules are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and they may not be obvious and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate or both”. That’s especially true in a world that is increasingly characterized as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous; where old habits are being disrupted and the rate of change is accelerating.  That not means that in the rectangles above, the unknown portion to the right is effectively infinite, but also that the known portion to the left may be shrinking (AI is teaching that lessons to experts in coding, among many others, as I write). So betting on specialisation and exploiting what you have is no longer a good bet, if it ever was; these days we need exploration.

Range is a rich book, and while Epstein does not explicitly use the exploration vs exploitation lens, it’s the broader abstraction of his themes. Gladwell-like in his (ahem) range, he tackles:

• the whole idea of giving our kids a head start (what does that really mean in a disrupted world?)
• when you would be better off giving up and starting something new
• our inherent cognitive biases and what we can do about them
• the notion of disruption as central to breakthroughs. 

In each case he marshalls anecdotes and data to show the benefits of being able to make links across disparate areas; to make analogies across disciplines; and to have many sources of creativity. His overall thesis is one any parent thinking of early specialization for their children should consider carefully: “While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose… we need…people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences while they progress. People with range.”

Does this mean we parents shouldn’t allow our children to specialise? Despite his argument above, Epstein notes that the answer is not an unqualified ‘no’ and he draws again on the contrasting examples of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. The “public consciousness is that they were created by their fathers…When in fact, in both cases the father started responding to the kid’s very unusual display of interest and prowess.” So it was the child’s intrinsic motivation that was the driver that the parents supported, not – as is commonly thought – the extrinsic choice of the parents.

Reviewer Ashley Fetters notes a study of 1,200 young musicians that shows a strong link between studying an instrument not their choice and quitting; and another that shows that among young musicians, those who went on to to be most successful only started practicing more when they identified the instrument they themselves wanted to focus on. Fetters notes that “Tiger Mother author Amy Chua… begins to make sense of this herself at the end of her book, when her daughter Lulu, whom Chua has decided will be a violin prodigy, abruptly quits playing at age 13 despite showing extraordinary potential because, as Lulu puts it, her mother picked it, not her“

Fetter’s discussion of Epstein’s work is misleadingly titled “The Case Against Grit”. It’s misleading because there’s nothing wrong with dedicating yourself to a discipline, putting in the 10,000 hours needed to master a skill or profession, and sticking with it through the tough times (i.e. ‘grit‘). We should have nothing against grit per se – only against grit applied to the wrong thing (which is more likely if it’s someone else’s choice). The real message is that in most cases, and certainly in times of uncertainty, you want to be confident that you’ve chosen the right skill, one that you (not someone else) are interested in, because your intrinsic interest is what will get you through those tough times. That probably means exploring a whole range of things first so you can identify and then exploit the ones that you love.

References

• Conceptually.org (2019) What is the explore-exploit tradeoff? – Explanation and example
• Epstein, D (2019) Range. Why generalists triumph in a specialised world. Riverhead Books.
• Fetter, A. (2019) The Case Against Grit. The Atlantic