SEE Lens: Familiarity (and Antidotes)

By the time we set off for first grade, we already knew a staggering amount –how to talk, make choices, tell stories, complain, get dressed. We didn’t know how we learned all this, or even that we knew it. It was just a part of us, and we assumed others were no different.

You already knew all that. In other words, you were familiar with it. Familiarity is an inevitable part of our existence and easily taken for granted. We depend on it and strive for it. So why the parenthetical “antidotes” in the title? Because we also bemoan familiarity when it leads to boredom. More importantly, familiarity can blind us; we often don’t realize what we lose when we acquire it.

Let’s unpack these claims.

Depending on Familiarity 

It is easy to take familiarity for granted … until we lack it. That happens quite often! Can’t find something where you’re sure you put it; sudden glitches on your trusted devices; getting to your destination, but the expected conditions have changed; someone you know well acts strangely, or maybe you act strangely… Our cognitive clarity also relies on the predictability of sequences. Why isn’t Ctrl+Alt+Delete behaving as it should? Confusion is unlikely to be on our wish list.

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Striving for Familiarity 

Much of our familiarity, especially in our earliest days and years, came without our conscious efforts. It was built from repetition—lots of it! There were repetitive sound patterns, shapes, objects, locations, foods, and specific people. There were also multitudes of repeating sequences, including responses to our actions. We are hard-wired to learn from repetition, incorporating variations as we acquire our knowledge.

Individually and globally, we also have substantial investment in gaining familiarity through conscious effort. Formal and informal education, coaching, and training are all about that -- concerted efforts for gaining familiarity. We rely on a vast array of expertise (others’ and our own) for answers to endless urgencies and puzzles.

Familiarity is the stuff of our memory, on the tip of our tongue, and the basis for our decisions. It is not surprising that we are biased for the familiar given how much it guides us.

Bemoaning Familiarity

Although familiarity is essential and inescapable, there are times when it breeds contempt. Perhaps practice makes perfect, but perfection may not be worth the effort. We greet others with “what’s new,” not “what’s same old.” Grandpa’s (or anyone’s) beloved, totally predictable tales can be hard to take. Repetition can be annoying. Worse yet, it can be distorting. That’s where antidotes come in.

Antidotes

Boredom is potentially a genuine drawback of familiarity. However, some other consequences of familiarity may be more consequential. Over time, with increased repetitions of objects, circumstances, or anything else, recognition becomes easier and faster, making new situations feel simpler and more comfortable. These changes are desirable and useful. However, they also change the way we “see” and “act.” Such transformations, in turn, often lead to complications– or even disdain – in dealing with people whose experiences differ from ours. That may be overly dramatic since no one shares all our experiences; the differences, however, can have dramatic implications, exacerbating the differences between individuals or groups differing in background or outlook.

Pattern Recognition and Categorization

Starting in infancy, we learn to recognize recurring patterns. We also learn names for these patterns (spoon, finger, dog, mom, dad.) We learn categories – cat and dog are in a different category from spoon or play. With vast familiarity, we automatically apply such categorizations both quickly and confidently.

Think about confronting a large pile of laundry you just removed from the dryer. Having a great deal of experience with such situations, you are likely to sort the pile in terms of similar objects (e.g., T-shirts, pants, socks, towels). It’s a quick, “automatic” task, but haste can lead to placing an item in the wrong pile.

That’s true for any area of expertise. We learn to see patterns and identify pertinent categories, not because of magical ability but from a huge amount of repetition. The pattern recognition becomes automatic and rapid; rapidity leads to confident decisions. Jumping to conclusions is a by-product of extensive familiarity. Sometimes there are major costs to such hastiness.

Communication Hurdles

When someone doesn’t understand something that’s “obvious,” it’s easy to forget that the same something wasn’t always obvious to us. Similarly, the assurance that a task is “really easy” wasn’t very convincing when we were given the same advice.

Communication depends on shared familiarity, and falters when it doesn’t align. 

Familiarity is inescapable and indispensable. Extensive repetition is the basis of expertise, and as our expertise grows, we often encounter communication hurdles with those less knowledgeable. There are ways to deal with the implicit imbalance (if we recognize it), but, unfortunately, we often ignore the “others” who are affected. They are the people who might complain about not being respected, appreciated, consulted, “heard,” or “seen.” Sometimes we are those people. Other times we are the ones who let “I hear you” substitute for listening. 

Regardless of our expertise, feedback can be beneficial; however, making the effort to provide it takes effort and intention. Feedback can help unmask potential mismatches between our differing ways of “seeing.”

Collaboration takes feedback to another level. It can take many forms, all providing opportunities to gain from others’ perspective.

Rather than putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we can all benefit by inviting the people wearing their own shoes into the conversation.

SEE and Takealongs

Familiarity, like the air we breathe, gets little notice. It hides in plain sight, creating our vital, intertwined structures (aka mental models), which are at the core of everything we do and care about. The mental models of those with whom we want to, or need to, communicate are also invisible to us. That often leads to inadvertent confusion, miscommunication, and missed opportunities.

By contrast, meaningful action need not be inadvertent or invisible! It encompasses countless remedies for addressing communication hurdles and can take advantage of our differences. We have mental models for taking such actions as well. Active listening, feedback, and collaboration can go a long way toward enabling supportive environments.

That, however, draws on our bandwidth, requiring effort and intentionality. And yet, the outcomes can be well worth the investment.