networked Thanks for posting this and your application to business settings. It feels like this is an instance of a more general class of reasoning errors. Th

networked Thanks for posting this and your application to business settings. It feels like this is an instance of a more general class of reasoning errors. The reasoning error is to ignore or underestimate the impact of the context when we attribute cause and effect. "What worked before will work again, even though the surrounding context is totally different." I have seen it with sales people moving from large organizations to smaller early stage businesses. The transitioning employee and the new employer often jointly make the same attribution mistake. You were very successful at selling services for giant corp X, so you are a superstar business development person and will naturally be able to use all those contacts (Rolodex) and do wonderful things selling our business services. A few months or a year later everyone is wondering why this guy hasn't sold hardly anything? The mistake is to assume that this person's sales skills were truly general when in fact his former success was due to an unusually good fit between his skills and the giant corp's culture, services and customer base. So instead of transferring right over from superstar for them to superstar for us the sales guy is struggling, fighting a loss of confidence and trying to regain sales momentum. Although it is harder to see in reverse, I suspect the following to be true. I try something based on common wisdom. It doesn't seem to have the effect predicted by everyone else. But that advice is from people in a very different starting position. Maybe at a later stage in life I am in the right situation but because of my prior failed experience I don't try again even though this is the context in which that advised approach really works well.