Do we understand what's going on as well as we think?

The 2000s have seen a tsunami of books on brains and neuroscience that are changing the way many think about thinking. We like that, since it helps point out that habit and ideological frameworks and cultural myths are often the enemy of valuable new ideas and new ways of doing business. The neuro-scientific truth is that 95% of our days consist of following rote existing patterns, autopiloting not thinking, assuming not assessing. Ninety-five percent. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that we are surprised when someone succeeds wildly by doing the thing we thought too simple, too obvious or too different. Or, too difficult. Yeah, computers were serious grey boxes until Apple said they didn’t have to be. Hope was a "squishy" abstraction, not a strategic theme, until a Presidential candidate used it to create a crushing historic victory. In each case, the “professionals” thought they knew what was going on, and confidently predicted outcomes that the habits of their expertise--their mental frameworks--told them would happen. Their habits and assumptions misled them. And they lost.