Everyone knows it’s going to be a bloodbath.

In exactly ten minutes, an entire country of drivers is about to move over to the wrong side of the road.

It’s Sunday 3rd September, 1967, and after over two hundred years of driving on the left, Sweden has decided to switch to the right. As the radio counts down the final seconds to five o’clock, thousands of police officers and soldiers stand guard to deal with the consequences of asking nearly two million drivers to unlearn decades of instinct overnight.

But then something odd happens.

As the country braces for pandemonium, accidents go down.

Collisions plummet as people take their time, check twice and treat every junction they’ve been driving through for twenty years as though they’ve never seen it before.

In other words, Sweden has accidentally made its roads safer by turning a country of experts into beginners again.

The Expert Trap

Nobody misses being a beginner.

The first few weeks of a new job are a masterclass in feeling stupid: every name, process, acronym and weird unwritten rule has to be painstakingly learnt from scratch.

Arriving on the scene with fresh eyes, we see questions everywhere.

Fast forward six months and most of those questions have completely disappeared.

Thinking is expensive, so the brain builds mental models of every situation it’s seen before in order to avoid doing the same heavy lifting twice. These templates act as a kind of cheat sheet, turning past experience into a playbook that lets us recognise what we’re up against and decide what to do without having to start from zero every time.

It follows that expertise is the slow and steady accumulation of better mental shortcuts.

But shortcuts only stay useful when the road remains the same.

Old Habits Die Hard

Expertise works by teaching the brain what it no longer needs to pay attention to.

It nudges us into cognitive autopilot, allowing us to solve familiar problems with less and less thought.

As we go through life, we accumulate experiences that turn us into pros – we quickly learn how to get a toddler back to sleep, what solves a work problem and what fixes a bad day. As experts, we’re dab hands at recognising old problems.

But dab hands have a habit of reaching for old answers.

This is known as the Einstellung effect – a cognitive bias where the mind defaults to familiar solutions, making it harder to spot a better way of doing things. The more recognisable a problem feels, the faster the brain spits out the strategy that worked last time.

Generally speaking, expertise is brilliant at producing good thoughts.

But good thoughts have an unfortunate tendency of blocking even better ones.