Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell | Good collection of stories

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Blink: The Power o...

	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell Back Bay Books, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 954 reviews view larger image
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A Critical Decision Making Tool!

Sometimes decisions need to be made quickly. All of our knowledge, education, experience, reasoning, intuition, common sense and confidence must come together rapidly.

Malcolm Gladwell calls quick decision making thin slicing in his book: Blink. Thin slicing is the ability to focus on a small set of critical variables to make a quick decision rather than consciously considering every possible variable.

Many decisions are time dependent. Weighing the amount of information needed before making a decision, against the time available is a challenge.

Examples of when thin slicing is needed: combat, avoiding a car accident, or anything requiring an immediate decision. Another common name for thin slicing is thinking on your feet.

Gladwell does an excellent job of explaining what happens in these situations. For example:

"...in interviews with police officers who have been involved with shootings, these same details appear again and again: extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. This is how the human body reacts to extreme stress..."

Besides the excellent examples given in the book, here is a classic example of using thin slicing.

Thin slicing was used on multiple occasions during the US space program. Gene Kranz (a flight controller on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs) writes about the need for quick accurate decisions in his book: Failure is not an Option.

Endless intensive simulations were run with the controllers, flight crew and others before every launch. Everyone's skills had to be razor sharp during the actual missions. Decisions had to be accurate and made in real time. There was little, and sometimes no room for error. Lives were at stake. Risk was part of their business.

Gene Kranz sums up how he gained his skills to be a top flight director when he said:

"The flight director's ultimate training comes at the console, working real problems, facing the risks, making irrevocable decisions."

Although we may not be faced with life and death decisions, we will (on occasions) have to make quick decisions. The better our skills and Critical Thinking are, coupled with training and quickness, the more prepared we will be to make sound decisions in the blink of an eye!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

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Good collection of stories

For me, this book was a good collection of stories, that hold some useful idea in them. And that is really exciting. But, unfortunately, as it was said above, Gladwell fails to bring the general idea (at least until the few paragraphs at the end of the book) and usually whiffle between those short stories. What's good - he gives you some ideas of what you might want to explore more seriously later.

Doesn't deliver

"I believe . . . there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis". Gladwell promises to show the reader that quick decisions can be "every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately", when we can and can't trust such snap judgments, and how they can be "educated and controlled". He fails. Entertainingly and informatively, but he still fails.

Blink analyzes decision making in everyday life, sport, crime, war, and emergencies of various kinds. Each individual case study is presented admirably, showing how experts make their decisions in that particular field. The problem is that the lessons are usually not transferable. What can we learn from the following?

-An art historian, with one glace, identifies as fake a statue that months of scientific tests had pronounced genuine. She can't say exactly why. It just doesn't look right.

-A decision tree based on a few simple questions gives better results than the expert clinical judgment of doctors in an emergency room. The tree is derived from extensive statistical analysis.

-Psychologists can make good predictions about the durability of a relationship (not perfect, but much better than chance) after watching a couple interact for only a few minutes. They do this by watching for signs they have picked up by watching hundreds of hours of slow motion videotape of other couples.

-Professional tennis and baseball players believe in and teach techniques that they do not use in practice ("roll the wrist" and "watch the ball onto the bat" - the former causes injury and the latter is physically impossible!).

-People who believe themselves unprejudiced reveal unconscious bias (with regard to race, sex etc) in word association tests and auditions.

All of the brilliant "blink of an eye" decisions are grounded on knowledge of many previous decisions and their outcomes. (With a formal decision rule, the decision maker need not possess the knowledge personally, but it is guiding their actions all the same.) It seems an almost inescapable corollary that there is no generalised skill called "good judgment". One heart attack or statue is enough like another to permit useful generalisation, but heart attacks and statues are different enough that the rules for one are useless for the other. Sometimes decisions are made quickly because they have to be, and sometimes because there is no gain from waiting for more information or analysis. Sometimes the logic of the decision can explained rationally to a non-expert, and sometimes it can't. Expertise can come from formal training, or years of practical experience, or just following the instructions, dummy. And prejudice based on irrelevant information can bias even the most expert.

(Scene: foot of bodhi tree. The Author, sitting in great serenity, is approached by a worshipful Reader.)

Reader: So, Mr. Gladwell, can I learn to make quick, accurate judgments?

Author: Of course. Just make sure that you consider all relevant information (but not irrelevant information, which might cause prejudice), and take as much time as you need (but no longer).

Reader: How do you know which information is relevant and how long is long enough?

Author: Well . . . you just know! You are an expert.

Reader: But I'm not an expert. That's why I bought the book! [Reviewer's confession: I actually borrowed it from the library.]

Author: Well, in that case I suggest you work and study hard for many years, and then you will be an expert.

Reader: In decision making?

Author: No, just in whatever subject you spent years studying.

This is just how the world is, so it might seem unfair to blame Gladwell. But the whole book is explicitly about "the power of thinking without thinking", one might say intuition for short. The promise was insight into decision making in general, not just about the authenticity of art or heart attack treatment. An impossible promise, maybe, but all the more reason it should not have been made.

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May be readable, may be not. But certainly wont improve your intuition at all

Forgive my poor English. I would like to quote a passage on "Competing on analytics by Davenport and Harris" which wrote what I failed to express. Enjoy!

"It's ironic that a book praising intuition would arise and become popular just when many organisations are relying heavily on analytics, but then perhaps that's part of its romantic appeal. It is fun and persuasive, but it doesnt make clear that intuition is only appropriate under what circumstances. The author is undoubtedly correct, for example, that human beings evolved a capability to make accurate and quick decisions about each other's personality and intentions, and it's rare for formal analysis to do that as well. Yet even the author argues that intuitions is a good guide to action only when it's backed by many years of expertise. Any many of the author's examples of intuition are only possible because of years of analytical research in the background, such as Dr. John Gottsman's rapid and seemingly intutitive judgements of whether a married couple he observes will stay together. He's only able to make such assessment because he observed and statistically analyzed thousands of hours of videotaped intactions by couples. It's also clear that decision makers have to use intuition when they have no data and must make a very rapid decision - as in the author's example of police officers deciding whether to shot a suspect." pg13-14

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