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August 18, 2005

Blink - Using the Mind's Eye

Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, focuses on the adventures of the unconscious mind, in which pattern recognition collapses the timeframe of decision-making from minutes, or even months, to seconds.

But Gladwell cautions that speed kills as easily as it charms. Thus he sets out a few basic problems that should be addressed in the Unconscious Mind Owner's Manual. His cautions are good, but I'll propose these summary orientation notes anyway.

How do we decide when to use the unconscious mind?
- turn it on for events requiring decision-making under psychological time-pressure.
What's old about this? Relying on experts in these instances.
What's new about this? Refusing to replace experts with science.
The takeaway: patterns visible to experts are not the same as hypotheses visible to technicians.

How do we operate the unconscious mind?
- by ignoring extraneous information
What's old about this? Several thousand years of Eastern philosophy.
What's new about this? Analytics as opposed to metrics.
The takeaway: Critical correlations are usually few in number; think of Pareto's Principle, the 80/20 rule.

How do we make the unconscious mind safe for use?
- exposure, education and training
What's old about this? Nearly everything.
What's new about this? The return of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; now available over-the-counter in a package with a warning label.
The takeaway: With great power comes great responsibility.

Gladwell's keynotes point out that patterns living in the unconscious mind develop over time from thousands of observations. This is what makes experts Experts. He also cautions that misapplying a pattern, that is, using it out of context, is a serious mistake. So, since we can't all be experts at lots of things, the most difficult part of our interest in using our unconscious mind is knowing in the heat of the moment whether our confidence in it is really appropriate to the occasion. This problem of "context" immediately suggests some options that many people might consider to be "best practices":
- get multiple experts
- specialize our own range of involvement
- use as much time between decisions to increase exposure to similar situations

What does this all come down to? The influence of mental models is the core of the book. In Blink, the central hypothesis that the Getty Museum used was trounced by a bunch of patterns, but both approaches were mental models. Gladwell just tries to help us understand where the two types come from, so that we can appreciate why one worked better than the other.

Going along with that, one of the truly huge messages from the book is that experience is a great trainer, but not always a great teacher. High-speed decision-making relies on experience, but effectiveness still comes from an accurate sense of where you currently are -- which requires high-quality current information in perspective. Thus, the "success" of high-speed decision-making relies a lot on properly recognizing the problem at hand, and then also having the right exerience for it. In other words, solving the right problem might be even harder than solving the problem right. We need to be wary of the silos that experience can put us in.

Another message that runs throughout the book, under the umbrella issue of "problem-solving", is the contrast between scientific management and intuitive leadership. In the stories in Blink, it appears that the intuitives keep beating the scientists (for better or worse); but it turns out that the leaders keep beating the managers. Perhaps the punchline of Blink is that we want to be "scientific leaders", because our intuition derives from what is essentially a scientific evolution -- observe, test, refine, observe again -- of patterns that live in our unconscious mind and that in the heat of the moment become vibrant and noticable. Meanwhile, our leadership springs, just-in-time, from the intuition and the willingness to use it -- which, simply but profoundly, often means to accept its spontaneous insistence on being noticed.

Where on the bookshelf should we keep Blink? I put it right between Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller Goldfinger. On the one hand, Kuhn describes a lot about why we have the patterns we have, and why we hold onto them. On the other hand, Fleming describes a lot about the pressure that provokes intuition, whether it's life-and-death, gambling and love, or pride and anger. In all three books we get a good strong blast of the glory and folly of thinking.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at August 18, 2005 6:52 AM

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