I've recently joined a business book club, and we talked about Malcolm Gladwell's Blink Thursday. Loyal readers may recall my previous comments wherein I drew some lessons for customer experience managers from the book.
Most of those in the group gave the book a 2 out of 5 rating as a business book, and the general consensus was that it required more editing.
Are we rational or not?
A handful of the book club group found Blink quite stimulating. Those folks had little exposure to much of the psychological research referenced in the book, and so there were a lot of new ideas there. A few in the room soundly rejected the notion that emotion -- or anything other than conscious thinking -- guides our decision making. It's hard to know what to say to such persons, since there is very little science to back that view up, and a lot of science that says a great deal of our decision making process occurs at a non-conscious level. [Since it was my first time, I tried to be polite. I'm keen to go back for the World is Flat session in a month.]
One of the attendees, a writer herself, wondered why Gladwell didn't raise the word intuition until about the last 50 pages of the book. Gladwell's web site says he hates the concept of intuition:
You could also say that it's a book about intuition, except that I don't like that word. In fact it never appears in "Blink." Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings -- thoughts and impressions that don't seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking -- its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with "thinking."
Where's the definition of Thin-Slicing?
As I tried to refresh my memory on the key concepts of the book, I went looking for Gladwell's definition of thin-slicing, but was quite unable to find one in the book. His explanation in a subsequent interview was much better:
The term thin-slicing was coined by psychologists (led by people like Robert Rosenthal and Nalina Ambady) who were interested in the human tendency to draw conclusions about situations and people based on very "thin slices" of experience. So how long do I have to know you before I decide what kind of person I think you are? How much "information" do I have to gather before I make a prediction about whether you are, say, straight or gay, or friendly or unfriendly, or honest or dishonest? The gist of much of the thin-slicing work is that we don't take very long to jump to those conclusions and, surprisingly, we're pretty good at those snap judgments. Much better than we would ever have imagined.
When I went looking for the scientist's definition of a thin-slice, that was actually pretty easy to find. Here's one from Nalina Ambady et al, in their article Thin-Slice Judgments as a Measure of Interpersonal Sensitivity:
We define a thin-slice as a brief excerpt of behavior, sampled from the behavioral stream, less than five minutes in length.
Okay, it's a bit academic, but there we have it. Their article goes on to suggest that individuals with greater cognitive complexity are better at making these quick interpersonal judgments. This suggests to me that senior officers in large corporations should typically be accurate judgers of people -- and to a large extent, I think this is true.
Do Organizations Value Thin-Slicers of Exceptional Skill or Not? YES, and that's why they are building expert systems to replace them...
Some of my colleagues put forth the view that organizations do not value individuals who have the kind of deep knowledge to make skilled judgments very quickly. As one said, "In large corporations, you can blink all you want, and that's not going to get you anywhere".
While that may be true in the world of business cases, I don't think it's true in the realm of day to day operations. More often, I think we are seeing sophisticated efforts to model these types of judgments using expert systems, neural networks and other multi-variate models. Once these models are in place, you no longer need as many of the experts. I've heard of many examples of this, ranging from the prevention of breakouts in steel rolling mills to the avoidance of fraud losses by credit card companies.
In Thursday's book group discussion, several people asserted that this type of model cannot be applied to things like advertising or fashion buying. Want to bet? Only last week, an executive from a large research agency told me their advertising testing model had a very high rate of success in predicting market success for an ad. The model was based on a database of 35,000 advertisements and their market performance.
As the mathematical modelling of every aspect of human behavior gets better and better, many expert roles are at risk of being displaced by expert programs.
What do you think? Seen any examples of this in your own travels?
Final Word on the Book
I loved a few of the stories in this book, actually. Gladwell is a good teller of anecdotes. So just read the anecdotes, and skip over the feeble analysis to the next anecdote. And avoid the whole chapter called Kenna's Dilemma, which went on endlessly to little point.
If you get hooked on the psychology, try some of the other books referenced in our book list, such as How Customers Think
