Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

When presented with a new concept, challenge, organization, or even person do you ever come to a conclusion in the "blink" of an eye. Your "gut" has already given you the answer, yet you cannot explain why?



In Malcolm Gladwell's book "blink" he covers what happens within your mind to enable you to process a large amount of information and quickly come to a conclusion of which you cannot immediately substantiate why.

We have been trained not to listen to our gut, but rather follow things through with diligent research, to only find that our gut instinct is correct in the end. Do you ever wonder how you came to that conclusion?

For a personal example, I remember when I was getting my MBA we were covering Organizational Change. The professor that taught the course was previously the Executive Director of the Governor's Economic Advisory Council of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and afterwards left to become a professor.

One of the students asked the professor, "How do you know whether you are effecting organizational change, how long does it take before you know?" And unfortunately the professor took the ivory tower approach to say "It depends.", and refused to elaborate beyond that. Hardly a conclusive answer nor a solid approach to a critical topic.

For whatever reason I felt in my gut that I knew the answer to the question. I raised my hand and said, "No the correct answer is 90 days." Bear in mind that I had not previously analyzed this issue, but there was an overwhelming instinct inside me that said that was the correct answer.

The professor feeling challenged, said, "How can you be so sure that is the correct answer. There are multitudes of organizations and multitudes of challenges how can you arbitrarily assign 90 days?"

Inside of me, I wondered how did I know? And as I started to think about it, it became to clear me, and I said, "Most public organizations are run on quarterly results. In general when you have a new CEO, new product, etc the first 30 days are the honeymoon period. You can't do any wrong since everyone is willing to see if you have made an impact. After that 30 days people start to ask themselves do they see any change; it does not have to be substantial change, but at least momentum in a positive direction. If they do, then your 90 day clock just got reset, if they don't you have another 30 days of where they observe you. At 60 days in with no change, most people will begin to assume that this is either a bait-and-switch or more of the same and if you don't effect change by the 90th day you will have lost your ability to effect change."

Not liking my answer, the professor stated that it was too general of approach and could not be applied to the real world.

To which my instinct prodded me to ask the question, "Ok Professor, when you were working at the Governor's Economic Advisory Council at what point after a major change in the process did you sit down at dinner with your wife and first tell her 'You know honey, I don't think this is going anywhere?'"

And the look on his face answered my question... it had been 90 days!

"blink" is a fun read, and provides insightful answers to how our brain can process multitudes of information and give us the correct answer in a blink of the eye. If you find it to be interest to analyze your own "blink" judgements just follow the link to Amazon.