Making Wise Decisions Quickly

By Alan S. Miller

Marin County, California
June 14, 2005

Malcolm Gladwell, the marvelously insightful author of The Tipping Point (the best selling study that seeks to “decode” social change and suggest why it is that events today often move so quickly and unexpectedly) has now done it again.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Gladwell suggests that in most life situations, we spend too much time analyzing and worrying about the decisions we have to make. Too much thinking can “trip us up.”

It is often better to simply trust and depend upon our accumulated wisdom — the combination of all our prior experience coupled with a bit of intuition — to help us make correct decisions.

As an example, Gladwell describes the curators at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles who were recently offered a chance to buy a rare sixth-century Greek statue. After a year of detailed and expensive study, they forked over ten million dollars, having convinced themselves that the statue was authentic.

Thomas Hoving, the ex-director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a man with decades of experience in evaluating art objects of all types, saw the statue and quickly came to a totally different conclusion. His experience and judgment led him to simply eyeball the statue and instantly declare it a fake. As Gladwell notes:

In the first two seconds of looking — in a single glance — Hoving was able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months. “Blink” is a book about those first two seconds.

He then provides another example.

Imagine two bird watchers, one experienced, one a beginner. The experienced one catches a glimpse of a large, yellowish bird flickering overhead and calls out “evening grosbeak.” Meanwhile the novice frantically flips through a field guide. The experienced bird watcher has synthesized all the data and internalized a pattern while the novice must rely on an external device — the field guide. The experienced watcher responds quickly because she's relying on the accumulated wisdom of intuition.

Gladwell suggests that quick decisions are sometimes the best decisions because experience has already laid the foundation stones for wise action, “laying down tracks in the brain, cognitive templates” against which new information can be compared.

Most of us understand that today's world often provides more data than we can properly absorb. I've often “googled” a subject on my computer seeking an answer to a simple question and then found references to thousands of articles and bits of information that I neither needed nor wanted.

A good “googler” learns how to refine and simply the search process. This is what Gladwell is suggesting for us in our daily decision making.

He also notes that entrenched prejudices and inelastic chains of command in our institutional lives often leave little room for intuitive decision-making.

Even as we are personally buffeted by too much information, our ever more centralized power structures in government and industry are often similarly bogged down by indecisiveness and bureaucratic haggling. Both Blink and The Tipping Point are good reminders for us that not everything needs to be referred to a committee. The events of 9/11, for example, required thoughtful and speedy governmental renewal and reconstruction. What we discovered was that the entrenched security and intelligence communities seemed stuck in the practices and prejudices of the past. After almost four years, not much has really changed.

Gladwell's reminders about the fast moving tipping points of change and the speed with which careful people can legitimately make decisions are helpful insights for modern life. Quick decisions — “blink decisions” — are not, of course, always correct. But Gladwell's insight that we normally should rely more than we do on our intuition and experience are instructive.

Don't agonize over data for too long. Don't always second-guess yourself. Trust your own judgment more frequently than you do. The experts are not always right! Snails don't usually win the race.

Copyright © 2005 Alan S. Miller
Last updated: June 17, 2005