Book Review: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown and Company, £8.99, ISBN-10: 0316172324

This book is about the first two seconds of perception of something new - 'rapid cognition'. The intriguing theme is that, in some cases, our instinctive, immediate reactions can deliver better judgements and decisions than days and weeks of rational analysis.

Gladwell uses many examples to illustrate this case, including an art historian who could not explain why, but just 'knew' a statue was a fake, even after detailed expert analysis had confirmed it was genuine. It turned out to be a fake. While this must happen all the time, Gladwell's example from the Cook County Hospital in Chicago gives more substance to the argument. At Cook County, doctors have improved the accuracy of their diagnoses of chest pain by basing conclusions on just a few key observations, not the multitude of parameters they previously tried to interpret. Less information resulted in better results.

Gladwell connects these examples using the term 'thin-slicing'. This describes the way we humans instinctively make conscious sense of our environment by subconsciously selecting a few key points from the available information. If thin-slicing works for chest pain diagnosis, maybe our first impressions will sometimes be our best analysis. Gladwell works through the risk that thin-slicing is a slippery slope to over-simplification, dogma and prejudice, and broadly concludes that thin-slicing and rapid cognition should be taken seriously, with positive as well as negative potential.

I feel this book helps balance the fact that much education and training encourages us all to doubt our immediate impressions, and spend more time on investigation and interpretation. Yet we all know seasoned and successful business people who regard "gut feel", "…it just felt right…", and "…chemistry.." as major reasons for their decisions and success.

The message for IT sales and marketing is a reminder that first impressions count - especially as door-openers and perhaps tipping the balance in a final decision. But between those two, there's a lot of hard graft based on facts and analysis.

Peter Thorne

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