Book Review: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, 2005

Decision making spans a continuum that ranges from 100% intuition to 100% fact-based. Where I grew up, in Israel, we were unknowingly being trained from childhood to develop out gut, learn to think on our feet and make decisions with partial, often inadequate, information. Consider the following: When a terrorist attacks, there is no time to gather information, sift through it, synthesize the appropriate elements and make an informed decision. This is a time when auto-pilot must take over, processing few bits of data during several seconds, and reaching a decision almost instantaneously. As a result, decisions are made very fast and with the utmost certainty, which makes adjustments and the recognition that the decision is wrong extremely difficult.

In the US, decision making goes through an almost diametrically opposed process. We seek data, develop it, review it, often request more information, and after several (some say countless) iterations, we make the decision. We inhibit out "gut" from developing and lengthen the decision-making process beyond what's often needed.

Malcolm Gladwell's book is designed to train our brains to improve our "auto-pilot" function, make decision more quickly and without too much data, and reach a better balance between brain and gut. Intuition can be developed. Our brains are trainable to make faster decisions that are good decisions based upon partial information and effective data digestive systems.

Using our brains to process data faster and reach conclusions in a more efficient manner is a useful technique that we can all develop and benefit from.