The Competitive Advantage Goes to Leaders Who Apply Cutting-Edge Science to Real-World Problems!

Section IV: Decision-Making

Chapter 18:  “Blink or Think? When Should You Go with Your Gut?”
What’s the Story?

In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell describes an incident in which a Cleveland firefighter ordered the men under his command to retreat from a burning house. As they were shooting water into the kitchen, the lieutenant was suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety. He shouted, “There’s something wrong. Get out, now!”1 Seconds later, the living room floor that the men had been standing on collapsed. Months later, an interviewer urged the lieutenant to try to remember what might have alerted him to a problem. He recalled a feeling of being surprised at how hot the fire was, how quiet it was. The reason that the living room was so hot and the fire was so quiet was because the fire was not solely in the kitchen as he had initially supposed. It was centered in the basement, just below the living room floor.

Yet while in that stifling house, the lieutenant was not consciously thinking about these factors and weighing them. He didn’t say to himself “this fire is too quiet” or “this fire is so hot.” In fact, he had to think long and hard after the fact to even recognize that he had had these fleeting impressions of “too quiet” and “too hot.” His brain, below the level of his conscious awareness, noticed the elements that didn’t seem right and alerted him to the danger…

… The idea that our brains can perform sophisticated analysis and decision making without consulting us (our conscious minds) is one of the most unexpected realizations to emerge from the field of neuroscience. This insight feels like both a gift and a threat. It feels like a gift when we have a lifesaving impulse unaccompanied by any apparent thought or effort. But it is threatening because it’s disconcerting to realize how often our brains are making up our minds for us! In his book The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own, neurologist Richard Restak notes that people often assume that conscious knowledge is the only “real” knowledge. Information and ideas that are stored below the level of consciousness don’t “count” as real knowledge. But, Restak objects, “Modern brain research suggests that knowledge involves dynamic, evolving patterns that are stored at multiple levels in the nervous system. This exciting, scary insight explains such things as intuitions [and] hunches. . . .We all know more than we can say.”

What are these “patterns” that are stored in the nervous system? Much of what we are doing when we develop expertise is learning to recognize patterns. A clear example of this is what happens when a physician sees a patien. The doctor listens to the patient’s complaints and then tries to see if the symptoms and test results form a pattern that fits a diagnosis…

…Interesting, but so what?
How can I use this information as a business leader?

Historically, there have been recurring debates about how business leaders should make decisions. Advocates of rational management approaches advise leaders to create what are essentially detailed decision trees. In rational management, leaders solve problems by following a logical series of steps from problem definition to action plans based on the root cause they have identified. More intuitive, seat-of-the-pants decision-making approaches are in sharp contrast to this kind of effortful thinking.

As psychologist Richard Wagner notes, acceptance of the rational method of management has declined. Why? “The downfall of rational approaches,” Wagner writes, “is the growing belief that they just do not work as effectively as alternative approaches actually used by managers on the job.” Research shows that, on the job, managers “typically grope along with only a vague impression of the problems they are dealing with, and with little idea of what the ultimate solution would be until they found it.” Rather than planning ahead, managers take an action. Then they consider what happened as they decide their next step.

Like the physician making an on-the-spot decision and the firefighter intuitively knowing that the situation is dangerous, many managers base their decisions on tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that people possess but often find hard to articulate. Their years of experience have taught leaders a great deal and they are successful partly because they allow this tacit knowledge to guide them. Research shows that measures of tacit knowledge reliably distinguish experienced managers

From MBA students. Tacit knowledge is also related to leaders’ success. For example, researchers surveyed participants in a leadership development program at the Center for Creative Leadership. The results showed that the managers with greater tacit knowledge enjoyed higher salaries, greater success in generating new business, and were more likely to work for a company nearer the top of the Fortune 500 list.

Some leaders look at research like this and conclude that managers should let their implicit knowledge guide them. They should just follow their intuitions. But it is not quite that simple. As psychologist and researcher Gary Klein points out, people make good gut decisions when, like the expert diagnosticians, their brains have stored “very large repertoires of patterns acquired over years and years of practice.” Klein believes that leaders can get better at making intuitive judgments. But to do so, they need more than just experience…

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