Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink is about our hunches, how they arise, and how their reliability can be enhanced or diminished by our experiences. He sets out to understand how and why we make snap judgments and leap to conclusions - both good and not so good - and why some people are much better at this than the rest of us.

Examples:

Ancient Greek statue for $10M and proceeds to spend 14 months assessing its authenticity. It consults with many art experts to certify that the statue's features reflect its purported era, and hires scientists to estimate the statue's age using electron microscopes and mass spectrometers When an art historian takes just one glimpse of it, it's a fake. Realized that the statue was fake when he looked at its fingernails. He felt something was wrong - he could not articulate why. Pentagon officials recruit a retired general and Wall Street traders to play the role of a rogue military commander in war simulation. By linking weapons, sensors, and other theater assets to a vast information system of databases and computer models, JFCOM would be able to "read an enemy like a book" and deploy the right assets at the right time and place to inflict predictable reductions in the enemy's capabilities. General believes that the military functions best when decisions are pushed out to commanders in the field. Within days of the exercise's opening, the general's team hands JFCOM a rapid and surprising defeat, sinking 16 US ships. Tennis coach figures out he can predict doubt faults – but he does not know how he is doing this. John Gottman has figured out that we can predict is a couple will stay together. He knows what to look for the key elements that count and the key ones that don’t A hospital emergency manager figures out heart attacks will happen based on 3 criteria, if not present then the patient much go to their doctor

Gut feel, which Gladwell calls the adaptive unconscious, arises from our ability to "thin-slice" a situation by focusing only on the data that matters most. Our ability to thin-slice can be hampered when we force ourselves to rationalize every decision and overload ourselves with more information than we need.

But Gut feel is affected by perceptions that ingrain us

Examples –

• Car salesmen – offer better discounts to white mans – successful saleman make not assumptions up front
• Word association tests. http://www.implicit.harvard.edu/
• Ekman is one of the world's experts on the physiology of emotions. He studies how emotions trigger contractions of facial muscles in set patterns.
  He studies how emotions trigger contractions of facial muscles in set patterns. In other words, a person's facial expressions are a signature of what is going on in the person's head - at least emotionally. While a person can hide their emotions, they cannot do it perfectly or instantaneously, and so learning to recognize these patterns allows one to essentially read another's mind.
• Blacks do worse in test when they are reminded of there ethnic background are the start of the test

What I would have called the devil in the detail now I call them key understanding of the system under review:

Examples

• More consumer choice can lead to less sales in Jam test 3% buy with more than 6 varieties and 30% buy with less than 6 varieties
• Kenna – singer – not successful because early testing did not have context needed to make good decision
• Speeddating
• Coke vs Pepsi – sip test – bias toward sweet (pepsi), but Pepsi market share not growing
• Louis CHESKIN – Sensation transference - product and the package are one. Colors have symbolic meanings. Asking customers what they think of a package design is not a useful way to measure effectiveness. Eg 7up adding yellow to label – more people thought added lemon/lime flavour

Summary – successful decision making:

• Balance of deliberate and instinctive
• Needs to be good in the moment (ER and War games)
• Frugality matters – look for the underlying patters - Codifying key rules works