I’m buckling down here. I’ve got to write this quickly. Instinctually, I know what I want to write about – I’ve just got to sit here and pound it out. I’m on an airplane – there’s a limited amount of time I’ve got before we’re back in Pope City – let’s see how this book holds up. You see, I just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, a book that dissects the relevance of instinct in decision making. Weaving together an eclectic blend of personal anecdotes, interviews, and old psych papers, Gladwell spells out both the benefits and dangers of using less data to make decisions. As it turns out, our unconscious minds often know things before our conscious minds do – so working faster can oftentimes lead to better results.

Let’s give it a shot.

One of the many stories Gladwell tells to advocate for the role of automatic thought is the story of Paul Van Riper. Van Riper is a Vietnam veteran who played a key role in the Joint Forces Command’s Millennium Challenge (basically the war game to end all war games). The two players in the game were the ‘Red Team’ (run by Van Riper as a *completely hypothetical* virulently anti-American Middle-Eastern government) and the ‘Blue Team’ (the U.S.). The Blue Team was stocked with the most advanced warfare technology of the time. Their combat decisions were carefully executed based on information provided by an incredibly complex system of databases and modeling algorithms. Van Riper had significantly less technolgoy, and acted far more on instinct. His operational theory was that he was “in command, but out of control” – the idea being that, by placing nearly unfettered trust in his subordinates, he would enable a type of automatic cognition (the faster, lighter, stronger approach).

I think you can probably see where this is leading – with an unsuspected volley of fictional cruise missiles, the graybeard general crushed the nerd troupe who was left helplessly attempting to fit the attack into rigidly structured analytical models as they were being pummeled. Instinct 1, Analysis 0.

But not so fast.

As much as Gladwell advocates for a return to the primal nature of automatic thinking, Blink also warns of its consequences. In a look at the unlikely rise of Warren Harding, a dim politician whose main proclivities were womanizing, drinking and golf, Gladwell notes that the judgment of his champions was clouded by the overwhelming ‘air of distinction’ Harding seemed to emit. His advisors made instinctual decisions, but they were based on Harding’s presidential good looks, not on his political prowess. To further illustrate the dangers, Gladwell provides an analysis of the case of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean New Yorker gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets several years ago. Again, in this situation the police acted instinctually, but when placed within the context of an unusually tense environment, the officers missed all of the situational cues, and ended up making a series of, to put it mildly, ‘critical misjudgments’. Instinct 1, Analysis 2

It turns out that Gladwell is advocating more for a conscious recognition and balance of both the automatic and the analytical sides of the decision making process. As important as instinct is in decision making, in the absence of any situational data that instinct is uninformed, and can be wrong. At the same time, a glut of information clouds the dataset with noise, distracting from the key factors of an issue. Relying solely on either process is when the disasters come – the better decisions are made from an equilibrium of instinct and analysis.

The concepts of Blink track well to the creative process. In my songwriting experience, the trick is finding the balance between inspired improvisation (the automatic thought) and iterative editing (the analytical thought). So while Echo Bloom can tend towards the analytical side of things (guilty as charged), that intentional exploration enriches the instinctive output – hopefully it’s a good blend between the two.

And now, the plane is starting to land. Instinct 2, Analysis 2 – we’ll call it a draw.

More:

• Gladwell’s blog
• Powell’s Interview with Gladwell