Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (2005) Little, Brown $25.95 Hardcover



ReaderStrength Rating:
Focus 4
Build 2
Adapt 3
Overall Rating as a leadership resource 3
(Please see "How Do We Evaluate Resources?" in right column)

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, delivers another thought provoking book. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is written in an entertaining style, entwining disparate stories together to make a profound, but not obvious, point. Just when you think you understand where the author is leading you, he twists you around with a contradictory story.

Thin Slicing

The book opens with the story of art experts being able to do what Gladwell calls to “thin slice” a situation. To “thin slice” means to access a situation very quickly and respond from a place of knowing without using the slower processing part of the brain, the frontal cortex. The story is that a fake Greek statue was sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1983. After the statue was purchased, several art experts, after just one quick glance, expressed their belief that the statue was not authentic. The curious part of this story was these experts were not able to explain in logical terms what was wrong with the statue - they just knew, and they were correct. The point of the story is that we humans have the ability to know without knowing, and that this is a good and helpful trait one can rely on after years of training and expertise in a particular field.

The Downside of Thin Slicing

Later in the book, a twist on this concept comes just when we've formed the opinion that “thin slicing” is a good thing. In chapter six, we meet four plainclothes police officers on patrol in the South Bronx in an unmarked car. The officers just “knew” something was out of place late that night in the neighborhood of Soundview. They approached a man who was reaching for a gun. The four officers reacted with incredible timing and a volley of 41 shots took down this dangerous man. When the gunshots ended, the police officers discovered that the man’s hand had been reaching for a wallet, not a gun. Tragically, they had fired all of the shots themselves, killing an innocent man.

Gladwell’s brilliant storytelling illustrates that we like to categorize things as good or bad. Once we have done so, either consciously or unconsciously, we don’t easily change our mind. This ability to categorize things as good or bad is prevalent, and it causes us more trouble than our politically correct awareness will let us consider. The story of the four police officers in the South Bronx has an interesting ending. The police officers were acquitted of murder, but there were people who claim that because the officers were white and the victim was a black man, the story is a simple case of police officers being racist. This is unsettling because it too easily attempts to solve a complex problem shared by everyone in our society.

When we label certain people as racist, we ignore our own contribution to the perpetuation of racism. Prejudice comes from a deeper place in our brain than we recognize. Gladwell introduces the reader to an assessment you can take to get a baseline for your own unconscious beliefs. It is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) found at. www.implicit.harvard.edu . Interestingly, he reports that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black on the Race IAT. Taking the test again and again can be maddening when a person has explicit beliefs about race that don’t match their apparent implicit beliefs.

From a leadership perspective, the profound but not obvious point of the book is that leaders can benefit from recognizing both the upside and downside to thinking without thinking. An example of recognizing the downside is how law enforcement leaders in many police departments have banned high-speed car chases. Fast-paced police activity like a car chase creates an environment where the heart rate goes up and motor coordination deteriorates. Officers lose perspective, so mistakes in rapid cognition or thin slicing occur. These leaders have taught police officers procedures to slow down a situation.

After reading this book, you can look at your world and determine how thin slicing can help you achieve greater results and how it could steer you or the people you lead into trouble.

Recommendation

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking was not written as a leadership book. It proves to be the best kind of leadership book in that it is a page-turner that will leave you questioning yourself and the society in which you live. As a leader you can ask the question, “How can I take this information and make things better?” We evaluated it as a leadership resource in the following ways:

Focus: We give the book a four because it creates a broader vision of what it is to be human, and inspires you to see the need for leaders who can accept the both the positive and negative implications of thin slicing.

Build: While the book provides some insight into the fact that we can change, it doesn’t go into detail about how to build these new competencies. Therefore we give it a two.

Adapt: Gladwell certainly models what it means to adapt. He is shocked to discover his own implicit prejudices that are evident from his Race IAT, given the fact that he is half Black. We give the book a three because of it’s acknowledgement of our need for self-awareness and growth.