VARBusiness 500 Keynote Speaker Malcolm Gladwell Promotes Snap Judgments

By Joe Caponi, CRN
June 14, 2006 3:25 PM ET

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"You are in the judgment business," author Malcolm Gladwell told the audience at Tuesday night's VARBusiness 500 awards. But as much as people value the "critical yet elusive quality" called judgment, Gladwell says we have a poor understanding of the processes that result in sound judgment and frequently undercut ourselves, second-guessing and demanding marginal information that only serves to muddy the decision-making process.

Gladwell, a mild-mannered, shaggy-haired writer for The New Yorker, rose to fame with his 2000 bestseller, "The Tipping Point," which examined how changes affect people, businesses and societies in a discontinuous fashion, where ideas behave much as medical epidemics do, spreading rapidly from person to person.

His current book, "Blink," examines "thinking without thinking"--how people make judgments in an instant, ones that frequently stand up better than decisions made with far more research. Or, as Gladwell described it: making "high-stakes decisions under informational uncertainty."

Core to what it means to be successful," Gladwell said, is a quality the French call "coup d'oeil"--the ability to size up a situation at a glance and unconsciously make the right decisions and act on them. This ability comes from working through similar situations hundreds of times, developing an expert skill that frequently operates without explainable reasons.

Though his message isn't completely new (it has echos in phrases from "trust your instincts" to "use the Force"), Gladwell brings a depth of research on decision-making in dozens of specialties, including art, tennis, medicine and police work.

Gladwell spent much of his presentation relating the story of the Getty Museum and its staff's attempt to verify the authenticity of a "Kouros" (pictured here), a Greek statue of, potentially, great age and immense value. The museum eventually purchased the statue after spending months running a wide variety of tests, digging up as much information as could be obtained on the statue, its owners, its physical and artistic features, and more.

But their judgment was wrong. In showing the statue to independent art experts in America and Greece, including former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving, the outside experts were uniformly struck with the certainty that the statue was a modern forgery.

How did they know something was wrong? Consciously, the experts had no idea. But they had spent a lifetime evaluating art and, as Gladwell described it, compared the statue "to the unconscious database of art in their heads." The Getty experts had let their emotions, and the sea of data they'd collected, overwhelm evidence that should have been right before their eyes.

Gladwell related a number of additional examples that "run contrary to our expectations about the world of information":

Famed tennis coach Vic Braden spent years training champions and asking them about their on-court decision-making. He eventually came to the conclusion that "there's nothing to be learned about tennis by talking to tennis pros," according to Gladwell. Like other athletes, they simply don't know how they do some of the things they do best.

Police in life-and-death situations make better decisions when they're alone than they do in situations with other officers present. "Cops in groups do dumb things...just like all young men do dumb thing when they're in big groups," Gladwell noted. The move to single-officer squad cars is a reflection of this basic idea.

Emergency room doctors, tasked with evaluating patients' chest pains, learned that focusing on a few key symptoms produced far more reliable and timely results than running a wide variety of tests. "Decision-making thrives on frugality and simplicity," Gladwell concluded.

While our instincts tell us it's always better to bring in as much information as possible before making a decision, "adding marginal information has real costs," Gladwell said. Decision makers, he added, need to respect the value of their expertise and promote the kind of good judgment needed to help their businesses succeed.

NEXT: Gladwell's four tenets of snap judgment

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