Think!

Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye

Michael R. LeGault

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781416524663
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

This isn't the time to Blink.
It's time to
THINK!
-- before it's too late. Outraged by the downward spiral of American intellect and culture, Michael R. LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling phenomenon, Blink, which theorized that our best decision-making is done on impulse, without factual knowledge or critical analysis. If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of Americans. Somewhere along the line, the Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Emotion; this systemic erosion is costing time, money, jobs, and lives in the twenty-first century, leading to less fulfillment and growing dysfunction. LeGault provides a bold, controversial, and objective analysis of the causes and solutions for: • the erosion of growth and market share at many established American companies, big and small, which appear to have less chance of achieving the dynamic expansion of the past • permissive parenting and low standards that have caused an academic crisis among our children -- body weights rise while grades plummet • America's growing political polarization, which is a result of our reluctance to think outside our comfort zone • faulty planning and failure to act on information at all levels that has led to preventable disasters, such as the Hurricane Katrina meltdown • a culture of image and instant gratification, fed by reality shows and computer games, that has rendered curiosity of the mind and spirit all but obsolete • stress, aversion to taking risks, and therapy that are replacing the traditional American "can do" mind-set. Far from perpetuating the stereotype of the complacent American, LeGault's no-holds-barred analysis asks more of us than any other societal overview: America can fulfill its greatest potential starting today, and we need smart teachers, smart health care workers, smart sales representatives, smart students, smart mechanics, and smart leaders to make it happen. Now is the time to THINK! -- because a mind truly is a terrible thing to waste.

PART ONE

CAUSES

CHAPTER 1

Don’t Blink, Think

The company, a medium-sized automotive supplier based in Ohio, was already spinning in the upper regions of a vortex heading directly down the tube. What the company did sounded simple enough. It took glass windshields, put a strip of rubber around the perimeter, and shipped them to major automotive manufacturers. An operator placed the glass into a machine, and the machine injected melted rubber around the edge, then quickly cooled it to make it stick. The problem was this: The glass was breaking. The scrap rate mounted—10 percent, 20 percent. Little bar graphs posted in the cafeteria illustrated the amount of money the company was losing each week. Employees blinked uncomprehendingly when the figure reached a million dollars. Was anyone doing anything?

The company was doing all it could, or at least it felt it was. It hired a young, dynamic, university-educated plant manager. Intuition their guide, the plant manager and his team of floor supervisors and engineers attacked the problem. They pulled the dies—large steel molds into which the glass was placed—from every machine and scanned them with lasers to confirm dimensions to a thousandth of an inch. They ran quality control checks on all shipments of glass they received from other companies. They installed new process control software on the machines to continuously monitor the internal condition of each machine. Day and night, one or more engineers paced the factory, poring over printouts, making adjustments to the machines. Some days, on a few machines, there appeared to be progress, then just as quickly, things spun out of control and it seemed every other windshield was being devoured by mad machines determined to put the company out of business. Hunches about the cause of the problem were getting the company nowhere.

The head office called an emergency meeting. They were giving the plant one last chance to fix itself. They slid the plant manager the business card of a guru. His fee was $1 million. It seemed cheap.

The guru asked for the scrap rates of each machine operator. The company had the scrap rates for each machine, but not for the operators, who were rotated on machines on a daily, or even hourly, basis. The guru spent one month gathering the data. He spent an equal amount of time plotting and analyzing the numbers. Engineers at the plant still intuitively believed the problem was somehow related to the equipment, but the guru, examining the plots and data, noticed something odd—the women operators had much higher scrap rates than the men. But there was an anomaly: Two male operators also had high scrap rates. He asked to meet the two men. They were both slightly built and on the short side. A million-dollar light went on inside the guru’s head.

The windshields weighed twenty to forty pounds, depending on the model. The operators had to lean over and into the machines to place the windshields into the molds. The workstations were set up in a one-size-fits-all mode. The guru watched one woman strain to place the heavy windshield in the mold so that it would line up properly with the guiding pins. The machine closed and the windshield shattered. The woman loaded the next part and the guru told her to wait. He ran his hand along the top edge of the windshield. The part seemed to be loaded properly between the guiding pins; however, he noticed one edge rode out a little farther on the pin than the other. He gave the edge a push. He told the woman to run the machine. The large steel jaws clamped together, then opened to reveal a gleaming windshield looking for all the world like a Van Gogh.

The company modified workstation ergonomics, redesigned the die guiding pins, and trained staff workers. Scrap rates fell below 5 percent. The guru was feted and paid. A sigh of relief was heard around the plant. Only the plant manager was somewhat chagrined. He was embarrassed he had to rely on the critical thinking skills of someone else to fix his plant.

He could, if he wished, console himself. Sharp, incisive, clever thinking is steadily becoming a lost art, more and more the domain of specialists and gurus. The trend is troubling and raises the question, Is America losing its ability to think? If, for argument’s sake, we define thinking as the use of knowledge and reasoning to solve problems and plan and produce favorable outcomes, the answer is, apparently, yes.

Consider the sober assessment of John Bardi, a lecturer at Penn State who has been teaching university students a variety of philosophy and cultural study courses for over twenty-five years. In a 2001 essay about the decline of critical thinking, Bardi states, “The intellectual qualities I see displayed in my classes…are getting worse every year, with the current crop [of students] being the worst.” Critical thinking is a cognitive skill that permits a person to logically investigate a situation, problem, question, or phenomenon in order to make a judgment or a decision. Bardi argues that the collapse of critical thinking skills in this country may be “systemic and historical, even inevitable,” although he allows that many of his colleagues have a simpler explanation—that the problem is not history or culture, but today’s students, who, for whatever reason, “lack the critical thinking skills necessary for higher learning.”

Certainly our universities, especially the upper tier, still attract many diligent, gifted students who can knock off a set of differential equations as if they were a connect-the-dot drawing. If Bardi’s and his colleagues’ harsh assessment annoys some, think of it as applied “on average.” Of course, this still means that the critical thinking skills of even the top college students have, on average, declined. If this is the case, it is not surprising, as independent testing on our schoolchildren has confirmed deteriorating performance in reading, math, and science for many years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducts a triennial evaluation of the math, reading, science, and problem-solving skills of fifteen-year-olds living in the primary industrialized countries. In PISA’s 2003 assessment, American students ranked twenty-eighth out of forty countries in problem-solving ability. The performance was on par with that of students from Serbia, Uruguay, and Mexico, and well below that of fifteen-year-olds from Japan, France, Germany, and Canada. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress has measured some improvement in the reading and math scores of fourth-and eighth-grade students since 2000. Overall, however, the unvarnished results show that more than two-thirds of our nation’s fourth and eighth graders are not performing at their grade levels in either math or reading.

If a decline in thinking skills were limited to unmotivated or hungover university students hell bent on frittering away their parents’ money, we could probably muster a shrug, perhaps in the naive belief that the stringent standards of academia will inevitably weed out the deadwood. Poor thinking and nascent idiocy, according to this optimistic view, will be nipped in the bud, contained safely on campus, before they reach the real world. It is obvious, however, that this cannot be the case. Many of these students have become adept at muddling through their curriculums, finding a smorgasbord of courses they can pass, and picking up their degrees. One by one these graduates are transporting their limited knowledge and deficient thinking skills into the fields of their chosen professions, as the next generation of teachers, nurses, sales representatives, and company managers. Thus we have teachers, health care workers, and managers with historically inferior critical-thinking skills teaching, caring for patients, and managing businesses.

At least one high-level automotive executive, General Motors’ Robert Lutz, has lamented the inferior problem-solving skills of U.S.-trained engineers. Other refined mental skills crucial to workplace performance also appear to be deteriorating. A 2004 report released by the National Commission on Writing, a panel of educators assembled by the College Board, brought to light the growing disgruntlement of businesses with employee writing skills. The report, Writing: A Ticket to Work…or a Ticket Out, included a survey of chief executives from the nation’s top corporations. The results were not pretty—about a third of the companies said only one-third or fewer of their employees knew how to write clearly and concisely.

Predictably, as if filling a growing market niche, a new-age, feel-good pop psychology/philosophy has sprung up to bolster the view that understanding gleaned from logic and critical analysis is not all that it’s cracked up to be. This outlook, which sounds especially appealing after a couple of beers in a loud bar, suggests that the rational model is often unnecessary, and may even be obsolete. Malcolm Gladwell has recently set the high-water mark for this philosophy with his book Blink—The Power of Thinking without Thinking. In Blink, Mr. Gladwell argues that our minds possess a subconscious power to take in large amounts of information and sensory data and correctly size up a situation, solve a problem, and so on, without the heavy, imposing hand of formal thought.

As a demonstration of the omnipotence of instantaneous, Blinklike snap judgments, defined as an understanding arrived at “in the first two seconds,” Mr. Gladwell relates a story about a forged Greek statue purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1984. The sculpture was a nude male youth, claimed by the art-dealer-seller to be one of the stylized statues known as a kouros produced in ancient Greece.

Officials at the Getty were apparently suspicious of the origins of the statue from the start, as it radiated “a light colored glow” not typical of ancient statues. Nonetheless, after extensive scientific tests showed that the marble from which the statue was carved came from an old quarry in Greece, and also verified that the statue was covered with a fine layer of calcite—a substance believed to be formed over thousands of years by natural processes—the Getty purchased the kouros for many millions of dollars.

Then, as Mr. Gladwell describes it, things began to unravel. One by one, a host of art experts were led to the statue, with each expert, to a person, instantaneously experiencing the same feeling that there was something “not right.” The Getty became so concerned it had the statue packed up and shipped to Greece to be examined by the country’s leading authorities on ancient Greek sculpture. One of the experts, the director of the Benaki Museum in Athens, felt a wave of “intuitive repulsion” the moment he laid his eyes on the statue. With alarms going off, the Getty launched a full-scale investigation, uncovering a trail of fabrication and trickery, and ending with the unhappy discovery that the statue had been made in a forger’s workshop in Rome in the 1980s.

Boiled down, the Statue That Didn’t Look Right is a cautionary tale about the limits and failure of applauded scientific methods and rational analysis, and the far-reaching power and success of homely, undervalued gut feelings and intuition. (Blink unpackaged being, by any other name, intuition.) But how meaningful is the story in proving the author’s thesis that quick snap judgments often yield results equal to or better than those produced by thoughtful critical analysis?

First, the scientific testing did not fail. The dolomite marble of the statue was covered in a thin layer of calcite. The ingenious forger had apparently used potato mold to induce calcite formation in a couple of months. Other initial evidence had corroborated the apparent authenticity of the kouros, including records of ownership that turned out to be phony.

Second, if you read the story carefully, it is clear there is something else going on in the experts’ minds other than just out-of-the-blue hunches and intuition. Laying eyes on the kouros, the first word that popped into the mind of Thomas Hoving, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, was “fresh,” that is, too new-looking to be several thousand years old. The director of Athens’ Acropolis Museum, George Despinis, said he “could tell that that thing has never been in the ground.” The Benaki Museum director’s “intuitive repulsion” was apparently informed by his observation of a contradiction between the statue’s style and the fact that the marble had come from a specific quarry on the Greek island of Thasos.

In other words, lying behind these “snap judgments” are educated impressions formed by years of study, thought, and analysis. And these educated hunches were confirmed by further analysis, which established, for instance, that the Greek statue was “a puzzling pastiche of several different styles from several different places and time periods.”

One of the appeals of Blink is that we all have intuition and rely on it to help us make decisions and get through the day. There is a sort of mythology that has sprung up about the power of first impressions. But mythology is not scientific. In a section on “speed dating,” a tightly organized event in which a group of men and women have a few minutes to talk to each other and decide if they want to go out together, Mr. Gladwell taps into the power of the belief that first impressions are the best validation of people’s characters and personalities, especially as they relate to male-female relationships. But how cut-and-dried is this truism? If first impressions are so important in modern society in establishing close relationships, why is the divorce rate so high? Indeed, we have no inclination to track or know how often our first impressions and snap judgments fail us. Upon hearing that a serial killer lived in their community, people are often surprised. “He seemed a nice, regular guy,” is a statement one commonly hears on the news. For thousands of years, humans’ first impression of the earth was that it was flat. When, looking through his newly improved telescope at the sun, Galileo saw dark spots, the Church brought heresy charges. The first impression of the sun was that God had made it uniformly bright.

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If first impressions are so important in modern society in establishing close relationships, why is the divorce rate so high?

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In essence, Mr. Gladwell is making a case for one-half of a classic false dichotomy. A false dichotomy, sometimes also called “the fallacy of the excluded middle,” is an either-or proposition presented in such a way as to make us think only one, not both of the choices, can be true. The ruse is often used in politics, as in, “Will you reelect Congresswoman Smith, or face the prospect of more jobs going overseas?” In this case the false dichotomy is intuition versus stepwise analysis and critical reasoning. Mr. Gladwell not only separates and distills intuition as a mental power unto itself; he promotes it as a potential source of unbounded, utilitarian good: “What would happen if we took our instincts seriously? I think that would change…the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained…and if we combine all of those little changes, we would end up with a different and better world.”

He allows that our biases can lead automatic judgments astray, but provides no definitive insight on how to improve our snap-judgment ability other than “practice.” In fact, critical scientific reasoning almost always involves a component of intuition, and intuition is almost always informed by experience and hard knowledge won by reasoning things out. When Einstein was working on his theory of special relativity, he had a “hunch” that energy and matter were different versions of the same thing. Not until he worked out the equations using his astounding powers of critical reasoning, arriving at the famous E = mc², was his hunch worth a damn.

The technique by which we make good decisions and produce good work is a nuanced and interwoven mental process involving bits of emotion, observation, intuition, and critical reasoning. The emotion and intuition are the easy, “automatic” parts, the observation and critical reasoning skills the more difficult, acquired parts. The essential background to all this is a solid base of knowledge. The broader the base, the more likely one is to have thought through and mastered different concepts, models, and ways of interpreting the world. The broader the base, the more likely all the parts will fit together. Yet, just as intuition is possessed by each of us, so is the ability to think and reason critically. One of the fundamental principles of the Age of Enlightenment, a period of discovery in which evidence for the great power of human reasoning came to full light, was that all people have the ability to shake off dogma and superstition and think for themselves. Much of modern twentieth-century philosophy also largely rests on the assumption of man’s basic freedom and his ability to create his own destiny through reason, free will, and personal responsibility.

This is the point where Think! and Blink diverge: the assumption that in contemporary life the public is somehow wary of making snap judgments; that our tendency by nature or cultural custom is to methodically research and analyze data before reaching any conclusion. If Mr. Gladwell were limiting the scope of his book to select research labs and corporate management teams, his assertion might have weight. In wider society, however, a society bombarded by a glut of information, spin, marketing messages, and demands on one’s time, snap judgments have become the norm. We are living and, in some cases, dying by snap judgments. Many people resort to paying someone else to think for them. We have become a society dependent on the views of experts—psychologists, landscape designers, financial advisors, even parent coaches. The realm in which we are permitted to entertain, play, and puzzle over life’s everyday mysteries has narrowed. In the absence of a habit of mind conditioned by careful, unbiased observation and applied critical thinking, snap emotion-based judgments have come to predominate. Snap judgments may account for “A nation divided,” the tag line that got so much play in the media during the Bush-Kerry election. We’ve become a “gut-level” society, relying more and more on instinct to make our way through life. We’re very comfortable with what we already believe and know. Change, even of our opinions or thinking processes, has become the great anxiety for most people.

As naturopathic medicine taps into a deep mystical yearning to be healed by nature, Blink exploits popular new-age beliefs about the power of the subconscious, intuition, even the paranormal. Blink devotes a significant number of pages to the so-called theory of mind reading. While allowing that mind reading can “sometimes” go wrong, the book enthusiastically celebrates the apparent success of the practice, despite hosts of scientific tests showing that claims of clairvoyance rarely beat the odds of random chance guessing.

Although it is completely unverified by any rigorous scientific test, Mr. Gladwell’s premise has an a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One Causes
• Part Two Inspiration
• Part Three Fixes
• Notes
• Acknowledgments