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YOU FIND it puzzling to understand why some people are "brilliant decision-makers", while others are flop-shows.

You blink and ask `how' when winning people just "follow their instincts", while the many others simply "end up stumbling into error". For answers, here is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (www.twbookmark.com).

It reveals a secret: "Great decision-makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of `thin slicing' — knowing the very few things that matter."

The author is the one who tipped the scales in his favour with The Tipping Point; now in Blink he looks at `the power of thinking without thinking'. There's more than what meets the eye, when we choose what we choose "in the blink of an eye".

The book begins with a fake statue that passed many tests, yet caused an `intuitive repulsion' to a few who dared to question.

"In the first two seconds of looking — in a single glance — they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months," writes Malcolm. "Blink is about those first two seconds."

Normally, `thinking' gets premium attention; but don't discount the unconscious, on that score, because it is "a powerful force", though fallible owing to distractions.

"Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments," explains the author, and assures, "It is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it." Also, you can educate and control your `snap judgments'. Among the scores of medical and scientific evidence that Blink discusses, there is mention of Nalini Ambady's work that zeroed in on "the conversations recorded between surgeons and their patients."

She had selected 10-second clips of doctor talking, `content-filtered' the time slices to remove high-frequency sounds from speech, and retained only "a kind of garble that preserves intonation, pitch, and rhythm." Then came an interesting part of the study: Nalini got judges to rate the slices of garble "for such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness."

Using the ratings given by the judges, Nalini "could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn't."

Elsewhere, Malcolm declares that frugality is a virtue in decision-making, and so `less is more'. Don't, therefore, overload the decision-makers with information, because they'd find it tough to pick up the `signature' or pattern. "To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit." That happens unconsciously, even as you time-slice and recognise patterns and make quick judgments. To explain this, Blink refers to `speed-dating' Sheena Iyengar's research using jam bottles. "She wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold."

Contrary to conventional thinking that sales is directly proportional to choice, Sheena found that "30 per cent of those who stopped by the six-choice booth ended up buying up some jam, while only 3 per cent of those stopped by the bigger booth bought anything."

Explanation is that buying jam is a snap decision. "If you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralysed." Moral: Don't overfeed your decision-making faculty. You need the wisdom to recognise when information starts to become a burden.

Do I see you Blink-ing?

ManageMentor@TheHindu.co.in

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