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TO MAKE GOOD ‘BLINK’ DECISIONS, YOU HAVE TO
PREPARE A FOUNDATION OF STUDY: KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT & WHAT HAPPENED
I know lots of enthusiasts for the kind of intuitive decisions made instantly Malcolm Gladwell describes as Blink. Some people just have a knack for doing it in a particular domain (but not in others). Most have no knack for doing it in any domain. But you can increase your chances of success if you have a foundation of knowledge, made a habit of accumulating data in the past, shadowing decisions, and then exining what happened to see if the choice you made could have been right.
Too many Blink enthusiasts saw Gladwell’s work as an excuse to just make it up as they went along, to ignore the hard work of pattern observation that’s the foundation for successful pattern recognition. A naturally good Blink manager, and there aren’t a ton of them (I suspect about one in seven) successfully interprets observed patterns with few cases. A naturally adequate Blink manager attains adequacy not because the pattern recognition part of her brain is not excellent, but because its good and she has acquired experience over time — probably by filter-feeding and not by attacking the data rigorously or forcing herself to shadow this decision-consequence practice Pettis describes in the following interview snippets. Those adequate Blink managers are maybeen two out of seven managers. thomastik dominant violin string
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Which leaves four of seven who just plain stink at it. Many of those used the book’s (accurate, worthwhile) observations as an excuse not to study, but just “feel” their way through decisions. An empty gut makes gut decisions that are empty of insight.
On to Pettis…
Gary Pettis (GP): If there is not anything a good or great centerfielder needs to learn is not that they can play shallow.
MBB: Interesting. I once asked os Otis, who was super-great, the se questions I asked you, obviously a long time ago. He said, “I’m the only really good centerfielder in the league right now”. He had a cockiness about him…he was joshing me to some degree, but I think he also meant it. I said “Okay, okay, well, what about Rick Manning”…another guy who had good range then…and he said, “He doesn’t have an arm”. I said “Tell me what you mean”, and he said to me “If you’re ever on base against him, this is not worth knowing…he plays shallow to cover for his arm, which isn’t very good.”
Filed under: USA