Tod means Fox

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the kind of thinking that occurs in about the same amount of time it takes to blink: Rapid Cognition. The brain has an ability to make excellent or devastating decisions in a fraction of a second. In some cases, if we relied more on this part of our brain for decision-making we might all be better off. In other cases, not thoroughly thinking through a decision could lead to disaster.

I’m posting about this book here because I think that the basic ideas holds true for any type of development project, whether it is a vertical application or a data warehouse. I couldn’t help but relate the material to my work with business intelligence and data warehousing applications in particular.

Malcolm claims that “we have come to confuse information with understanding” (page 264). How many times have you heard the phrases “information overload” or “analysis paralysis”? In fact, that is one of the problems that data warehouses are trying to solve: Get the right data to the right people at the right time to help them make better decisions. A “better” decision might simply mean making a decision with less information, less noise, and less bias. Don’t throw the album at the CEO, give him a photo.

Thinking too long about complex matters often leads to paralysis — or if you’re lucky, some sort of compromise that weaves in and out of your 3-page long pro and con list. Conversely, making snap decisions on simple matters can lead to equally bad results. A good rule of thumb is that if the matter is simple, think about it. Spend time on it. Make a good decision. Do this when you buy a new dishwasher, if you’re deciding what to feed the kids for dinner, or if you need to hire a new employee. For more intricate and complex matters, like asking your girlfriend to marry you, rely on rapid cognition to deliver an appropriate amount of insight without all the noise (the “she doesn’t dig sci-fi, but she does like roller coasters” back and forth in your brain might take years to sort out). Your brain’s rapid cognition center will automatically filter out the noise, make a good decision for you, and in the end, you’ll be happy with yourself moving forward. Do you really need to think long and hard about getting out of the way of a speeding bus? Should you go on an impulse-shopping spree?

Malcolm doesn’t talk about this, but I think that regret comes out of making bad choices after thinking too long and too hard. You end up making some sort of compromise, when you knew exactly what you really wanted in the first two seconds. Think about some of your greatest regrets. Before you made the fatal compromise or decision, the one that you would come to regret, did you think long and hard about it? I have a silly monkey tattoo on my ankle that I thought long and hard about getting. My gut told me no, but here I am more than 10 years later not too happy with my decision.

Blink and Bloomberg Professional

Yesterday I attended a training session for using the Bloomberg Professional data service. Within their training, they talked about their Launchpad desktop application. This got me thinking about Blink and data warehousing.

Launchpad allows you save any number of functions that are specific to your business needs so that you can easily get to them again (sort of like your Internet Favorites or Bookmarks). With thousands of functions, I’m quite sure that Launchpad was well-received. But on a deeper level, Launchpad gives brokers and researchers the ability to make better decisions faster. You now have a filter. Not as fast as a blink of your eye, but close. You can get lost in Bloomberg Professional and spend hours upon hours achieving absolutely nothing. Is this the cost of research? Or is it that we need more filters? As Business Intelligence professionals, application developers, and solution providers, we must start thinking that “Less is More” and start giving our end-users access to new brain functions.

Scorecards, dashboards, and aggregations are great examples of initiatives that are in this arena. But it isn’t so much about the latest tool or interface, it’s about a mindset. It’s about providing decision-makers with just enough information to “thin-slice” a situation or condition and make an approriate decision to gain some business advantage. Malcom talks a great deal about thin-slicing and provides several great examples of how it works.

Recommendation

Tipping Point was a better read and seemed to have a better direction. In fact, I was wondering throughout Blink what Gladwell’s real point was: Should we or shouldn’t we rely on Rapid Cognition? He added an Afterward some time after the book was first published and this actually tied his thoughts together. Without the Afterward, I would have been thoroughly disappointed.

That said, this is a good book that got me thinking (not so rapidly, though!) If you liked Tipping Point, this is another book with a subtle social message (that involves screens, women, and large musical instruments — now doesn’t that make you want to go out and get it?).

More importantly for me, it has given me a bit of a push into a different way of thinking about business problems, data as an asset, and decision support.

You can get Blink here from Amazon.