The author is president and CEO of Integris Mental Health Inc., one of the largest providers of mental health services in the U.S. He is also President of the James L. Hall Jr. Centre for Mind, Body and Spirit. He has maintained a private psychiatry practice for 20 years and is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Centre.

If you’re sick for a few days, chances are you’ll tell your doctor each and every way in which your body isn’t working right. It’s our culture’s way, after all, to understand illness as a physical problem. When we are sick, it is due to a stray germ, a troublesome gene or an unfortunate chemical reaction, and we expect our physician to prescribe a medication or procedure to fix it.
In the future, though, there may be another element added to standard healing therapies: a visit to a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker or therapist. Why?

There is increasing evidence that the emotional states and behavioral factors in which mental health professionals specialised play a critical role in the prevention, onset and progression of disease. Most doctors have noticed that a patient’s attitude makes a difference in recovery. Now, though, it is beginning to be realised on a much broader basis just how much influence the brain can have over the body. The proof is coming more and more quickly that the physical world and the human mind and soul are linked at the deepest levels, and each one influences the others.

Research indicates that almost all visits to primary care physicians are in some way related to mental health. About a third of “medically ill” people have psychological problems expressed as physical symptoms. Another third have illnesses as a result of dysfunctional behavior, such as addiction to alcohol, drugs, chemicals or cigarettes. The final third suffer from physical illnesses in which the cure may be influenced by the state of the patient’s mind.

What can you do to tap the power of your mind? A healthy, open and caring outlook lays the groundwork for a healthy body.

The first step toward achieving that outlook is to be able to recognise, process and share feelings as soon as possible with someone you trust. Unshared feelings leave an “electrophysical residue.” The longer you wait to share feelings, the more likely you are to experience them as a destructive force that leads to physical symptoms.

You may also wish to adopt these approaches:

Have empathy for others.
Develop healthy human relationships.
Have a purpose in life.
Be interested in your community.
Seek a balance in life between work, play, creativity and soul.
Does this mean you can cure yourself through the power of positive thinking or happy thoughts? Not at all. It is, however, a recognition that attending to mental and emotional states may result both in a sound mind and sound body.

Time urgency

Away from work, you are always on the run, taking children to appointments, doing grocery shopping, taking care of household chores. At work, deadlines are crashing down upon you. The phone won’t stop ringing, and each call brings still more things to be done. You are overloaded and overwhelmed. In response, you race through meals and rush to appointments. When forced to wait in lines of traffic on the highway or in lines of people at a store or the bank, you are impatient to the point of anger. You feel that no matter how fast you go, it is not fast enough.
If this describes your life, you may have what medical researchers are beginning to refer to as “time urgency.” Time urgency, along with hostility, is typically a component of the hard-driving type A personality. You don’t have to be type A, though, to have time urgency. So how can you know if you’ve got it? Take a deep breath and ask yourself these questions:

Do you dislike waiting or get impatient with the rate at which many things take place?
Do you find it difficult to linger at the table after eating?
Do you regularly do more than one thing at a time?
Do you suffer from “racing mind” and experience disturbances in your sleep?
Do you feel a chronic sense of time pressure?
Have you lost interest in activities away from your job?
Do you measure yourself by quantitative accomplishments?
Do you have difficulty accumulating pleasant memories?
Do you have a deep-seated need to be on time, or conversely, are you always late?
If you answered yes to any of these, you may have time urgency. It is not a healthy condition to have.

A study conducted at the University of California at San Francisco Mount Zion Medical Centre looked at 32 patients with heart disease. Thirteen of those patients also exhibited symptoms and signs of time urgency and hostility, and often experienced episodes of decreased supply of blood to the heart muscle. These episodes are often a precursor to a heart attack.

Beyond heart problems, the stress felt by people with time urgency can also cause muscle pains, headaches, high blood pressure, irritable bowels, insomnia, phobias, depression and anxiety. Your immune system may be weakened as well.

What can you do about it?
In the Mount Zion study noted above, ten of 13 patients with time urgency and hostility received counselling for 14 months. They were encouraged to change elements of their belief systems, and they did exercises intended to modify their sense of time urgency. After counselling, the intensity of time urgency of the ten counselled patients dropped 53 per cent, and the frequency of episodes of decreased blood supply to the heart declined from 6.6 to 3.1 every 24 hours. The frequency of such episodes in the three uncounselled patients did not change.

The finding that counselling can help people with time urgency is consistent with other findings on the value of stress management in combatting illness. For instance, a study at the University of California at Los Angeles looked at people recovering from melanoma surgery. Those provided education on stress management and coping skills plus an hour and a half of counselling each week for six weeks had almost half the rate of cancer recurrence and a third fewer deaths than other melanoma patients in the next five-year period that followed. Research conducted at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre on a group of patients with psoriasis found that the skin of patients who received relaxation training along with standard phototherapy cleared more quickly than did the skin of patients receiving only the standard treatment.

This is not to suggest that if you have time urgency, you need counselling. What should you do, then?

Be objective about your life. Time urgency causes us to lose objectivity about our lives. Stop and determine why you are doing what you are doing and what steps you need to take to reach your goals.

Take responsibility for your choices. God has given all of us the same 24 hours each day. What you do with your time is your choice. Every second of the day you make choices about what to do and how to spend your time. Own up to the decisions you have made.

Set priorities

Drop the idea that everything must get done. Choose a small number of things to do, from accomplishing specific on-the-job tasks to more broadscale goals such as nurturing relationships with your spouse and children. Having set those priorities, act decisively in pursuing them.

Pursue meaningful relationships

All too infrequently in our busy lives we don’t make time to nurture relationships. We need to connect with people on a deeper level. True intimacy replenishes our souls.

Seek oneness

Most of us have experienced a magical moment in which everything seemed perfect. You may have had that moment while praying to your creator. You may have felt it while holding a sleeping newborn, or when you yourself were held in a warm embrace by someone who loves you. You may have felt it when listening to music, creating a work of art, labouring on a project you truly believe in or finishing your morning run.

These are moments of oneness with creation, times when every cell in your body reasonates with a sense of rightness, when every fibre of your being says life is good. These moments restore us spiritually and recharge us emotionally. They also do wonders for us physically, reinvigorating and replenishing our immune system and making us feel more vital and alive.

Source:

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0003/00030140.htm

As the woman repeats the phrase to the crowd, you can hear her digesting it as if it has just become a part of her. It is a term Gladwell introduced to the group only moments earlier when describing what happens when our ability to read people’s intentions is paralyzed in high-stress situations. Cocking his hands back in a gunlike position, he had explained in a tone that was part sociologist, part Shakespearean actor, how the cops misread a “terrified” black man for a “terrifying” black man. “They didn’t correctly understand his intentions in that moment, and as a result they completely misinterpreted what that social situation was all about,” he said. “I call this kind of failure ‘momentary autism.’ ” It’s only one of many neatly packaged catchphrases Gladwell sprinkles throughout his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, January 2005). There’s “rapid cognition,” “thin-slicing,” and the “Warren Harding error,” but “momentary autism” is the one that you can quickly imagine this woman using, explaining to her boss why she froze during the new business pitch.

No one in recent memory has slipped into the role of business thought leader as gracefully or influentially as Gladwell. Soon after his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, 2000), fell into America’s palms, Gladwell made the leap from generalist staff writer at The New Yorker to marketing god. Since then, Gladwell has oscillated between pen and mike, balancing lengthy New Yorker articles with roughly 25 speaking gigs a year, his current going rate some $40,000 per appearance. Last year, he spoke at such highbrow conferences as TED and Pop!Tech and was invited to share his wisdom at companies including Genentech, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Hewlett-Packard. His New Yorker articles have become required reading for B-school students. The Tipping Point spent 28 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and more than two years on Business Week’s, and today there are almost 800,000 copies of Gladwell’s trend-mapping bible in print. Mention his impact, though, and he modestly tries to brush it off — leaning, like any good journalist, on data points to support his argument. “Remember,” he points out, “even a book that’s a best-seller still is only read by less than 1% of the American public.”

But as the expert in social epidemics knows better than anyone, it’s not how many people you reach, it’s whom you reach. Gladwell and his ideas have reached a tipping point of their own, and evidence of his impact can now be found in all corners of our culture, from politics (Donald Rumsfeld used “tipping point” to describe the war in Iraq) to entertainment (legendary hip-hop group The Roots used it as the title of their latest album).

But nowhere is Gladwell’s influence being felt more than in business. Starbucks’ Howard Schultz publicly attributed his company’s success to the tipping-point phenomenon. The public- relations agency Ketchum created what it infelicitously named an “Influencer Relationship Management” database that emulates Gladwell’s model of connectors, mavens, and salesmen. One tech company even named itself TippingPoint Technologies Inc. The mere mention of his name to creative directors or product developers results in nouns not typically associated with business thinkers: He’s a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.

Now Gladwell’s back again in bound, written form, this time exploring how first impressions affect decision making. In Blink, he argues that by distilling the first few seconds in which we interact with a person, product, or idea into what is useful information and what is misleading, we can learn to make better decisions. “We talk endlessly about what it means to think about a problem, deliberative thinking and rational thinking,” he says. “But we spend very little time talking about this other kind of thinking, which is happening in a split second and which is having a huge impact on real-world situations.”

The more Gladwell discusses his next big idea, the more it becomes apparent that his drive is both intellectual and practical. He understands that in order for change to happen, he must package his ideas in a language that people can use to discuss them. The curious journalist who sees himself as nothing more than a “conversation starter” has earned himself a greater responsibility than that. To the business world, he’s now a corporate sage, a 21st-century Peter Drucker.

A Genre of His Own

When you see Malcolm Gladwell for the first time, standing barefoot at the entrance of his breezy Tribeca apartment, you are struck by how young he looks. He’s 41, but seems closer to 30. His slight build is that of a high-school runner, his halo of bushy brown hair evokes Lenny Kravitz. You notice his relaxed stance, his jeans and fitted white T-shirt. If you were going to rely on your own uncanny ability to nail first impressions, you would probably never guess that this is the guy so many people claim has changed the way they do business.

From an early age, Gladwell was drawn to the written word.

Raised in a home with no TV, the youngest son of two published authors was reading the Bible by age 6, and by 16 won a writing competition for a story in which he interviews God. A track star as well, “he was very, very competitive,” says his father, Graham, a math professor. “In fact, he was obnoxiously competitive.” While he was clearly precocious, Gladwell describes his Canadian upbringing as “very mellow,” attributing it to Canadians’ general nonchalance toward the American ideal of success. “There isn’t this big fretting about getting into college,” he reflects. “It seemed like a very easy and warm way to grow up, and by comparison, sometimes I feel like things seem to be a lot more at stake in America.”

This combination of a laid-back demeanor with an inner ambition has turned out to be his competitive edge in journalism. He got his inauspicious start in high school publishing a ‘zine: Ad Hominem: A Journal of Slander and Critical Opinion. “The rule was, in every article you had to attack somebody,” says Gladwell, smirking while noting that only about four issues ever made it to press. While he dabbled in journalism, “it never occurred to me you could actually make a career out of [writing].” So the self-described “slightly lost” University of Toronto grad with a history degree tried breaking into advertising — to no avail — and on a lark landed an editorial gig at the conservative magazine The American Spectator. He was later fired, probably, he says, for his penchant for oversleeping. Gladwell eventually found a home at The Washington Post, where he worked for nine years, migrating from the business beat to science and medicine to New York bureau chief. He gravitated to business writing for the same reason he gravitated to science — because they are about real things that have tangible consequences.

Since joining The New Yorker in 1996 (“It just kind of happened,” he says), Gladwell has, as his editor Henry Finder puts it, “essentially invented a genre of story.” A “Malcolm Gladwell story” is an idea-driven narrative, one focused on the mundane rather than the bizarre. It takes you on a journey in and out of research through personal, social, and historical moments, transports you to a place you didn’t know you were going to end up, and changes the way you think about an idea. The result is articles such as “The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?” published in 2002 and still circulating today. In it, Gladwell uses psychology and case studies to demolish the “star” talent system that McKinsey & Co. lauded — and its client (the then-bankrupt) Enron epitomized. “They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box,” he writes. “It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”

The business community’s fervor for Gladwell and his work, particularly The Tipping Point, stems from this potent mix of the entertaining with the perspective-shaking. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell reveals a map for how ideas, products, and behavior become contagious within a culture. He traces the word-of-mouth life cycle through the people who start and then accelerate it, whom he dubs “connectors,” “mavens,” and “salesmen.” “I bought books for my whole team, my whole family, and all my friends. I probably bought 30 copies,” says Nikki Baker, a marketing analyst at Pepsi who tested the concept for the Aquafina Essentials product launch in 2002. A year after the beverage giant was busy pitching its bottled water to yoga instructors (deemed “key influencers”), its more irreverent competitor, Glaceau (maker of Vitaminwater and Smartwater), began seeding 500 influencers across the country. Matt Kahn, Glaceau’s director of corporate marketing, now makes The Tipping Point required reading for his 35-person marketing team, starting from the point of hire.

Other companies have built entire practices around his ideas. After Simmons Market Research’s team read the book, it created the Tipping Point Segmentation System — syndicated research its clients can use in order to understand how to reach the 12.5% of the U.S. population that falls within Gladwell’s classification of tipping-point segments. One of its clients? Gladwell’s own employer, The New Yorker. Its sales team applies the data to its 950,000-plus subscriber list to help convince advertisers of the magazine’s “influencer” following. Gary Warech, a vice president at Simmons, puts it plainly: “It was a great book. It became the bible, the must-read in business circles. Our guys read it and said, ‘This is great. We can operationalize this and help our clients.’ “

In the Blink of an Eye

“The first thing that started happening was I started getting speeding tickets. . . . I wasn’t driving any faster than I was before, I was just getting pulled over way more.”
The impetus for Blink started with Gladwell’s hair (as did his brief splash in the gossip pages when he got “a little too close to some candles” and it ignited during a recent literary event, according to the New York Post’s Page Six). For most of his adult life, he had worn it closely cropped, but several years ago decided to let it grow out into a woolly Afro. “The first thing that started happening was I started getting speeding tickets. . . . I wasn’t driving any faster than I was before, I was just getting pulled over way more.” Then there was the day Gladwell was walking around New York and cops surrounded him, mistaking him for a rape suspect. “I’m exactly the same person I was before,” recalls Gladwell, who’s half black (his mother, a therapist, is Jamaican). “But I just altered the way someone makes up very superficial, rapid judgments about me.” Rather than merely grouse — legitimately enough — about prejudice, Gladwell, who has the tendency to look in on his own life as a case study, was inspired to try to understand what happens beneath the surface of rapidly made decisions. “The idea that something that is extraordinarily harmful in society could be exactly the same in its form as something that’s incredibly useful is really interesting to me.”

The “useful” that Gladwell advocates in Blink is the idea that we can teach ourselves to sort through first impressions to “figure out which ones are important and which ones are screwing us up.” While most of us would like to think our decision making is the result of rational deliberation, he argues that most of it happens subconsciously in a split second. This process — which Gladwell dubs “rapid cognition” — is where room for both error and insight appears. Many of the snap judgments we make are based on previously formed impressions and are competing with subconscious biases such as emotions and projections. Once we become aware of this, Gladwell argues, we can learn to control rapid cognition by extracting meaning from a “thin slice” of information.

Hiring is one area where we tend to fall into the “dark side” of rapid cognition, says Gladwell. He conducted a study to showcase how we often succumb to what he calls the “Warren Harding error” (Harding being, he says, “one of the worst presidents in American history,” who nevertheless radiated “all that was presidential”). Polling about half of the Fortune 500 companies, Gladwell discovered that the vast majority of their CEOs were at least 6 feet tall (only about 14.5% of all American men are 6 feet or taller). What does this say about the way we hire? “We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like,” he writes. “And that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.”

Similarly dangerous is how first impressions cripple breakthrough ideas and innovation. Gladwell tells the story of furniture maker Herman Miller Inc. in the early 1990s, when it created a new office chair. It was made of plastic and mesh, and while it was created as the “most ergonomically correct chair imaginable,” he says, it was just plain ugly. Focus groups, facility managers, and ergonomics experts all despised it. Why? “They said they hated it,” writes Gladwell. “But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it.”

Gladwell argues that it’s a mistake to rely on the first impressions of customers who are inherently biased against the unfamiliar. Herman Miller execs went against the market research, stuck with their instincts, and created the Aeron, which eventually became the company’s best-selling chair ever. “What once was ugly has become beautiful,” he writes. Unless you’re willing to take that kind of leap, he says, you’re condemned to doing knockoff, me-too chairs.

For every Herman Miller “going with your gut” success story, though, there are 100 flops by companies that didn’t listen to customers. Gladwell acknowledges this, but notes, “only by accepting the risk of failure will [a company] ever hit a home run.” Relying on the good judgment of your staff, he believes, is the key ingredient for a new kind of decision-making environment, and judgment is what companies should be screening for when hiring. With the right people in place, companies can liberate themselves from their obsession with data-driven decisions.

While the notion is provocative, the road map Blink offers corporate America gets fuzzy from there. (For example, Gladwell never explains how Herman Miller’s execs overcame their concerns about the Aeron’s ugliness.) Gladwell offers much more insight into how those in rapid-decision-making professions (such as firefighters or ER doctors) can slow down a moment or create an environment where spontaneous decision making can take place. That’s less applicable in the white-collar workplace. You can learn how to untrain yourself from making the Warren Harding error, but you’re more or less on your own in rewiring your thinking.

This raises the primary criticism of Gladwell’s work — that he sometimes stretches his colorful stories to make them apply to business issues. And he admits it. “I’m just trying to get people to start a conversation, even if the conversation is, ‘Well, that’s interesting, and that’s not, and that’s sort of bulls — t’ . . . I’m much happier getting criticized for overreaching than I would for being too timid.”

In effect, that’s exactly the leap he wants companies like Hewlett-Packard to make. For a company of numbers-driven engineers, steering away from data is downright frightening. “We want to innovate and break out, but we don’t have the instinct for it, really. It scares us a little,” says Shirley Bunger, HP’s director of brand innovation. So as part of her mandate to help HP’s 145,000 employees think differently, she brought Gladwell in last June to share the Aeron story.

Bunger recalls watching reactions around the room as Gladwell’s presentation erupted into a vibrant discussion. “There were some people who just had this sense of relief and connection and then other people with this sense of ‘Oh my God, this man is completely challenging everything I believe in,’ ” she says. At one point, someone asked Gladwell if he believed in focus groups, and he replied, “I think we would all be better off if focus groups ceased to exist.” While this idea and others in Blink aren’t revolutionary, they’re exactly the kind of thing that can spark change. And who better to hear them from, argues Bunger, than Gladwell?

Guru or Scribe?

Companies like HP are still vying to “bring in Gladwell in a way that he could really shape some of our work,” says Bunger. Add it all up: a passionate following, companies eager to sign him on as a consultant, some accessibly packaged books, and a knack for addressing a room full of businesspeople with the intimacy of a dinner-party chat. It sounds like the beginning of Malcolm Inc.

“Oh God, no,” Gladwell laughs, shielding his hazel eyes with his hands. “I can’t imagine anything more horrible.” While he is flattered by how many diverse groups have been drawn to his work and he enjoys speaking to companies, formal consulting would be a breach of his first commitment — journalism — and he claims he’ll never do it. Yet when you ask Bunger, she says Gladwell was very receptive to the idea of a formalized working relationship. And he’s already well entrenched in the pantheon of business prophets: Gladwell is number 27 in Accenture’s ranking of “The Top 50 Business Gurus,” above the likes of Jack Welch (34) and Richard Branson (45).

Gladwell’s reluctance to accept the trappings of gurudom reflects his professional DNA: He’s more Peter Drucker than Tom Peters. Like Drucker, he doesn’t come from the usual feeder pools of consulting or academia, and his MO isn’t prescribing the solution but sparking more questions. “I was definitely surprised that he didn’t have all the answers and he didn’t care about it,” says Nikki Baker, the marketer at Pepsi who saw Gladwell speak at The New Yorker Festival last October. “He was just a thinker.”

She doesn’t mean that as faint praise, of course. But not everyone holds Gladwell’s thinker credentials in such high regard. “When [Gladwell] talks about mavens or connectors, in my neighborhood we call them ‘gossips,’ ” says Mario Almonte, who heads the PR practice for Herman Associates, a marketing communications agency. John McGrath, a psychiatrist who’s also the vice chairman of a public-affairs firm, believes marketers became starry-eyed over Gladwell’s first book because he props up the elusive with the quantifiable. “You tend to think, ‘Oh wow, this is really science-based stuff.’ Well, it’s new language, but it’s not science.” In fact, the tipping-point concept has been around for decades. The idea was first deeply explored by the economist Thomas Schelling (as Gladwell acknowledges in his original tipping-point article), and marketers have been practicing these ideas without Gladwell’s vocabulary for years. “It’s one of these things that’s kind of obvious but nobody said it,” says Henry Mintzberg, the management guru and a Gladwell admirer. “You know, thousands of psychologists spend lifetimes studying these things, and here, one guy kind of waltzes along with a really interesting idea.”

“When I was writing The Tipping Point, I realized that in order for people to talk about something . . . they need some way to describe and name things.”
Gladwell’s real gift is packaging these ideas in a way that makes them palatable. “[He] acts almost like a translator between the scholarly world and the practical world,” says Frank Flynn, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Columbia Business School, who uses many of Gladwell’s articles in his MBA classes. Gladwell deflects the charge that he’s just a savvy marketer of ideas, standing by his earnest intentions to help frame people’s thinking. “When I was writing The Tipping Point, I realized that in order for people to talk about something . . . they need some way to describe and name things,” he says. “So I always like to try to come up with simple, sort of catchy ways of capturing complex ideas.”

While Gladwell’s newfound role in the business spotlight might be entirely accidental, he sees himself as part of a greater movement. “I feel like there’s been a kind of intellectual awakening in the business world in the past 20 years or so, where people began to realize that there was an enormous amount to be learned from the world outside of business,” he says. “I think of myself as one of the many people who are trying to feed that curiosity.”

As CEOs and marketers and R&D teams immerse themselves in Gladwell’s new notions of decision making, and as he gears up for a new flurry of speaking gigs, Gladwell admits he hasn’t given much thought to what’s next. “I don’t think that far ahead,” he says, his eyebrows perking up like bookends. “Yeah, I don’t really have high expectations about much. It’s a good psychological position to be in, because that means I’m usually delighted by what happens in my life.” Whether that means dreaming up more best-sellers or seeing the impact of his ideas playing out in the real world, we can be sure of one thing. He’ll soon be in his favorite un-gurulike pose, lying on his couch with his laptop on his belly, typing away.

Danielle Sacks is a Fast Company reporter/ researcher in New York.

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/90/open_gladwell.html

Folks:

The posting below is a review of the popular book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell who also wrote the best seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The review is by Phyllis Grummon, which originally appeared in Planning for Higher Education, December 2005- February 2006. The Society for College and University Planning Copyright (www.scup.org) © 1998-2006. http://www1.scup.org/PHE/FMPro?-db=PHE.fp5&-lay=Home&-format=home.htm&-FindAny Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu

Source:
http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2006/06/735_blink_the_p.html

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Reviewed by Phyllis Grummon

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of a new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell’s previous book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, introduced readers to the principles of epidemiology in the context of social influence and idea adoption. In Blink, Gladwell uses his journalistic style to engage readers in the process of rapid cognition-what happens in our brains when we first perceive a situation. Specifically, Gladwell explores how we transfer meaning and action from our past experiences into a moment, sometimes to our benefit and sometimes not. He also provides insight into how experts and novices differ in their interpretations of the same experience: experts have the ability to gain significantly more meaning through “thin-slicing” than do novices. There are a number of areas in integrated planning and design where the lessons of Blink can shed light on our work.
Gladwell seeks to explicate how and why “the power of the glance” is both a significant strength and a potential problem when we are approaching a situation, particularly a novel one. More importantly, Gladwell maintains that we can train or retrain our unconscious judgments to make them more helpful to us. While not an expert himself, Gladwell weaves together research that creates a compelling argument for his conclusions.

The first lesson Gladwell presents is that, particularly for experts, it takes very little time-often only seconds-to apply their knowledge to significant problems. Gladwell presents a variety of examples of this phenomenon. One of the most powerful is based on the work of John Gottman, a highly regarded researcher on marital relationships. Gottman began videotaping conversations between husbands and wives more than 20 years ago. At first, he worked on coding all the negative and positive interactions during a 15-minute period. Over time, he learned that raters really only needed to pay attention to one type of exchange to be able to predict with nearly perfect accuracy which couples were most likely to divorce or break up. The thin slice Gottman needed was that of contempt. If one or the other partner expresses contempt during their discussion, it is very probable that the relationship is doomed. If Gottman hears contempt, then “blink”, he knows what is likely to happen.

Thin slicing can also predict how likely it is that a medical doctor will be sued for malpractice. Surgeons who have never been sued average three minutes longer with each patient than those who have. One study reported by Gladwell found that raters could correctly predict which doctors were likely to be sued simply by listening to two 10-second clips of their conversations with patients and rating the doctors on the level of dominance they displayed. Doctors who sounded dominant were significantly more likely to be sued.

Thin slicing, of course, is nothing new in our world. We all practice it when we receive a first impression from a person, object, or place. What Gladwell adds to our understanding is just how little sensory input we use to make those judgments and how often they are right regardless of how quickly we make them. Our unconscious processes information and acts on it in ways that may never be available in our conscious decision making. One example Gladwell gives of this phenomenon is the use of scrambled sentence tests that prime us to behave in certain ways through the words included in the test. One set of 10 scrambled sentences includes words that subconsciously remind test participants of being old or of aging. After completing the test, participants walked more slowly down the hall than they did when they walked into the room. None of the participants were conscious of this change. Likewise, participants primed to be polite waited up to one half hour to talk to the experimenter when he was engaged in conversation with someone else. In a number of cases, the participant never interrupted. Subtle cues carry powerful messages within our brains.

What allows these cues to be so powerful? To say they are ingrained by a life immersed in a particular culture tells at least half the story. In order to negotiate our daily lives, our brain makes many decisions without our needing to think about them. The light is red and we stop. We see something that looks inviting and we approach. We see a crumbling building and we cross the street. More insidiously, we meet a tall, handsome stranger and assume he is smart and competent-before he even opens his mouth. Until this election, in fact, the taller candidate for president always won. Gladwell reminds us that these characteristics, tall and handsome, gave us Warren G. Harding-often cited as our least competent and most corrupt president. The instant decisions our unconscious makes can lead us astray, just as they keep us from drowning in our cognitive vacillations. These decisions are most likely to take us to the wrong places when we do not reflect on them and when our passions-but not necessarily our training-carry us there.

Whether John Gottman or a professional food taster, experts have an extra set of filters based on their experience. “Whenever we have something that we are good at-something we care about-that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions” (p. 184). This reality has direct implications for our work on campuses. As experts in planning, our ability to “see” issues and solutions is often far different from that of the people with whom we work. Walking onto a campus, we are likely to have immediate, visceral responses to how welcoming it feels, how safe, how accommodating, and how well-planned it is. While the design may seem chaotic or purposeful to us, less well-schooled visitors likely do not even have the idea of design anywhere in their experience to use as a way to gauge their reactions. In most cases, people are both unaware of what drives their emotional reactions to a place and convinced that their reactions are rational. Experts have reactions, but then can reflect to identify the specific attributes of the thin slice that created them. As experts, then, what do we do to help those we work with overcome their “blink”?

Gladwell works to convince the reader that our naive first impressions can be retrained to be more reflective. How does that happen? First, we need to help those with whom we work to sort through what created their impressions. Creating opportunities for the unconscious to come to awareness is a first step. Asking clients what feelings were evoked by a proposed building, actual landscape, or new academic program can help us link those feelings to the assumptions about place that may or may not be accurate from our expert point of view. The feelings and actions that follow a first impression are real to clients, but not necessarily the appropriate basis for future decisions. Experts need to help those less trained to interpret immediate responses in more global ways. We need to give our clients a vocabulary for their impressions, words that allow customers to find meaning they can use as they consider the future. When they tell us that the design or proposed organizational change “just feels wrong,” we need to help them identify more deeply what characteristics might create that reaction. We cannot just dismiss them as resisting change.

Expert planners understand that first impressions cannot be ignored, either their own or those of others. “This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding” (p. 184). Our job as planners, then, is to understand our own grounding and to communicate that in a way that creates understanding in those with whom we interact. Gladwell’s book offers insights into how a variety of experts do that for themselves and for us. Its contents are easily accessible since Gladwell acts as a boundary spanner between research on first impressions and our own naive views of how those impressions occur. For those of us who wish to enhance our ability to help others with the translation between an expert “blink” and an un-trained one, this book offers a good start.

Q & A Session with Malcolm Gladwell

1. What is “Blink” about?

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

You could also say that it’s a book about intuition, except that I don’t like that word. In fact it never appears in “Blink.” Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings–thoughts and impressions that don’t seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It’s thinking–its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with “thinking.” In “Blink” I’m trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?

2. How can thinking that takes place so quickly be at all useful? Don’t we make the best decisions when we take the time to carefully evaluate all available and relevant information?

Certainly that’s what we’ve always been told. We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we’re always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don’t think this is true. There are lots of situations–particularly at times of high pressure and stress–when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

One of the stories I tell in “Blink” is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That’s the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain–like blood pressure and the ECG–while ignoring everything else, like the patient’s age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in “Blink” where that simply isn’t true. There’s a wonderful phrase in psychology–”the power of thin slicing”–which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in “Blink” on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.

3. Where did you get the idea for “Blink”?

Believe it or not, it’s because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, “The Tipping Point,” you’ll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time–and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go. On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United State suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn’t about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers’ thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.

4. But that’s an example of a bad case of thin-slicing. The police officers jumped to a conclusion about you that was wrong. Does “Blink” talk about when rapid cognition goes awry?

Yes. That’s a big part of the book as well. I’m very interested in figuring out those kinds of situations where we need to be careful with our powers of rapid cognition. For instance, I have a chapter where I talk a lot about what it means for a man to be tall. I called up several hundred of the Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. and asked them how tall their CEOs were. And the answer is that they are almost all tall. Now that’s weird. There is no correlation between height and intelligence, or height and judgment, or height and the ability to motivate and lead people. But for some reason corporations overwhelmingly choose tall people for leadership roles. I think that’s an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed toward thinking of that person as an effective leader, the same way that the police looked at my hair and decided I resembled a criminal. I call this the “Warren Harding Error” (you’ll have to read “Blink” to figure out why), and I think we make Warren Harding Errors in all kind of situations– particularly when it comes to hiring. With “Blink,” I’m trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition.

5. What kind of a book is “Blink”?

I used to get that question all the time with “The Tipping Point,” and I never really had a good answer. The best I could come up with was to say that it was an intellectual adventure story. I would describe “Blink” the same way. There is a lot of psychology in this book. In fact, the core of the book is research from a very new and quite extraordinary field in psychology that hasn’t really been written about yet for a general audience. But those ideas are illustrated using stories from literally every corner of society. In just the first four chapters, I discuss, among other things: marriage, World War Two code-breaking, ancient Greek sculpture, New Jersey’s best car dealer, Tom Hanks, speed-dating, medical malpractice, how to hit a topspin forehand, and what you can learn from someone by looking around their bedroom. So what does that make “Blink?” Fun, I hope.

6. What do you want people to take away from “Blink”?

I guess I just want to get people to take rapid cognition seriously. When it comes to something like dating, we all readily admit to the importance of what happens in the first instant when two people meet. But we won’t admit to the importance of what happens in the first two seconds when we talk about what happens when someone encounters a new idea, or when we interview someone for a job, or when a military general has to make a decision in the heat of battle.

“The Tipping Point” was concerned with grand themes, with figuring out the rules by which social change happens. “Blink” is quite different. It is concerned with the smallest components of our everyday lives–with the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that bubble up whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. I think its time we paid more attention to those fleeting moments. I think that if we did, it would change the way wars are fought, the kind of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted and on and on–and if you combine all those little changes together you end up with a different and happier world.