Basic Instinct
Everyone knows that first impressions count. This fascinating book argues that it is, in fact, the first two seconds in many encounters that count far more than you would ever imagine. For creatives who live and die by their instincts, Blink casts valuable light on the pros and cons of trusting your gut.
Gladwell makes clear that instincts can be both on the money or wildly off the mark. For example, relationship psychologists can review a 15-minute video of a married couple talking, and predict, with 90 per cent accuracy, whether they will still be married in 15 years' time. On the flip side, he recounts the tale of how Warren Harding, America's worst-ever president, ascended the political ladder purely by making good first impressions.
Like in his previous book The Tipping Point, Blink is based on well-researched and well-told stories from wildly eclectic fields: from speed dating to war games, and jam tasting to racial prejudice. Unlike Tipping Point, this book moves beyond the merely descriptive to some genuine insights. The passage on the two-way street between facial expressions and emotions is enthralling.
Although he sometimes lazily falls into computer analogies, the book paints vivid sketches of the inner workings of our minds. In most situations we apparently work best when we don't process much information, but focus on ‘thin slices' of vital information to spot familiar patterns.
Old ground is covered, like why focus groups don't work. But this is countered by the Aeron chair story - a wonderful tale of triumph in the face of withering user feedback and an illustration of true expert instinct. Intuition is demystified as latent knowledge based on distilled experience, and useful distinctions are made between layman and expert ‘rapid cognition'. Where non-expert reactions are often shallow, experts can decode and structure first impressions, and have a vocabulary to capture them.
Gladwell rightly counsels against analysis paralysis - interrupting the creative flow by thinking too much. The creative process happens in fits and starts, with short bursts of creativity followed by longer periods of rational reflection and refinement.
The experienced designer knows when to go with the flow and when to take a step back. Senior creatives also know that few investment decisions get through purely on the back of intuition, and that hunches need to be backed up with hard facts. Indeed, most of the insights in the book arise from expert hunches that have been painstakingly proved though reasoned rigour.