Being direct... AdVantage Nov 2005
You'll Never Think The Same Way About Thinking Again?
New approaches encourage increased involvement, but perhaps we really do need to TRUST our instincts more ...
Malcolm Gladwell is well-known for having written a great book about how 'memes' (a name given to an 'idea-virus') actually spread and often reach a 'Tipping Point' when the idea itself takes on a life of its own, and gets widely communicated - usually through 'word-of-mouth'.
Well, I have just finished reading his latest book called 'Blink' and I thought that I would highlight some of the key concepts in this month's column. In addition to his two (so far) world-wide best seller business books, Malcolm Gladwell is a columnist for The New Yorker magazine, and frequently writes on a variety subjects relating to human evolutionary progress.
Before pursuing the thesis underlying 'Blink' I want to quote from Malcolm's column published in The New Yorker in May, which he called 'Brain Candy'. The central theme of this piece was to describe how - as our media choices have changed over the past decades, the actual level of interaction on the part of media audiences themselves - has changed from literally being quite 'passive' to becoming intellectually 'involved'.
Amazingly, it is suggested that this involvement has had the side effect of actually forcing people to become 'smarter'. He goes on to provide details of Steven Johnson's analysis of this phenomenon called 'Everything Bad is Good for You' and he quotes examples like tv programmes and video games.
A typical episode of 'Starsky & Hutch' in the nineteen seventies followed an essential linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving towards a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of 'Dallas' today, he goes on to say, is to be stunned by its glacial pace; by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships; by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline; by how obvious it all was. These days, a single episode of 'The Sopranos,' by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot. Modern television definitely requires that the viewer provides a lot of 'filling-in'. If viewers don't make the effort, they may not fully get 'what's going on'.
As another example, he talks about the differences in computer games over the past 20 years. From the simple motor-coordination and pattern-recognition functions of games like Tetris or Pac-Man we get to today's games where you no longer get a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. Players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The games present the player with a series of puzzles, and you can't succeed at the game by simply solving the puzzles one at a time.
Johnson suggests that these days it is all about 'constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence…it's about finding order and meaning in the world, and about making decisions that help create that order'. In each example, the suggestion is that 'involvement' - where the viewer has to actively intervene to look for the hidden logic, or to find order and meaning in the apparent chaos - has materially changed the relationship between content, medium and audience. Very interesting concept indeed!
Now, here is the simple 'fact' underlying Malcolm Gladwell's meticulously researched new book 'Blink': Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. This statement is supported by new evidence from both science and psychology and for the first time cognitive psychologists like Gerd Gigerenzer are studying that part of our brain that 'leaps to conclusions' - called the adaptive unconscious. The study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology, according to Gladwell.
The new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data that we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. When you walk out into the street and suddenly realise that a truck is bearing down on you - do we have time to rationalise all of our options at that moment? No. The only way that we could have survived as a species for as long as we have, is to develop another kind of decision-making apparatus that is capable of making very quick judgements, often based on very little information.
Gladwell warns though that we humans are innately suspicious of any kind of rapid cognition, because we have been trained to believe that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. We tell our kids…haste makes waste…look before you leap…stop and think…don't judge a book by its cover…etc. We really only trust conscious decision making. We only trust information that is meticulously analysed and decisions that are made after extensive analysis. Yet we know that in the marketing of goods and services for example, the consumer does not necessarily read all the body copy, or the pack insert, or the pack itself for that matter - before making a purchase decision.
First impressions, linked to individual memories and perhaps even something called 'sensation transference' (coined by marketing pioneer Louis Cheskin) to describe how many people (without realising it) transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of a product - to the product itself. Put another way, Cheskin suggests, most of us don't make a distinction (on an unconscious level) between the package and the product. The product is simply the package and the product combined. Gladwell quotes a number of examples, including the Pepsi/Coke taste-test fiasco of a few years ago, as well as how changed packaging affected the acceptability of yellow margarine. Does this phenomenon perhaps help us to understand how we see something 'creative' and we just 'know' (indeed, without necessarily being able to rationalise it) that it will 'work' in the marketplace?
Get yourself a copy of 'Blink' at your local bookstore or one of the amazon/exclusivebooks/kalahari websites, and as Gladwell says: You'll never think the same way about thinking again!