Generally my brain seems set on “random fire,” but every now and then my thoughts start to coalesce around a theme.
This latest theme was launched while the Talented and Gifted coordinator and I watched our very methodical high-school chess player/chess club helper decide which 10 of 32 elementary-school chess players should be chosen for the chess team. He had reviewed the stats on who had won how many games, but that was insufficient data: he carefully noted each player’s style and folded that into his analysis.
Amused and charmed, I remarked to the TAG coordinator how differently I would have made the decision, implying that since I cannot (or am simply too lazy to) do that level of analysis, my results would have been vastly inferior. She arched an eyebrow at me and said, “You would have chosen based on intuition, but your results might have been the same.”
For a moment, that set me back. There was a time when I valued my intuition. The Myers-Briggs test was all the rage in Silicon Valley when I worked there back in the day, and it tickled us all that introverts, relatively uncommon in the population at large (~25% is the figure I remember) are practically ubiquitous in software engineering. Since I was by far the least technical of the technical writers on our team, intuition was one of my primary tools.
But then, reader, I married an engineer, and the balance of power in my brain began to shift. There seemed to be a preponderance of situations where impulse and intuition served me less well than research and analysis served my spouse. And then the kids arrived, and as most stay-at-home parents know, thinking of any kind takes a back seat to the hourly demands of baby and child care.
Now that the kids are in school and I have a little more time to think, I’m trying desperately to revive the parts of my brain that have been seemingly been dormant. Was I strongly intuitive, once? What did that look/feel like?
And into that particular stew dropped the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. Yes, I realize I’m three years behind the times on this one, but I found a copy for 50 cents at the library, and I read it in a day and a half. If you’ve not read it, Gladwell reviews some new ideas about how people understand things and make decisions, often coming to correct conclusions in a “blink” of an eye. If I understand him correctly, this is partly intuition, partly experience/knowledge, and partly some mysteriously subconscious apprehension. (Are you there, God? It’s me, Satchel.) In any case, it felt like complete validation. Not only are there situations where more information/analysis can be proven to degrade the quality of decisions, but often people immediately “get” something that they find difficult to explain to others, even when they are entirely correct.
This is not to say, and Gladwell explicitly denies, that what we call “intuition” is always perfect — but that to ignore it is to cut off a valuable, even priceless, source of information. Moreover, he claims that it can be trained.
So today I rejoice. I do get things, sometimes. Thanks, God.
I am waaaay behind you.
I just finished the book a couple of weeks ago. Try his other one, The Tipping Point. I think it’s even better.
vhaecky
April 5th, 2008