I spent today catching up on my reading, and found an unusual amount of attention paid to the costs of sometimes attempting to accomplish things more rapidly than perhaps we should. Hence the name of this post.
In the Sunday New York Times, there was an article entitled Beyond the Blink which is here. In the last Economist, the Schumpeter column was named No Rush, and is here. Perhaps some of this attention is a backlash against the present pace of life, and perhaps some of it is due to the popularity of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, which goes into detail on the differences between our more automatic response based on past experience and perhaps our gene pool, and what we call reasoning (see my posts of Dec. 4 and 15, 2011). We rely heavily on the first, but our species is somewhat unique in our ability with the second, and we are rightfully proud of this ability—especially those of us from Western cultures who hang around commercial, educational, and legal institutions. We still venerate the scholars of classical Greece, even though the majority of the people were fighting wars, making money, and acquiring slaves, and their descendents seem to be having a bit of trouble with their economy. And we push “theory” in education.
At present there is a run of interest in brain function that does not involve much conscious reasoning—Kahneman”s “fast” thinking, Ariely's irrationality, Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge, Gladwell’s Blink. One of my reading tasks was to finish an excellent book entitled The Righteous Mind, by Janathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies morality (Amazon button to right). The book applies not only to morality, but to problem solving in general – even to the design of high quality products. The book is divided into three sections, but here let me make a few comments about the first section, entitled Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reaasoning Second – a provocative title.
In this section of his book, Haidt uses a nice metaphor which he used in a previous book (The Happiness Hypothesis). He describes what he calls automatic processes (intuition, emotion, etc) as an elephant, and controlled processes (reasoning) as the rider. The elephant lives life quite well, but the rider with its ability to learn things, see into the future, and rationally make decisions, can help the elephant. And also, the rider can use language and associated cognitive skills to explain and justify the elephant’s actions (and of course take credit for them).
In dealing with creativity, one runs into these two types of thinking, and often gets into arguments. I have always used the words habitual thinking, since the term unconscious thinking used to get me into trouble with a few psychologists who seem to be wedded to the idea that if it isn’t conscious, it isn’t thinking. I find Haidt’s metaphor most useful, because it distracts people from such arguments. Elephants are big and reasonably smart, and since most of their decisions have precedent, they make them rapidly. The rider can simply take care of overall directional decisions, and the elephant will handle the details. Perhaps a bit like General Motors in the 1970’s
In order for the rider to solve problems that are unprecedented to the elephant, and plan new and risky moves, he/she will possibly do better by stopping the elephant, or slowing it down, to allow more time for reasoning. Creativity and response to change are in this category, as is quality. More time and effort may be necessary requiring increased design and development times (or alternately increased parallel R and D efforts) to think more clearly about responding to change, increasing creativity and improving product quality. Heresy? Perhaps, but who sets the pace? Marketing? We do make money from promoting the new, but will lose in the long run by producing inferior products. “Competition? Maybe, but suppose we in the U.S. all move so rapidly to compete wiith each other that we produce low quality products and lose to overseas competition (Japanese cars in the 1980’s and German cars now.) Or pick up bad habits like software people who deliver as new products as soon as possible and fix them later with “updates”.
I will return to Haidt’s book (part two and three) and this issue in my next post.
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