Thinking About Thinking

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Getting the Biases out of Your Thinking

Competencies: judgment, decision-making, strategic thinking, creative thinking, self development

Who benefits: anyone

Consultant Usage: personal development

What’s it about? I have been thinking a lot about Thinking lately.  Regular readers will recall recent reviews of Pain In The Ass, a book on critical thinking skills, and Imagine: How Creativity Works, a book on imagination and creativity.

Now along comes Thinking, Fast and Slow which will provide relief to readers having trouble with Pain In The Ass (PITA).  PITA, as you may recall, is a book I highly recommended, but only if you were willing to read it twice.  It is a book that builds new or refines old skills and it takes time and practice. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow is basically saying “Whoa, before you get into all that PITA stuff, calm down and reflect.”  Reflect on the thinking process and what produces the best results.

Begin with the author’s interesting and provocative Introduction:  “Every author, I suppose, has in mind a setting in which readers of his or her work could benefit from having read it.  Mine is the proverbial office watercooler, where opinions are shared and gossip is exchanged.  I hope to enrich the vocabulary that people use when they talk about the judgments and choices of others, the company’s new policies, or a colleague’s investment decisions.  Why be concerned with gossip?  Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than recognize our own.  Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it….  So this is my aim for watercooler conversations: improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves … (and) suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause.”

The first major talking point in the book is how biases contaminate our thinking, judgment and decision-making.  I won’t go into it here; it is covered in depth in the book.  But I will say I was willing to sit back and reflect on the author’s point.  And as much as I would like to write with a straight face that I am bias-free, tain’t so.  Sadly, I am just like everyone else.

The heart and soul of the book is in the chapters addressed in the title, the systems that drive our thinking.  Fast thinking, which he calls System 1 thinking, relies on intuition and emotion.  He states that this is where our biases reside and where our thinking goes astray.   System 2 thinking, the Slow in the title, is more deliberate and utilizes logic and reason.  Here he posits is where judgment and decision-making is best.  It is here in System 2 that Slow thinking intersects with the critical thinking skills of PITA.

There are other books, some reviewed in past posts, which give more credence to the role of intuition in judgment and decision-making.  But the author gives a well-reasoned argument why intuition is often faulty and some of what we think is intuition is merely recalling previous and similar experiences.  His bias is toward System 2, Slow Thinking.

The book is reader friendly.  Complex ideas are explained in easy to understand language.  The content is important to all of us. 

The book was selected as one of the best books of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. 

I recommend it highly.  After all, the author is a Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences for his work in psychology and my intuition tells me he is Right On!

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.