Like many of the subjects he writes about for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has become a bit of a cultural phenomenon. The best-selling author of The Tipping Point displays an uncanny ability to gather concepts and ideas from seemingly disparate fields and show how, viewed in combination, they can help clarify why people behave the way they do. In his latest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Gladwell uses examples from marriage counselors, the police blotter, the arts and the business world to show how relying on snap judgments and instinct — what he calls “thin slicing” — may often be the best way to find the right answer. FuelNet recently spoke with Gladwell on the importance of learning to trust your gut instincts in an increasingly complex, information-laden business environment.

FuelNet: Some business executives are legendary for having great business instincts. Is being a better instinctive decision maker something that can be learned and honed?

Gladwell: I think it can absolutely be learned. I talk a lot about the extraordinary instincts of art experts in my book — people who can look at a work of art and tell instantly whether it’s real or fake. But those people weren’t born with that trait, and they aren’t possessed of an innate skill that the rest of us don’t have. They can think that way because they’ve spent years and years studying art, to the point where their unconscious has become adept at that kind of instantaneous pattern recognition.

FuelNet: How can marketers trust their adaptive unconscious more when much of modern-day relationship marketing seems to encourage a very deliberative process?

Gladwell: It’s time for marketers to declare war on the customer research mechanisms that I think have hijacked their profession. Focus groups, in particular, are a completely bankrupt methodology. The only way to create space for the marvelous gifts of the unconscious is to clear away the decision-making and intelligence-gathering structures, like focus groups, that make the exercise of rapid cognition impossible.

FuelNet: Several of the examples you cite in Blink involve major consumer products, such as New Coke and the Aeron chair, where the initial testing and company expectations were way off once the products were actually introduced. Can businesses learn from these examples to rely more on their gut?

Gladwell: I hope so. The basic lesson is that home run products operate by different rules. Almost by definition, a truly breakthrough product will fail market research tests. Market research can tell you whether [the movie] Die Hard 2 is better than Die Hard 3. But it can’t tell you whether Pulp Fiction will be a hit. [In fact, focus group research indicated the movie would be a box-office disaster.] If you want to produce Die Hard 3, fine. But if you want to do something revolutionary, you have to throw away the market research safety blanket.

FuelNet: Is there anything executives can do to encourage their staff to use more of their adaptive unconscious?

Gladwell: One of Blink’s big lessons is that introspection is the enemy of rapid cognition. The more I make you examine your own thinking, the slower and more pedestrian your thinking becomes. We need fewer meetings and reports — and more action.

FuelNet: Is “thin slicing” strictly for internal decision making, or can companies also use it to build stronger customer relationships?

Gladwell: I think the principles of thin slicing apply anywhere decisions are made internally and with customers.

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