blink - great book, no answers

WARNING: This post bangs on about advertising/branding thinking and stuff. So if you're looking for pictures of amusing street furniture please come back later, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink'. Fantastic book. I'd been saving it for an opportunity to read it all through in one shot and it was worth it. Lots of great stories, brilliantly told, all hinting that the way we'd all thought about communications is wrong. But, like The Tipping Point, without actually telling you what to do about it. Which frustrates some people, but which I love.

Lots of people will find in this book more evidence that most market research is a dumb waste of money (New Coke, the Aeron chair) but we all knew that already didn't we?

What I thought was really interesting was the stuff about Creating Structure For Spontaneity and the dangers of thinking and introspection.

Gladwell talks about the notorious US war game exercise Millennium Challenge where Paul Van Riper played the part of the 'bad guy / Red Team general' and trounced the good guy / Blue Team forces through improvisation, imagination and enabling spontaneous action. The Blue Team were equipped with all manner of intelligence databases and decision support software with all sorts of acronyms. They thought they had a perfect understanding of every aspect of the battlefield. And they had a process with all kinds of experts weighing in at vital points of the battle offering opinions, debating options, evaluating possibilities.

Van Riper says "What I heard is that Blue Team had all these long discussions. They were trying to decide what the political situation was like. They had charts with up arrows and down arrows. I remember thinking, Wait a minute. You were doing that while you were fighting? They had all these acronyms. The elements of national power were diplomatic, informational, military and economic. That gives you DIME. They would always talk about the Blue DIME. Then there were the political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information instruments, PMESI. So they'd have these terrible conversations where it would be our DIME versus their PMESI. I wanted to gag. What are you talking about? You know, you get caught up in forms, in matrices, in computer programs and it just draws you in. They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning."

Jesus. Doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that sound like Big Agencies and Big Clients? The acronyms, the process, the endless analysis; all getting you nowhere. We've all done this.

Van Riper told his team that he would be "In command, but not in control" - that sounds the perfect description of how brand management should work. But rarely does. Brand management should set the objectives, make the big decisions, point to north. The important executional decisions should be as close to the point of execution as possible.

Gladwell also discusses the Goldman algorithm - a simple tool for making the incredibly difficult decision about whether someone's actually having (or is likely to have) a heart attack. Goldman demonstrated that you actually need relatively few datapoints to make that decision and that all the extra data that the experts insist on collecting was actually making their decisions worse.

That rings all sorts of bells too - all those companies that bring all this meaningless data to bear on brand / marketing decisions. (Made more meaningless because it's measuring the un-measurable). I suspect that people with experience and common sense and talent create equivalents of the Goldman Algorithm for themselves. (Rules of thumb, I guess). Years of doing stuff (or instinct) have taught them that there's just a few things you need to look at to understand 90% of the problem - and most of the other stuff is just going to confuse you. I suspect in our case it might be: look at the ads, look at the competition's ads, look at where sales are going, look at the brand-owning culture - there's not much else you need to know. Sounds simplistic but it seems to work.

But the most fascinating bit for me was Gladwell's discussion of Jonathan W. Schooler, verbal overshadowing and insight. I think this explains a lot of what actually goes wrong with the planning/advertising process. Schooler has demonstrated that the problems that require flashes of insight (the linkages and possibilities that spring, seemingly unbidden, from the unconscious) are likely to be stymied by writing down the parameters of the problem. Writing down your strategy for solving an insight problem makes it less likely that you will solve the problem. Gladwell cites a couple of examples in the book and there are more online; but I had a huge aha! myself here. And suddenly felt justified in refusing to write stuff down until the last minute (which everyone at work hates) or in only using pictures, or at the most MindMaps. Obviously this is mostly laziness but I've always felt that it helps us come up with better ideas, and now I have proof.

This little thought explains so much of what makes a creative industry like advertising seem difficult. There's so much anxiety around our output that we feel like everything has to be written down - we have to show our working, and demonstrate all kinds of rigour. And because this business tends to put strategy before execution everything gets written down way before the most interesting thinkers get involved. This also explains why most creatives find most briefs so annoying - whether they know it or not these bits of paper are probably reducing the likelihood they'll have an interesting insight.

Which is why we've improvised all kinds of ways of working that get around this. We've always felt it to be the right thing to do; but this is the first bit of grown-up evidence that what we do makes sense.

Examples:

1. We pack the briefs with all kinds of ideas, rather than narrowing down to one.

2. We try to think visually as well as verbally. (Planners almost always think verbally, which is why you tend to get such flat, thin strategies). And pictures capture the non-verbal much better than words (doh!)

3. We minimise the writing down and maximise the talking.

4. We look for loads of little insights; not one big one.

5. We look for the bits of data that might give us a clue. not every bit of data going. (We don't subscribe to Mintel)

I love Malcolm Gladwell. He doesn't tell you what to do. But he makes you think.

Comments

[Ruth]

Agreed. He does make you think, but do you not feel that he sometimes overstates the obvious; albeit with some depth.

Surely most acdemics (Ev.Psy, Neuro Sc etc) within the 'brain' areas of research & its applications would not dare publish such obvious statements. Fear of ridicule equals loss of funding.

As you rightly point out, most marketing talk and its offsporn (Brand Sense, Brand Gym, etc.etc)are, well Bollocks. Security Tools for stresseed exec's with a budget.

They borrow theory from the cream of a very large saucepen of boiling milk, Then - like Gladwell - chuck in a case study or three.

Bobs your Uncle. £16.99. Security for the stressed exec's and the general populi!

That makes me think.

[Ruth]

The Sunday Times - Books February 06, 2005

The blink, therefore, is the moment at which we understand a great deal without necessarily being able to explain why. The first problem with this is that it really isn’t as counterintuitive as it might seem, because the blink itself is the result of a lengthy learning process. An art historian who knows a statue is a fake in seconds does so on the basis of years of scholarship. Equally, the Cook County acceleration of heart diagnosis was done on the basis of long and complex research. What we are talking about here is not knowing less, it is knowing the right things.

At this point the big Blink insight begins to become unremarkable and obvious.

[M@]

There's a wonderful discussion on Blink between Gladwell and James Surowiecki (the wisdom of crowds) over at slate http://slate.msn.com/id/2111894/entry/2112064/

James opens with a question that echos Ruth's second post. Maybe thin-slicing is more the result of our ability to very effectively simplify the vast amounts of knoweldge stored between our ears. Creating an 'esspresso' out of the kilos of knoweldge kernels or beans we acquire over the years.

More a distillation of our expertise than a snap based mental reflex.

[Ruth]

"Some people are what you might call experts in thin-slicing, and the book is full of portraits of these people, including John Gottman, who can watch a couple talking for 15 minutes and predict with 90 percent accuracy the future of their marriage, and Paul Ekman, who seems able to read people's minds merely by looking at their facial expressions. But the first claim of Blink is that it isn't just experts who thin-slice. Everyone does, all the time. More important, we do so with surprising success, so that "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made consciously and deliberately."

Like I said. Some people love Gladwell for the wrong reasons. Definantly Comfort food for stressed out exec's.Time(mind)poor cash rich.

[Sarah Ennals]

Interesting - a lot of that is very similar to ideas that come up, albeit on a different topic, in Temple Grandin's Animals In Translation which I got for Christmas: particularly the idea of the more complex algorithm being misleading.

Grandin, in her book, talks about having come up with a 10-point checklist for slaughterhouse inspection which replaced an earlier 100-point checklist. Her ten points encapsulated the hundred by, for instance, replacing ten questions about the state of the floors with "are there any injuries to the animals' legs?"; knowing from experience that if there are, they were probably caused by problems with the flooring, but if there weren't, the floors must be ok.

Grandin also blames a lot of confusion on the priority often given to words and written language over visual communication. I suppose when dealing with something very concrete, writing often is just pushing it up another level of abstraction (although as an autistic, Grandin is probably a bit biased towards images vs. words).

[Toby]

Russell,

I agree with most things you say, but if i was to walk into an agency, aged 24, and tell them i only want to write something down at the last minute etc etc, i don't think i'd last very long there.

I've heard you answer this question before at an apg talk you gave and you just said to 'go ahead and do it anyway' - but the reality is alot different to that.

any suggestions, thoughts would be appreciated?

T

[Phoenix]

My experience in larger organisations is that the writing down and over planning is there more to cover people's arses for when great insights don't happen, when objectives aren't met, when clients aren't delighted. It's more about retrospective justification than planning. And yes, it does hinder creative insight!