i guess that title doesn't make much sense but that is what i kept thinking about yesterday on my long flight from orlando to seattle ...

 

i just finished reading the book "How Doctors Think" by Jerome Groopman ... a book recommended during my recent course at Kellogg Business school on marketing & strategy (what's the relation? read on...). i would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to go a few levels deeper in understanding how our thought & response process works. my prof, the Mohanbir Sawhney, recommended this as a reading to understand the complex mysteries of human mind which need to be unravled before creating the messaging & value proposition for our customers (as the perceived value of a good/service can be quite different than the proposed value).

 

the title of the book threw me off 'cos doctors are not really my customers! however, after flipping through 320 pages of intense medical jargon, the overall theme emerged on its own ... our thinking process is modeled over a long period of time and a lot of times at subconcious level without much conscious control or modeling. we develop patterns based on our past experiences and when we encounter a new situation, our brain works at a magical speed to do pattern recognition and come up with the closest matching response. this defines how we react to a new situation.

 

if you've read the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) - another highly recommended reading, you would relate to this theory. this book doesn't get in to the details of how our mind works as much and malcolm definitely doesn't use the medical profession as an example to explain his theory but the set of examples across the two books converge at the same point - what we call our "gut thinking", "sixth sense", "intuition" is nothing more than our mind relying on existing patterns to decipher a new situation. these patterns are formed over a period of time by reptitive action or examples - folks working in the area of artificial intelligence will understand this as "related data sets" that help form "decision trees" that aid in "pattern matching". it is quite scary to think how simple it might be for machines one day to do something similar ... but i'll leave that discussion for another post.

 

coming back to the two books ... how doctors think and Blink, the key difference is that while Malcolm recommends relying on this process to "think without really thinking", Jerome on the other hand warns against this. Jerome talks about the pitfalls of following this approach (it happens automatically) as it sterotypes patients and doesn't push you to think beyond what appears to be the obvious. in the medical profession, this can have serious implications and hence the argument does hold some water but what about other professions? am i being dangerously smart when i know too much about a topic that i don't need to think much about a problem to come up with an answer? or am i rightfully "blinking" to solve problems in the most intuitive way which gives me an advantage over others who are not experts in my area?

 

i'm not sure if i have an answer but i guess if i keep thinking and discussing about how doctors blink, my mind will form enough patterns that the answer will just come to me :). one thing is for sure though - being aware of how the underlying plumbing of our mind & thought process works definitely helps us consciously decide on whether we are blinking and when we are actually thinking. what we do after that is a choice we have to make.