In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Malcolm Gladwell explores how expertise can sometimes reveal itself in an instant, almost like a “blink.” Though this phenomenon doesn’t occur all the time, it does happen occasionally, and Gladwell provides compelling examples of experts who have experienced this. For instance, Federico Zeri, Evelyn Harrison, Thomas Hoving, and Georgios Dantas each had a gut feeling that a sixth-century BC statue wasn’t authentic. Despite eighteen months of analysis yielding no evidence of a problem, their instincts were eventually proven correct—the statue was indeed a fake. Similarly, John Gottman can quickly predict which marriages are likely to end in divorce, and tennis pro Vic Braden can instantly recognize a good serve.
What does this tell us?
First, it’s important to clarify what it doesn’t mean. These kinds of intuitive insights aren’t something everyone possesses innately. Such “intuitions” are not genetic or automatic; they are the product of training. It’s the intuition of a trained expert that allows them to perform these seemingly magical feats.
The takeaway is that a person deeply trained in a specific field, with years of study and experience, can occasionally achieve what appears to be miraculous insight. This was also the case with the founders of NLP, who recognized similar abilities in experts like Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Milton Erickson. When someone has trained their “adaptive unconscious” mind (as Gladwell refers to it), they can sometimes, in the blink of an eye, identify critical cues and quickly get to the heart of a situation. This type of thinking is known as rapid cognition.
Rapid Cognition Explained
In cognitive psychology, rapid cognition refers to how a trained intuition can quickly assess a situation, especially under stress or pressure. Gladwell cites specialists like Timothy Wilson, who describe the adaptive unconscious as “fast and frugal.” According to Wilson, “The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.”
Wouldn’t it be amazing to have that kind of rapid cognition, especially under pressure? For example, when you’re being evaluated while coaching, or when you’re in front of a group, or even when you’re trying to get to the heart of a client’s issue quickly.
Gladwell identifies thin-slicing as the key to this rapid cognition. Thin-slicing is the ability to take a small sample of behavior or conversation and, from that narrow slice, identify key features that reveal deeper truths. It’s perhaps the most crucial part of rapid cognition—the ability of your adaptive unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very limited experience. “We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are a lot of hidden factors out there. Careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot,” Gladwell writes. “How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training, rules, and rehearsal.”
Thin-slicing also relies on knowing what really counts. For John Gottman, predicting which couples are likely to divorce (with a 95% accuracy rate after observing just one hour of conversation) depends on identifying key factors he calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of a Marriage”: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. The most crucial of these is contempt. Gottman also found that for a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in any given encounter must be at least five to one.
The Role of Pattern Detection in Expertise
In Neuro-Semantics, we emphasize the skill of identifying key patterns, which highlights the value of pattern detection—recognizing what is relevant to a specific pattern, experience, or outcome. For instance, Samuel Gosling identified “The Big Five Inventory” in personality psychology, which outlines five dimensions of personality. In another study, the key determinant of whether a doctor will be sued after a mistake isn’t necessarily the mistake itself, but how much time the doctor spent with the patient (just three minutes more than those in the sued group) and the tone of their voice. Here, the thin slice focused on four qualities: warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness.
For the doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Brendan Reilly and Lee Goldman’s algorithm helped identify the most critical factors in predicting heart attacks. They reduced the list to three key items, combined with an ECG, to identify urgent risk factors. The problem they initially faced was too much information—too many factors that didn’t necessarily aid in diagnosing heart attack candidates. Once again, knowing what really counts in a particular context is crucial.
Implications for Meta-Coaches
As a Meta-Coach, this means that by learning to identify the factors that truly matter in human functioning and experience, you can train your adaptive conscious and unconscious mind to thin-slice conversations and experiences effectively. With continuous practice, your intuitions will become finely tuned, allowing you to detect key cues—even the subtle and quick ones. This kind of expertise, developed over years, enables you to deliver high-quality coaching that gets to the heart of the matter, even under pressure.
However, thin-slicing isn’t foolproof. Gladwell also shares stories of when rapid cognition goes wrong, such as when his long hair led two policemen to mistakenly identify him as a suspect. He also discusses how unconscious biases, like the assumption that taller people are smarter or better leaders (the Warren Harding Error), can lead to faulty rapid cognition. There’s a time and place for limiting your snap judgments, and there are times when you shouldn’t trust them.
“Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible—it can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled,” Gladwell notes.
How to Train Your Intuition
Would you like to develop this kind of expertise? Great! Start by attending your local MCF chapter meetings for practice. If there isn’t one, create one! Invite a few coaches to join you in reviewing the ACMC manual and practicing coaching together. Read, practice, record your coaching sessions, review them, get a mentor, find a buddy coach, or work with a supervisor to refine your skills. Return to Coaching Mastery for continued learning, and join the Assist Team as a Benchmarker. This ongoing practice is the key to training your intuition like nothing else will.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Certified_meta-coach] 2024 Morpheus #31 TRAINING YOUR INTUITIONS FOR EXPERTISE by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
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