I had been putting off reading "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell for no known reason.  You know how that goes.  As it happens my procrastination was not such a bad thing!  When I did pick up my copy it had an "afterword" by the author that reflected on his thoughts since publishing the book and talking to so many people about it and reflecting on it post-event so to speak.  If you do not know Malcolm Gladwell he is the author who also gave us the Tipping Point.  I guess the first thing to say is that this is a very enjoyable read.  Gladwell is a great story teller.  And he writes this book as a series of stories that you just have to keep reading.  Gladwell explains:

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

I wonder as project managers can we jump to a series of conclusions about our projects in the blink of an eye.  Nope - that can not be - what about all that project reporting and analysis we need to do and we are trained to do.  Gladwell gives a different perspective:

Certainly that's what we've always been told. We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don't think this is true. There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world. 

But some project managers seem expert at knowing what is going on really quickly.  We might call that experience.  Perhaps it is wisdom.  Maybe they have a natural talent.  But maybe they are assessing the right data very quickly.  Maybe they are "thin-slicing" as Gladwell calls it:

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

There are some other great stories and insights in the book into areas such as divorce rates, recruitment practices that discriminate, police violence, racism, modern military training, to name but a few.  Some of the lessons for project managers might be:

• set your self up right to make a decision
• slow yourself to get to the right place to make a good decision
• too much information can be very bad for good decision making
• less information - if it is the essential information is better for decision making
• overload of information is very harmful
• do not confuse knowledge with understanding
• "blink" more often!

I guess this is why project management dashboards like the one from BrightWork below are so important.  So - please - go forth and "blink" - and if not - do at least read and enjoy the book!