One of my favorite books is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m sure that’s so because I like his premise that some decisions and appraisals made quickly are more accurate than those made after deliberation. Having said that I don’t like to find books that challenge that! Unfortunately that is what Daniel Kahneman does in Thinking Fast and Slow.

Most of us (and especially those of us who consider ourselves intuitive) have what he calls “cognitive illusions”. This is a false belief that we intuitively accept as true. While we think we make good decisions on our own experience or our ability to judge situations we actually have a poor record of success if we stop to analyze the results.

He illustrates this with a personal example. When he was twenty-one years old he was a lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was given the job of setting up a new interview system for the entire army. Up to that point decisions about appropriate assignments for new recruits were made as a result of informal fifteen minute interviews. The system while entrenched and thought effective had failed completely. “When the actual performance of the recruit a few months later was compared with the performance predicted by the interviews the correlation between the actual and predicted performance was zero.” Zero? Zero.

Predictions based on simple statistical scoring were generally more accurate than predictions based on expert judgment. However the experts were understandably reluctant to change as they suffered from “the illusion of validity.” While they and others sincerely believed they could predict performance the truth was they could not. Believing is seeing – even if it’s not there.

Another example. During WWII it was widely believed that bomber crews surving thirty missions had done so because their performance had improved with experience. “It was obvious to everyone that the old-timers survived because they were more skillful. Nobody wanted to believe that the old-timers survived only because they were lucky.” As it turns out luck is exactly why they survived. “There was no effect of experience on loss rate. So far as I could tell whether a crew lived or died was purely a matter of chance. Their belief in the life-saving effect of experience was an illusion.”

I work in a field that regards discernment and experience highly. We make decisions about people and projects all the time. We often make them too quickly convinced that our expert skills and years of experience makes our judgment more valid. I wonder what our record would look like if studied? Personally I will make sure that never happens! After all I’m an expert.