and, ultimately, what you can do about it. Mental maps are vital because organizations don't come with computerized navigation systems to guide you turn‐by‐turn to your destination. Instead, managers need to develop and carry accurate charts in their heads.
Such maps make it possible to register and assemble key bits of perceptual data into a coherent pattern—an image of what's happening. When framing works fluidly, the process takes the form of “rapid cognition,” the process that Gladwell (2005) examines in his best seller Blink. He describes it as a gift that makes it possible to read “deeply into the narrowest slivers of experience. In basketball, the player who can take in and comprehend all that is happening in the moment is said to have ‘court sense’ ” (p. 44). The military stresses situational awareness to describe the same capacity.
Dane and Pratt (2007) describe four key characteristics of this intuitive “blink” process:
It is nonconscious—you can do it without thinking about it and without knowing how you did it.
It is very fast—the process often occurs almost instantly.
It is holistic—you see a coherent, meaningful pattern.
It results in “affective judgments”—thought and feeling work together so you feel confident that you know what is going on and what needs to be done.
The essence of this process is matching situational cues with a well‐learned mental framework—a “deeply held, nonconscious category or pattern” (Dane and Pratt, 2007, p. 37). This is the key skill that Simon and Chase (1973) found in chess masters—they could instantly recognize more than 50,000 configurations of a chessboard. This ability enables grand masters to play 25 lesser opponents simultaneously, beating all of them while spending only seconds on each move.
The blink process is key to expertise and skill. Kahneman and Klein (2009) argue that it works best for individuals who have developed a deep understanding of a particular domain through experience and deliberate practice with feedback. Skill and expertise come to those who are willing to invest time and effort and learning (Ericsson, 2005). But for nonexperts, fast, intuitive thinking often leads to very bad judgments. Experts typically know when they don't know, but nonexperts think they know when they don't (Kahneman and Klein, 2009). “Subjective confidence is therefore an unreliable indication of the validity of intuitive judgments” (p. 524).
Research on human thinking has led to the identification of two distinct modes of cognition that operate in parallel: Type I (intuitive and automatic) and Type II (deliberate and analytic), summarized in Exhibit 1.1. Intuition is faster, requires less cognitive effort, and produces holistic judgments. It works best in the hands of experts dealing with fluid, messy problems, particularly if time is short. Analytic thinking is slower and requires more effort and conscious attention but can lead to superior judgment and decision in situations with well‐structured problems and high‐quality evidence (Evans and Stanovich, 2013; Hodgkinson and Sadler‐Smith, 2018; Kahneman, 2011; Kahneman and Klein, 2009; Luan, Reb, and Gigerenzer, 2019). Many businesses analyze big data to discover insights and patterns culled from mountains of data far beyond the capacity of any human mind.
Exhibit 1.1. Characteristics of Two Types of Human Thinking.
| Type I (Intuitive) | Type II (Deliberate) |
|---|---|
| Fast Nonconscious Automatic Does not rely on working memory Requires less mental energy Relies on tacit, implicit knowledge | Slow Conscious Intentional Requires use of working memory Requires more mental energy Relies on explicit knowledge |
In medicine, there is a growing emphasis on “evidence‐based medicine”—basing diagnosis and treatment on rules derived from research. Emergency room physicians who treat stroke victims, for example, have a detailed set of guidelines for diagnosis and treatment that are periodically updated as new research comes in. Some scholars have argued that the same idea can also work for managers (Barends and Rousseau, 2018; Martelli and Hayirli, 2018; Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006, 2011), though evidence for the benefits of evidence‐based management is still sketchy (Reay, Berta, and Kohn, 2017). Pfeffer and Sutton (2011) cite research showing that incentive pay for teachers is a bad idea but teams work better with stable membership as examples of findings that could help managers make better decisions. Tourish (2019) counters that managers hoping to learn from published research will find that most of it is trivial, unreadable, and disconnected from practice.
The bottom line is that Type I intuitive and Type II reflective thinking are both powerful and vital tools for managers and leaders. Each has advantages and disadvantages compared to the other. The key is knowing how and when to use each. Leaders go astray when their knowledge and judgment are inadequate to deal with the complex and elusive problems they face. The quality of their judgments depends on the information at hand, their mental maps, and how well they have learned to use them. Good maps align with the terrain and provide enough detail to keep you on course. If you're trying to find your way around Beijing, a map of Chicago won't help much. In the same way, different circumstances require different approaches.
Even with the right map, getting around will be slow and awkward if you have to stop and study at every intersection. The ultimate goal is fluid expertise, the sort of know‐how that lets you think on the fly and navigate organizations as easily as you drive on a familiar route. You can make decisions quickly and automatically because you know at a glance where you are and what you need to do next.
There is no shortcut to developing this kind of expertise. It takes effort, time, practice, and feedback. Some of the effort has to go into learning frames and the ideas behind them. Equally important is putting the ideas to use. Experience, one often hears, is the best teacher, but that is true only if one learns from it. McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison (1988, p. 122) found that a distinguishing quality among successful executives was that they were great learners, displaying an “extraordinary tenacity in extracting something worthwhile from their experience and in seeking experiences rich in opportunities for growth.”
Reframing
Frames define the questions we ask and solutions we consider (Berger, 2014). John Dewey defined freedom as the power to choose among known alternatives. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu made a similar point 2,500 years ago: “Many options bring victory, few options bring defeat, no options at all spell disaster” (Sun, 2012). When managers don't see options, they make mistakes but often fail to understand why.
Take a simple question: “What is the sum of 5 plus 5?” The only right answer is “10.” Ask a different way, “What two numbers add up to ten?” Now the number of solutions is infinite (once you include fractions and negative numbers). The two questions differ in how they are framed. Albert Einstein once observed: “If I had a problem to solve and my whole life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty‐five minutes determining the question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in five minutes” (Seelig, 2015, p. 19).
Asking the right question helps to break frames. Why do that? A news story from the summer of 2007 illustrates. Imagine yourself among a group of friends enjoying dinner on the patio of a Washington, D.C., home. An armed, hooded intruder suddenly appears and points a gun at the head of a 14‐year‐old guest. “Give me your money,” he says, “or I'll start shooting.” If you're at that table, what do you do? You could faint. Or freeze. You could try a heroic frontal attack. You might try to run. Or you could try to break the frame and redefine the situation
