There a guy who has a double-high associative and observer. People with this profile take in multiple non-verbal cues and convert them to decisions at as close to light speed as our meat-based processing system allows. When he’s in a meeting, he’s watching the demeanor of the person presenting — searching for cues as to the confidence behind the data. As a result, sometimes his decision to risk millions of dollars includes interpretations processed in milliseconds.
When our brains take in information in this way, we may remember the factors which contributed to our decisions. Most often, we don’t. Our brain doesn’t store the hundreds of small details it integrated into a judgment. When asked to reverse-engineer our decision, we may be able to reproduce some of the highlights, but we’re rarely able to document the process to a level of granularity that matches the importance of the decision.
Which drives his partner crazy.
His partner is visibly a data guy. His brain responds to viewable fundamentals and calculable probabilities. He knows his colleague is a brilliant guy, but he wants to view the data his partner uses to generate his decision
“I want a bread crumb trail,” he says, speaking of his colleagues intuitive assessments. “He wants me to invest 80 million on the way someone bats his eyelashes.”
This kind of processing doesn’t leave bread crumb trails, I tell him. It’s like picking up the bits of ash, paper, and cardboard on a field on July 5th and trying to reproduce the burst of the firework. In this kind of rapid intuitive processing, our brains coalesce the data into a decision, burn it up, and scatter it. You can’t quantify the value of the data for each individual decision. You have to assess your colleague over time.
“Then I only want to give him 30 million.”