Consulting, fast and slow

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow isn’t about consulting, but it could be.

The Nobel prize-winning economist takes ideas he developed with Amos Tversky on behavioural economics and decision-making and examines the psychology that may help explain why we all – contrary to what economists used to think – make irrational choices.  His focus is on what he calls System 1 and System 2.  System 1 is the fast-moving bit of our brain, capable of making automatic choices without conscious intervention – detecting that one object is more distant than another, understanding a simple sentence, and so on.  It includes both innate skills we share with other animals and learned skills, such as understanding social situations and reading.  Some of the latter are widely shared, but others are only acquired by experts: thus, the Grand Master of chess who makes an apparently intuitive judgement about the outcome of a game is in fact tapping into a vast reserve of knowledge.  By contrast, the operations of System 2 require focus and we do them less well when we’re distracted.  While driving a car on a familiar road, largely empty of traffic, we can maintain a reasonable conversation with a passenger.  But dealing with an unexpected obstacle shifts our thinking process from System 1 to System 2: most of us stop talking and listening in order to concentrate.

Consulting involves a mixture of the two ways of thinking.  From the huge number of interviews we’re doing with clients at the moment, it’s clear that there is a lot of respect for the consultants whose expertise and experience enables them to make judgements which are both fast and informed.  Like the Grand Master, they’ve built up an enormous body of knowledge which they can automatically tap into.  System 2-style thinking comes into play where people and organisations don’t have that pre-existing reservoir of knowledge.  Consulting here involves bringing an open mind and taking the time to gather and analyse data before coming to any conclusions.  It can be a slow, painful process, and sometimes the answers challenge everyone’s assumptions.

But clients rightly have no time for that other form of System 1 thinking: intuition.  Non-expert intuition relies on extrapolating from your personal experience without recognising how biased that may be.  Aspiring consultants who’ve worked on similar problems with – say – two banks will assume that all banks share this problem.  They’re less likely to listen to what the third bank is telling them and will interpret what they hear in the context of what they expect to hear.  Things get worse over time: selective hearing means that each subsequent conversation reinforces an existing pattern rather than challenging it.  Non-expert intuition lies at the heart of the most damning criticism that clients levy against consultants, that the latter take a “cookie-cutter” or “one size fits all” approach to solving problems.

You could argue that the fault lies on both sides.  Clients, impatient for immediate results, are unwilling to go through the longer System 2 approach and consultants kowtow to this approach.  But I actually think the finger of blame in this instance points squarely at the consultants.  All too often consultants find themselves working in unfamiliar areas and have to fall back on their intuition for answers.  Moreover, as Kahneman points out, this involves simplifying the question.  Most of us can’t do complex maths in our heads but if we round the numbers we can make an intuitive guess; similarly, a consultant who’s floundering around for a solution will simplify the client’s problem.

The answer lies in specialisation (building up the reserve to draw on), honesty (being clear when you lack the former) and in being able to resist the temptation to hold forth on any given subject.  Faster is not always better in consulting any more than it is in thinking.