Hippo's, ABC's and Intution

There is a fascinating shift going on beneath our noses, and you may not even be aware of it.  Much of it revolves around the ideas of what intuition offers us, and how we have historically and perhaps mistakenly trusted it.  I grew up believing intuition as a positive thing - it was borne of experience and reflected sound judgment, and was what you fell back to when the path forward wasn't clear.  Like many things in modern life though, the role of intuition seems to have been blurred with opinion and the sound-ness of it isn't always what we thought it was.

Here's an example question that I'll admit having some fun with recently.  I read it in Daniel Kahneman's recent book Thinking Fast & Slow (A great read). The idea is to instinctively react to it, and at the same time, listen to your own brain in the process.  It goes like this:

A ball and bat together cost $1.10
The ball costs $1.00 more than the bat
How much does the ball cost ?

Easy yes ?  Well, not for everyone.  Our intuitive brain is wired to do the fastest and simplest of maths here, and arrive at the answer that the ball is $0.10.  That's the wrong answer of course. (This is where you go back, re-read it and think about the answer.)  That process of thinking illustrates to you that the ball actually costs $0.05.  You see, you were deceived by two factors here - the deceptive phrasing tricked your intuitive processes, and your brain lazily allowed intuition to carry the answer, without stopping to think if it was actually the correct answer. According to Mr. Kahneman, we do this frequently and automatically, and he offers many great examples where extensive testing has been done  to prove this out.  You see thinking slowly and deliberately uses lots of energy, and our bodies are hard-wired to avoid high energy usage brain activities unless we have to - some switch inside each of us controls this.   I won't go into more details, if this is interesting to you, read the book.

What does this have to do with Hippo's and ABC's ?  I'm glad you asked that.

There are related ideas in something else I came across, about A&B testing and how decisions are made.  It correlates to the inconsistency or at least pollution of the purity of intuition as well.  A&B testing is happening all around you.  For all I know, you're experiencing it as you read this page.  It's the subtle ongoing testing of varying page layouts in our online world, and reflects very small changes to increase levels of engagement.  Perhaps you've had a "Matrix-moment" where things seems a little different to you ?  You aren't crazy, you are seeing different things. It seems popular sites - the Google's, Yahoo's and others don't amend their look and feel all at once, they evolutionize them though A&B testing.   A subtle small change is designed and floated out in live time to perhaps 10% of the user population.  The engagement level (against the baseline of existing page users) is measured and the more successful page becomes the new standard, until it's evolved.  Clever..yes.  If the goal is to get us to click-through more ads which it often is, then it works.  But - what's this got to do with intuition ?

The other way to make changes is to do it based on what people think.  That's the historic model that delivered to us the iPod design, sleek sports cars and the Guggenheim museum.  When I say people, I mean select people, or even more precisely in an organization, the highly paid people who should know about these things using their .... wait for it .... intuition.   The problem with this approach, is that we don't all have the gifts in design that Steve Jobs or Frank Gehry have.  Instead we have business leaders that have opinions, and bias's and their authority can carry the day under the guise of intuitive design.  They are the Hippo's - highest paid person's opinion... and they are often as not wrong.  The purpose of the A&B testing is to rely on the data of engagement levels to determine if change should occur - they are the business world analytics version of thinking slow.

So the upshot of all this ?  I wish you all the energy and time to make thoughtful decisions.  Our world doesn't suffer time spent thinking slowly positively, but it's clearly worthwhile.