Thin slicing

As many of you will know I spend my working life split between facilitating Leadership training programmes for corporate clients and coaching athletes. I find both areas really motivating as they are fundamentally about helping to develop an individual's potential. Recently I have been working on a Leadership project for a major bank and was reminded about the book "Blink", by one of the participant's performance in some of the tasks we coached them through. In the book, it's author Malcolm Gladwell describes how the human brain is able to take in, what on the surface seems, a very small amount of information and extrapolate it very quickly. A good example would be how a tennis player reacts to return a fast serve, the unconscious brain takes in lots of sensory information from the servers body position and ball toss and seemingly without a thought moves to the position where the ball can be hit and returned over the net. All this happens in fractions of seconds. Gladwell calls this ability 'thin slicing'. He puts foward the idea that the more we have practised and mastered a particular skill the better we become at thin slicing information. He asserts that because our brain, through its learned experience of these very specific experiences, can effectivly short cut through the sensory information and make super fast decisions in fractions of seconds i.e. in the blink of an eye or even faster. We all wonder why Rodger and Rafa seem to have so much time when returning a serve, now it becomes obvious, their abilty to thin slice the information and move even before the ball is hit, means that added fraction of a second seems like a lifetime.

This theory makes a lot of sense, we know as humans we all live in our own world of perception, experiencing life through our own very specific filters. We all make assumptions about the world we live in or we'd never risk never making it out of bed in the morning. Imagine waking up and trying to decide if the ground was going to be there or not! We assume it is and get up - well, at least its never failed me thus far. When we meet or work with people who have mastered this in an area of life we are interested in it can be a fascinating experience. I have been struggling with an injury for a couple of months, and this week I went to see my physiotherapist, Tim Cruise-Drew. He specialises in working with runners and triathletes, so he has the experience of seeing and treating probably a couple of thousand of athletes across his career. This helps him to thin slice the information he is seeing - its the tiny, inperceptual details that he is aware of, that other physios may not pick up or misinterpret, that make the difference to his ability to identify the source of the injury. Thanks Tim, your insights are making a difference already!

Its what I call the difference that makes a difference. How does this relate to an endurance athlete's performance? According to Gladwell, there seem to be lots of ways that thin slicing works - here are just a couple of thoughts. A few seconds can be the difference between a podium position and 20th place. Think about how much faster you have riden a bike course after you have done it a few times. Depending on the course the difference between riding it for the first time and and the second can be many minutes. The more we learn about the course the faster we are able to thin slice the information we recieve from it and the faster we can go, seems obvious... right? What about the times when you have just gone with the flow in a race and suprised yourself with your performance? Sometimes those thin slices of information provide what we might call a gut reaction. If you'd have stopped to consciously analyse what was going on you might have talked yourself out of it. I remember chatting to an athlete that ran a marathon and on his way broke his 10k, 10 mile and half marathon PB, on the way to his marathon PB. When I asked him about it after the race he told me he had forgotton his watch and just ran as fast as he felt his body would allow him. I am not suggesting we all throw our Garmin's away - just become aware of the potential of the thin slice :-)