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The Thinnest of Thin Slices

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 31/05/18 18:00
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Thin slicing is a concept I was introduced to by Malcom Gladwell in his truly ground-breaking book Blink.

Gladwell explains that it is a process of experience and learning from situations over time which provoke instinctive decision making.

His classic story is the fire fighter who enters a room which is too hot for the little fire he can see in the corner, only to realise instinctively that the fire is under the floor and he needs to get his team out before they collapse through the floor and die.

This happens in life all over the place but it happens in healthcare the most.

The clinical responsibilities in my job are distilling down and down and the most valuable part of my job now is the thin slicing of patients at first consultation.

In the ‘good old days’ I was tasked with seeing 21 new oral surgery patients between 2-5:30pm every Friday.

I learned thin slicing the hard way.

Of course, experience is nothing without purposeful practice, if you don’t consider the mechanisms in thin slicing, how to improve your skills in that area and how to reflect on the ones that go wrong you’ll never get any better.

But if you do, my god, is it a powerful tool.

I can thin slice trust pretty accurately now.

And that is a powerful and valuable tool.

I had a meeting recently which actually may have been the most important financial meeting of my life (to date) and my job was to thin slice the individual sat across from me to see whether I trusted them or not.

You can get good at anything if you practice, I truly believe that.

One of the things I practiced was thin slicing trust.

 

Blog post number: 1659

 

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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