In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell argues for using our "adaptive unconscious" that gives us an instant and sophisticated analysis of information to warn of danger, read the intent of a stranger, or react to a new idea. There are times that this is better than detailed research. In 12 Mind-Blowing Concepts From Malcolm Gladwell's Bestsellers, the Business Insider recently looked at some of the key concepts from his books.
Number two on the list was: Analysis Paralysis -- Information overload is worse than too little information. They wrote that it can be difficult to focus on only the most critical information to make a decision when there is too much. Examining a large amount of data makes it hard to weed out the irrelevant and confusing. The act of collecting more and more information is too often just a search for facts that reinforce assumptions made. Gladwell suggests that decision making can often be best performed with a "frugality" of information and we need to learn to recognize when enough information has been gathered.
The Darwin Awareness Engine™ is designed to support the quick scanning of content to find the anomalies that lead to insights for effective decision making. If you are spending a lot of time and energy collecting information, you are more likely to get too much as the focus is on collecting. If you are scan for interesting content and anomalies through the Scan Cloud™ within the Awareness Engine, the focus is on looking for the right information.
This act of looking, rather than collecting, is more likely to enable you to engage in another of Gladwell’s concepts with Blink, thin slicing. In this case he argues that our ability to gauge what is important, relevant, or meaningful from a very narrow slice of experience can often lead to insights. In other words, “spontaneous decisions are often as good as, or even better than, carefully considered ones.” The Scan Cloud supports this spontaneity.
With the Scan Cloud, the top 100 themes within a set of content are displayed in a manner that allows for easy sorting and investigation. As you scan over the themes the related themes are highlighted in yellow allowing you to see the relationships between them. Through any of the themes you can see links to the actual content that generated these themes and go deep into what you find relevant. As you mouse over the themes other related themes are highlighted so you can see relationships as shown in the close up of the Scan Cloud™ below.
The mantra of the Awareness Engine is to look, not search. Bypass the collection stage to go directly to decisions.
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