The Chainstore Paradox, Blink, and Think

As I was reading up on the Chainstore Paradox I came across an interesting point on the economy of decision effort which classified decision making effort into 3 levels

  1. Routine
  2. Imagination
  3. Reasoning

At the Routine level decision making is requires little effort as decisions are typically arrived at by default in this situation. At the Imagination level the decision making requires more effort and the ability to see oneself in the opponents position, it is here that the majority of decision making in business is made due to the additional costs of moving to the next level of decision making, Reasoning. Interestingly moving from the imagination level to the reasoning level may not yield better results, especially if the computational complexity introduced is prone to error or bias.

Determining at what level to make a decision is a real skill. I have read a couple of contrasting books on this subject, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Think by Michael LeGault. It is the decision, whether to approach a decision with the intuitive thinking promoted by Gladwell or the critical thinking promoted by LeGault, that is of interest to me. In the end I guess it comes down to situational factors, what is the timeframe for the decision, the relative costs, and ability to change a decision when more information is known.