Think fast: You\u2019re the pastor. You walk out of a church service and are confronted by a member who is yelling at you and causing a scene. You aren\u2019t sure why, and can\u2019t tell if she\u2019s having a psychotic breakdown, is high on drugs, is demonized, or is just angry. A crowd of congregants has started to gather. How do you respond?<\/p>\n
What about this one? You\u2019re preaching a sermon, and a guy stands up and walks onto the platform and starts to loudly address the church about the end times. Now what? (And you\u2019d better be quick).<\/p>\n
Now, a question: In each of those recent, all-to-real instances did I use system 1 or system 2 thinking featured in the book Thinking Fast and Slow[1]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>by Daniel Kahneman? To explain, system 1 thinking is \u201cour fast, automatic, intuitive, and largely unconscious mode\u201d[2]<\/a>; it can include relying on instinct, rule of thumb, or prior learning. Conversely, system 2 thinking is \u201caslower, more deliberate and effortful form of thinking\u201d[3]<\/a> that engages deeper reflection and intentional use of logic.<\/p>\n System 1 thinking is used if I\u2019m pulling my car out of my driveway in the morning; but I need system 2 thinking if I\u2019m navigating a busy roundabout in London while driving on the \u201cwrong\u201d side of the road.<\/p>\n Often in church ministry (maybe more often in an urban environment?) there is a need to employ system 1 thinking. In a crisis, there may not be time to slow down and intentionally process a decision or direction. And any system 2 thinking that IS being used will lean heavily on system 1. Hopefully a pastor in this situation has enough experience or exposure to intuitively know what to do. Or if they don\u2019t, hopefully they\u2019re good on their feet.<\/p>\n But what about when there isn\u2019t a crisis? For me it\u2019s far too easy to default to System 1 thinking, not just because it\u2019s necessary, but because it\u2019s expedient; because I am a perceiver, not a judger, in the MBTI; and because I have over 10,000 hours of experience making church leadership decisions (and according to Malcom Gladwell[4]<\/a>, that makes me an \u201cexpert\u201d, right?).<\/p>\n The problem with expertise is that it can deceive a person into thinking she or he has an accurate gut feel about the right answer. Kahneman describes \u201can excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and (an) apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n We may think the heuristic (rule of thumb) that we\u2019ve developed or learned is a reliable source for decisions. We may trust the intuition that has worked before will undoubtedly work again. We may believe that our sense \u201cmust be from the Holy Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n And we may be unaware of it when we are totally wrong.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a core premise of this book, \u201cMuch of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition\u201d Kahneman says, \u201cand the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n This year we\u2019ve been assigned to read books like How to Read Numbers[7]<\/strong><\/a>, Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts[8]<\/strong><\/a>, <\/em>and Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error[9]<\/strong><\/a>.<\/em> Thinking Fast and Slow<\/em> joins these books that have made me question what I think I know, and to be a lot more careful with my instinct and intuition. As Dr. Clark has repeatedly quoted, \u201cAs the island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n So, I know that I need to better understand how wrong I can be, and I feel challenged to spend more time in slow thinking. But I don\u2019t want to discount System 1 fast thinking in my leadership. Without intuitive system 1 thinking I don\u2019t believe we would have the adventurous leaders Friedman was talking about in A Failure of Nerve<\/em>, because they would never take the ships out of the harbor for fear of making a mistake.[11]<\/a> Without system 1, system 2 might take over and create analysis paralysis, because there\u2019s never enough data, or consensus, or certainty to step into some things that God calls a church forward into.<\/p>\n Pastoral leadership requires thinking both fast and slow, depending on the situation, or one\u2019s experience, or what the Spirit may be doing in a moment (fast) that is aligned with the truth of the Word (slow). Instinct and quick decision based on prior learning has its place in church ministry. So does slower processing and deliberation.<\/p>\n The question is how do you know when each is appropriate?<\/p>\n Jim Holt of the New York Times suggests the answer might be found in Kahneman\u2019s response to the Malcom Gladwell question: \u201cIf you\u2019ve had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment \u2014 chess, firefighting, anesthesiology \u2014 then blink. In all other cases, think. [12]<\/a><\/p>\n \n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Daniel Kahneman.\u00a0Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/em>. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Jim Holt. \u201cTwo Brains Running\u201d. NY Times. November 25, 2011.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Kahneman, Daniel.\u00a0Thinking Fast and Slow,<\/em>\u00a016.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Malcom Gladwell. Outliers: The Story of Success. <\/em>New York: Little Brown & Co., 2008.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Kahneman, Daniel.\u00a0Thinking Fast and Slow,<\/em>\u00a017.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibid., 8.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Tom Chivers and David Chivers. How To Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News<\/em> (and Knowing When to Trust Them).London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Meyer, Jan, F.H and Ray Land. Overcoming Student Barrier to Student Understanding:\u00a0Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge.<\/em>\u00a0London: Routledge, 2012.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Kathryn Schulz. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. <\/em>New York: Harper Collins, 2010.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> John Archibald Wheeler.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick <\/em>New York: Church Publishing, 2017. 49.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Jim Holt. New York Times. Nov 25, 2011. https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/11\/27\/books\/review\/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Think fast: You\u2019re the pastor. You walk out of a church service and are confronted by a member who is yelling at you and causing a scene. You aren\u2019t sure why, and can\u2019t tell if she\u2019s having a psychotic breakdown, is high on drugs, is demonized, or is just angry. A crowd of congregants has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,2052],"class_list":["post-31502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-kahneman","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31503,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31502\/revisions\/31503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}