In 2000, planners of the Millennium Challenge war games approached Paul Van Riper—a career Marine commander whose relentless tactics during the Vietnam War gave him notoriety. They wanted him to play a rogue Middle East military leader who threatened American forces.

Van Riper’s “Red Team” was to face the US “Blue Team,” which had access to advanced computer systems, simulations, joint interactive planning processes, enormous databases, and “a formal decision-making tool that broke the enemy down into a series of systems—military, economic, social, political” (179). Theoretically, this was to enable careful thinking to control the progress of war. Van Riper, on the other hand, believed “that war was inherently unpredictable and messy and nonlinear” (182) and that calm rationality doesn’t work in the heat of battle.

In the simulation, Blue Team sailed an armada into the Persian Gulf, issued ultimatums, and knocked out Red Team’s communication antennae. Red Team responded by using couriers to communicate, then sent out small boats to monitor the Blue Team’s ships, and finally launched a surprise attack, firing cruise missiles that overwhelmed the armada and sunk 16 vessels. In a real war, 20,000 soldiers and sailors would have died. Riper’s in-the-moment decisions beat the US military’s carefully thought-out logical plans.

In another example, improvisational comedy groups take topic suggestions from the audience and immediately perform skits that they make up on the spot; this form of comedy “involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot” (193). Yet improv is not simply random, and has rules that require hours of practice. The main rule is for the actors to accept everything that happens onstage; though this may seem counterintuitive, it results in gifted performances. 

Similarly, Van Riper gave his Red Team plenty of leeway to innovate in the field and didn’t hold long meetings where his teammates explained their thinking. Based on such examples, Gladwell argues that explanations—“verbal overshadowing”—often interfere with the ability to see a situation clearly rather than serving as clarification. It’s easy, for example, to recall a face but hard to describe it; in fact, the act of describing interferes with the memory of the face, thereby displacing it. More broadly, Gladwell claims that trying to think through a fast-moving problem interferes with the mind’s ability to generate sudden, useful insights. In the case of Van Riper’s victory, the Blue Team was so absorbed in the minutiae of battle that it failed to creatively view the situation as a whole. 

In 1995, struggling with a shoestring budget, the emergency department at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital was overcrowded with patients, many of whom complained of chest pain but only 10% of whom were actually having a heart attack. Medicine department chairman Brendan Reilly found that doctors’ evaluations of patients’ heart risks were all over the map; even when physicians administered extra tests and otherwise gathered more data, their conclusions were essentially random. Reilly used cardiologist Lee Goldman’s new decision-making algorithm that combined the readout from an electrocardiogram with three urgent-risk factors: “(1) Is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina? (2) Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs? and (3) Is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100?” (230) The results are 70% better at detecting which patients are not suffering a heart attack. Cook County was one of the first hospitals to benefit from the Goldman algorithm.

Both the Blue Team defeat and the Cook County Hospital experience demonstrate that having more information is not always better. For instance, psychologists who receive more data about an individual become more certain of their evaluations, but their diagnostic accuracy remains the same. Gladwell suggests that too much information can also become a hindrance, observing that when people suffer from information overload, they tend to avoid making decisions. A store’s tasting booth with six types of jams generated sales from 30% of visitors, but when the booth displayed 24 different jams, sales dropped to 3%.

Gladwell returns to the Millenium Challenge war games. After the Blue Team defeat, the US military rewrote the rules so Red Team was unable to use any of the tactics it had employed. Blue Team won in a rout, and the Pentagon believed its new system worked just fine.