Don't "Blink"!

I just finished reading "Blink!" by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinating book. I was intrigued by the idea that snap decisions are not always bad decisions. As Gladwell says in the book, we've been taught that "haste makes waste" and "look before you leap", but we don't recognize our capacity for pulling together the many bits of crucial information at our disposal and deriving a competent and accurate assessment of the situation. In particular, I was interested in his remark that a two second clip of a teacher's performance can allow an observer to predict how "effective" the teacher will be rated by his/her students at the end of the semester. (Nalini Ambady) My connection to ID work is to wonder about the many steps we are asked to complete before we propose an instructional design solution. (learner analysis, structural analysis, etc.) Would a competent designer simply be able to "grok" the solution without explicitly going through all the preliminary steps? Hmmm.