Today I was eating at the Subway by Airborne School. A Major from [unit redacted] walked by and asked where I was headed. I told him Fort Irwin and he laughed right in my face saying “Wow you must’ve been last in your class. No tab and headed to Irwin.”

The above excerpt is from an email by a young Infantry officer I had the chance to mentor over the past few months. Unfortunately, he was dropped from Ranger School for failing a part of the assessment week; a fairly common occurrence for students attending the course. He was upset and embarrassed with himself, so we talked about how to grow from his “failure.” Having reflected on his vignette from the sandwich shop, I was upset and embarrassed for that nameless Major, so I’d like to share this as a cautionary tale for fellow field grades.

We’ve all heard someone say, “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover” but famed psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman says humans (and therefore field grade officers) probably can’t help it. For those unfamiliar with his award-winning book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes our mental operating process as a division of two systems; instinctive/emotional (System 1) and deliberative/logical (System 2).

System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So, System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy and tires easily … Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds it.

With this in mind, you can see the genesis of the Major’s failure. His system 1 produced a “draft of reality” for the Lieutenant seated before him. This “reality” was based on the patches, badges and the general appearance of this stranger. The collection of additional information, such as the Lieutenant’s next assignment, may indicate a system 2 effort to logically classify this officer among other previously developed mental models. However, any further deliberative analysis was clearly hollow. With an easily formed but unreliable story, “that Major” chose to ignore Mark Twain’s idiom that “it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Humans can, and often must rely on system 1 processing because not every interaction allows for a deliberative analysis. There is also a robust body of research supporting instinctive decision-making.  However, a short conversation with the Lieutenant would have revealed that he graduated in the top 10% of all ROTC Cadets, was the IBOLC honor graduate, and received multiple accolades for his performance in other courses. Instead, our peer ended up as “that Major” who thinks he knows this Lieutenant based on a limited sample of irrelevant data.  This demonstrated how ignoring the necessity to occasionally slow down and engage system 2 processing, can cause us to miss opportunities to learn and make better-informed decisions.

Field Grade Leaders everywhere can apply this lesson over the summer, when personnel of all ranks, backgrounds, and experiences arrive to new units. Consider this: first impressions work both ways. The nameless Major from our tale has probably already forgotten the interaction with this new Lieutenant, but it’s something the Lieutenant will never forget.

How will you balance your own system 1 and system 2 processing the next time you meet a new member of your team? How much do you really know from scanning an ERB/ORB or badges on a uniform? How much more might you find out if instead you say, “Welcome to the unit, now tell me what unique values and experiences you are going to bring to this team?” Then, let System 2 get to work!

MAJ Brandon “BK” Kennedy is currently serving a utilization as a Training Officer in the G-3/5/7, HQ TRADOC. An Infantry officer, he has served in Conventional, Training, and SOF formations with operational experience in Afghanistan. He completed his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) as a member of the MG James Wright Fellowship at the College of William & Mary.