In his book A Whole New Mind, author Daniel Pink suggests that the Information Age, the heyday of the logical, sequential, left brain, is ending. In its place, we are entering the Conceptual Age, one that will, increasingly, cater to, and be served by, the intuitive, synthesizing right brain. One of the reasons for this transition may be the accelerating rate of change. The left brain’s methodical processes are thorough, but they can also be painstakingly slow. In a world in which technologies emerge and change seemingly overnight, that’s a luxury most of us can no longer afford. Accuracy still counts, but unless you are planning a moon shot or picking wild mushrooms absolute certainty at the expense of timeliness can be costly.

Fortunately, the human mind is equipped to effectively balance speed and accuracy. The tools are in the brain’s right hemisphere, which makes intuitive leaps by analogy and pattern recognition. Even in unfamiliar circumstances your right brain recognizes similarities you can use to guide yourself toward smart choices. You can then turn those intuitions over to the "logical left" for verification and still save time over a primarily left-brained approach.

Several years ago I got see how effortlessly the right brain works, as customer after customer tried to exit a store by pushing a door that actually opened inward. The designer had put matching horizontal handles on both the outside and the inside of the glass door, apparently forgetting that we’ve all been trained to pull a vertical handle and push a horizontal one. The customers’ right brains were telling them to push in order to get out. In this case, that was an incorrect choice, but the fault wasn’t the customers’; it was the designer’s.

If you want an example of just how ineffective the left brain can be, just look at many product manuals. Too often, they are technically precise yet virtually unusable. Successful products tell us how they work, at least at a basic level. Components look like what they are. Symbols, shapes, and positioning of buttons, tell us what each one does, drawing on our previous experience. In other words, they inform our right brains by analogy.

Similarly, effective technology marketing speaks, at least in part, to the right brain. It tells a story. While aspects of the product itself—its bits and bytes and speeds and feeds—may be important in the later phases of decision-making, by the time that happens many contenders will have been eliminated. The finalists will very likely be those that appealed, to some extent, to the synthesizing right brain by presenting scenarios, analogies, and, yes, story. Bottom line: the more effectively you understand the observer’s world and put him or her in the picture with your solution, the more likely you are to still be in the running when the left-brained part of the process begins.