Book review
The Tipping Point - How
little things can make a big difference
By Malcolm Gladwell
Published 2001
Review by Donald Clark - Epic
Gladwell takes a series of vertical subjects and slices
across them with a horizontal common denominator. Here he takes
the emergence of syphilis, gonorrhea, AIDS, crack cocaine, fashion,
crime waves, literacy learning, smoking, suicide and health education,
and looks for the epidemiological spread. What makes them contagious?
If we could apply this to learning, we may yet overcome the huge
resistance we face in schools and the workplace.
His now famous three agents of change are:
- Law of the few
- Stickiness factor
- Power of context
Law of the few - connectors, mavens and salesmen
The Law of the few claims that just a few well chosen people, connectors,
mavens and salesmen make all the difference. Connectors know loads
of people, they collect friends and acquaintances and have lots
of 'weak ties' i.e. friendly and casual social connections. In organisations
that want to spread a 'learning' culture, influential managers and
even the company receptionist may turn out to be more influential
than the trainers or CEO. Mavens accumulate knowledge and want to
share this knowledge with others. They're information brokers. I
suppose I'm a sort of Maven in e-learning. Salesmen are the seducer.
They can sell the idea to large numbers of people. They're persuasive.
This is convincing and the learning world could learn lots about
spreading the word if they took the role of others in the organisation
seriously. Some educators and trainers are connectors, mavens and
salesmen, but on the whole, very few. The trick is to find the real
evangelists within an organisation. A simple list of connectors,
mavens and salesmen would be a good start.
Stickiness factor -astonishing research from TV learning
This section is the best in the book. He takes Sesame Street and
Blue. By examining their research techniques he found out what stuck
and what didn't with their young viewers. This is a compelling read
for learning professionals. He shows how the simplest of changes
can transform a learning experience into real action. A practical
call for action is something that should be in all learning experiences.
The simple addition of a map in a tetanus jab medical experiment
made the difference between success and failure.
He uncovers the 'clutter' problem, where too much information destroys
retention. We all know how common this is in learning. One could
argue that it is the norm. It is vital that we learn how to make
our voices heard or we will sink in this sea of digital abundance.
The Sesame Street story is worth retelling. The research showed
that young children do not sit and stare at TV, short looks are
more common. In short, they watch when they are engaged or understand
and look away when they are confused. The researchers devised ingenious
ways to determine the learning efficacy of the content and fine-tuned
the show, its edits and ultimately its format in the light of this
research. They cut out sequences where the letters were too low
on the screen as the attention points are closer to the centre.
Competing movement and animation also destroyed attention. The research
is full of lessons for learning designers. How many learning experiences,
whether in the classroom or via computer screen really make this
effort - very few.
top
Blue's Clues is a less well known sequel to Sesame Street and proved
to be an even stronger learning experience for children. It was
half an hour, not an hour and eventually killed Sesame Street in
the ratings. It ditched the idea that parents watch these programmes
with their kids - they don't, so they took out the adult stuff that
made Sesame Street supposedly appeal to parents. It was also vastly
superior to Sesame Street in capturing children's attention. Its
single story line proved superior to Sesame Street's anti-narrative,
magazine format. It is now clear that narrative as an organising
experience is absolutely central to young children. They also found
that the presenter must speak directly to the viewer from the screen,
often in close-up. The more interactive the better with posed puzzles
and questions. The children wanted to participate verbally and become
involved. You open strong, then make them work, starting easy then
getting harder with layers of interest to sustain repeated viewing.
Adults regard repetition as boring, children don't, so Blue's Clues
did something that broke all the rules of television - it was repeated
with the same episode running for five days running. Their attention
and understanding actually increased with every repeat.
You can't help but admire the testing that the producers put these
shows through before release and the lessons for learning design
in general scream from the page. It's these lessons and this sort
of tinkering and design that makes good learning sticky.
Power of context - the magic number 147.8 and beauty salons
The book goes a little astray here and this essay on the famous
Giuliani and Bratton zero-tolerance cause for crime reduction in
New york has been superceded. Indeed, this book is nowhere as good
as Freakonomics by Steven Levitt (see
the review) and Levitt, as one of the smartest economists in
the US has serious academic evidence to support his radically different
causal analysis of the same phenomena. Indeed his groundbreaking
work on the supposed causes of the drop in crime in New York completely
overides the Gladwell analysis. It will shock and surprise you -
I promise!
However, the second part of his Power of Context analysis looks
at the role that social groups play in social epidemics. Book groups
are examined along with the fascinating research by the British
anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, who showed that we have limits on
the size of the social groups we can handle. The book springs back
into life with Dunbar's famous number (147.8 - commonly rounded
to 150). This is the number of other humans with which we can have
genuinely social relationship. He found that this held good in hunter-gatherer
societies and effective military structures. Beyond this number
the group has to move from informal to formal organisational structures
and techniques. Gladwell then looks at a religious group, the Hutterites,
who split into two groups when they reach 150. His second example
is Gore Associates, an astounding company with no titles, no chains
of command and no determined communications channel, a truly flat
structure. It would appear that peer pressure works better than
boss pressure. They also split off when a company reaches 150.
The smoking study will surprise smokers and non-smokers alike.
It gets to the bottom of the habit by looking at the correlations
between smoking and personality type, even mental illness, confirming
many non-smokers prejudice that you have to be mad to smoke. As
it turns out a few key people drive smoking epidemics at school
forward and many smokers, called 'chippers' are actually occasional
smokers. In fact, people don't really get addicted until their twenties.
Finally research from Judith Harris is rightly brought in to show
that peer influence is vastly more powerful than parental influence
and that most of the popular literature on parenting is quite simply
wrong. In other words, telling teenagers about the health hazards
of smoking is useless. The fact that it is dangerous encourages
them!
The final study is an absolute gem. He looks at Georgia Sadler's
attempts to get her community to learn about diabetes and breast
cancer. After failing miserably through the usual educational channels
she had an inspired idea. Use hair and beauty salons. Women spend
a considerable amount of time in them, chatting to people who are
natural conversationalists and very intuitive. This is why most
health education doesn't work - classrooms don't work. You need
to reach out into the real places where real people spend their
real time. She changed the context.
Gladwell likes tight, focused interventions that are amplified,
so do I. His book is a case in point. Bestsellers have the ability
to spread the word and often thrive on word-of-mouth.
To be honest, I'm still not convinced by the book's central idea
- that these phenomena have a small catalyst that 'tips' into exponential
growth. However, the articles, and the book really is a series of
articles strung together, all make fascinating reading in themselves.
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