by Doug Walton, PhD ~ June 28, 2008
If you are are interested in organizational and societal change, you are probably also interested in the dynamics of epidemics. And chances are good that you have read Malcolm Gladwell’s widely popular book, The Tipping Point, which postulated three rules that determine the rise of an epidemic.
After publication in 2000, The Tipping Point was its own minor epidemic, quickly becoming an international best seller. As a result, Gladwell’s three rules compelled many marketeers and organizational development practitioners to take new approaches toward influencing people to buy products and to adopt organizational changes. However, over the last few years, there have been some studies that cast doubt on certain elements of Mr. Gladwell’s theory, and I am going to review some of them below.
The Law of the Few
Gladwell’ first rule was “The Law of the Few,” which holds that there are unique individuals in society who are extremely good at linking people to each other and to information. Of these indviduals, there are three types, as follows:
Connectors, who are people that just seem to know everyone and who keep in contact with many people. Connectors enjoy understanding how people are related to each other and in providing value by introducing people who can help each other.
Building on the the six-degrees of separation notion, Gladwell envisioned that a few of us communicate with each other until the communication hits one of these “super nodes” in the network that then broadcast the message to many others.
Mavens are people who accumulate knowledge and know how to share it.
Salesmen are the persuaders. These are charismatic people who most people want to be like and agree with. They presumably have greater influence than the average person, and it is the belief in this type of connector that causes advertisers to seek out celebrities as spokespeople.
Gladwell’s theory suggests that connectors, mavens, and salesman are particular individuals who use their unique skill to trigger the epidemic. Clive Davis in the February 2008 issue of Fast Company says,
In modern marketing, this idea—that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends—is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims “E-Fluentials” can “make or break a brand.”
However, in contrast to the mainstream view, Davis discusses his interview with Duncan Watts, a network theory scientist. According to Watts, epidemics aren’t necessarily started by a handful of highly influential or connected people Rather, Watts’s studies and computer models suggest that epidemics are more likely to be started by a random person than a handful of super nodes.
[Watts] found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
The implications of this are somewhat exasperating for those looking for the new and innovative methods of speeding up product adoption curves. According to Watts, who has tested his ideas with some success, the best way to start an epidemic is still with traditional mass media blasts. Davis says, “The ultimate irony of Watts’s research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is … mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete.”
The Stickiness Factor
Gladwell’s second rule was “The Stickiness Factor.” This rule stated that messages that “stick” tend to get transmitted more quickly and more thoroughly through the network. Examples of sticky messages include popular jingles, catch phrases, trendy clothes, and viral videos. Usually, these messages must be simple, easy to remember, easy to communicate, and interesting.
The Stickiness Factor is similar to work done in memetics , which seeks to understand why certain elements of cultural meaning (memes) tend to be transmitted and others do not. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in The Evolving Self the persistence of memes depends (a) mostly on their simplicity in terms of low psychic energy to remember and replicate, (b) occasionally on their logic or internal consistency, and (c) occasionally on their utility.
The Power of Context
The third rule from The Tipping Point was “The Power of Context.” Gladwell explained, “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” Citing Kelling and Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of crime prevention, Gladwell recounted the lore around a dramatic drop New York crime that was allegedly precipitated by a vigorous campaign to clean up graffiti on the subway. Based on that example and others, he asserted that “an epidemic can be reversed, can be tripped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.”
Although quite a lot of attention was paid to the “broken windows” theory over the years, much of the attention became critical as it was discovered that crime also fell in other cities across the United States at the same time, including those that did not practice the broken windows theory. There are several other compelling explanations for the drop in crime rate during that time period. One of the most powerful has been Steven Levitt’s claim, in his book Freakonomics, that the decrease in crime was probably best attributed to legalized abortion.
That is not to say that context doesn’t matter. But its impact may be more of providing a nurturing soil for the change rather than stimulating it. According to Davis,
Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
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by Doug Walton, PhD ~ June 1, 2008
I take a lot of notes, apparently even at other people’s commencement addresses. Back in 2003, my wife graduated from San Jose State University, and a well-known local real estate developer named Barry Swenson gave the commencement address. He offered the graduating class nine guidelines for going on to successful careers. I was so impressed with his guidelines that I wrote them in my palm pilot, only to discover them again earlier today.
At any rate, as we’ve reached the graduation season, and this advice is probably applicable for anyone at any stage of life, I recount, in my own words, how I remember Mr. Swenson’s pithy advice.
- Use leverage. You don’t hear this one all the time, but, as I recall, Mr. Swenson was advocating the use of loans on appreciating assets like real estate to build wealth.
- Study. Keep learning and keep educating yourself.
- Measure. Keep track of important things. Measure your progress. We only manage the things that we measure.
- Save. Be judicious about what you spend your money on. Try to save it starting at an early age.
- Invest. Not only save your money, but invest it wisely.
- Timing. Be conscious of timing. There are right times and wrong times to do things.
- Join clubs. Network with others. Build good friends and get involved with worthwhile projects, even if they are not all profit seeking.
- Marry happy. Who you marry is one of the most important decisions of your life. Choose wisely.
- Depend on yourself. Don’t expect others to do everything for you. Depend on yourself and take responsibility for your own life.
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by Doug Walton, PhD ~ February 25, 2008
Military metaphors are normally frowned upon in the organizational change world. Instead, organism metaphors and words like empowerment, collaboration, and partnership are preferred. But a friend of mine recently brought to my attention the Maneuver Warfare Handbook by William S. Lind. Although it is primarily a book about military tactics and operations, this book also has some interesting ideas for organizational change practitioners.
Much of Lind’s book is built on a fundamental insight drawn from the discoveries of a scholar of arial combat named Colonel Boyd. Boyd researched numerous reports of dogfights during the Korean War and found that U.S. pilots were able regularly dominante North Korean pilots despite the fact that the North Korean’s MIG aircraft had far superior performance to the American’s F86. The advantage the Americans had was twofold: Not only could they see out of the cockpit better, they could change flight modes faster. This enabled them to adapt more quickly to the enemy.
According to Mr. Lind, “Conflict can be seen as time-competitive observation-orientation -decision-action cycles,” or OODA loops. These loops depict the ability of combatants to identify the changed situation and to switch to a new tactic quickly. The successive adaptations create an increasing advantage, until the opponent is unable to keep up and is subsequently overwhelemed.
In the domain of organizational change, the “defenses” that we encounter are largely cognitive, but we do know that the “frontal assault” of invariant mandates from management are largely ineffective. Instead, we have to design changes that will will provide incentives for the new behaviors. Then, we have to gather feedback as the change is rolled out and quickly adjust as we learn the countours and texture of any resistance to the change. How quickly the change team can learn and adjust to ensure that the change effort offers a truly better and more effective way or working will be a critical factor to success.
Of course, resistance also adjusts to the change effort. Thus, there can be no fixed schemes, no formulas or patterns. As soon as one method is deployed, the organization will also adapt to it, seeking to maintain the status quo. Each situation is unique, requiring a change design specifically attuned to the specific situation.
These days, learning is often considered essential for competing in the market. Since at least Nonaka and Takeuchi’s The Knowledge Creating Company was published in 1991, it has been often asserted “learning is the only remaining source of competitive advantage in the modern, globalizing knowledge economy.” The metaphor of maneuver warfare described by Lind suggests that it is not so much gathering knowledge as the ability to rapidly adapt that creates the advantage. Both organizations and change practitioners must quickly read the conditions, get oriented to them, and make new decision to act.
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by Doug Walton, PhD ~ February 10, 2008
One of the great things about blogs is that they can bring many people into the conversation. When I first encountered blogs a few years ago, I thought “What good are these? So many people talking about nothing.” But that is a misconception of the utility of the blog. Although there are many fine blogs that rival the most professional news organizations, the majority of blogs serve a different societal benefit—which is to enable more voices to be heard in the public sphere, whether or not those voices are “professional” or “objective.”
For many years, the International Systems Institute held and annual conference in Northern California, the Asilomar Conversation Conference, where practitioners spent five days in deep dialogue on various topics. Sitting around wood fire, or walking along the Pacific Ocean, we discussed a wide range of social change topics. Sometimes the conversation meandered. Sometimes it became divisive. People got frustrated and occasionally there was anger. But, most of the time, we got to know each other well and learned. Very often, there would be in a moment in the conversation where the struggle to understand each other would coalesce into a powerful group insight. We used to call it the group transformative moment.
This group transformative moment seemed to be a group Aha! moment that disrupted previous conceptions, replacing them with a new mental model. In a sense, this learning was a sort of personal growth, where one’s outlook on the world was shifted. Moreover, those who experienced it felt a connection to each other aftward, for years afteward.
We found, during those conversations, that reaching a better outcome, both in terms of the quality and productivity of the work done, had a lot to do with the conversational process, or dialogue. Of course face-to-face dialogue has its own unique aspects that change how people communicate with each other and what non verbal signals are used in that communication. However, the increasing pervasiveness of video, audio, and text communication introduces an arena that may also benefit from a dialogic approach, albeit one that is adapted to the particular features of technology mediated communication.
Clearly, there is a shift away from a condition where a relatively few voices (ie., major television and radio networks) engage in one-way, broadcast communications. Now, almost anybody with a little bit of technology can “speak.” The problem we have now is that everybody is speaking— there is a cacaphony of voices all communicating at once. Still, as bloggers and others interact, posting and linking to each other, they are engaging in an online form of dialogue. Not only is information being created, but this communication is an interactive process that creates knowledge among the comunity of dialogers. How much insight and knowledge is captured depends on the quality of dialogue that occurs, so, for a truly high quality, technology mediated dialogue in the public cybersphere, we have to continue to encourage the appropriate equivalent of dialogue.
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