Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.
Gladwell at Gartner Event: Look out for Radical Problem Superspreaders
The best-selling author and host of the “Revisionist History” podcast explored leadership lessons from the pandemic, cyberattacks, bank robberies, and more.
3 Min Read
Author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell addresses attendees at Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 in Orlando, Florida.Photo by Shane Snider
Author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell probably wasn’t an obvious choice to give a guest keynote for an audience of IT leaders gathered this week at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida. His books and talks mostly focus on looking at social issues from different perspectives.
But a packed ballroom of CIOs and other IT leaders learned that a conventional approach to problem solving could lead to catastrophe -- especially when dealing with “radically asymmetrical” problems that don’t adhere to a normal curve of distribution. Gladwell cited several events that defied conventional wisdom, where the culprit was an exception.
From a faulty assumption by health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, to a particularly gifted North Korean cybercriminal, to LA’s explosion of bank robberies in the 1990s -- homing in on outliers may have produced better outcomes and solutions, Gladwell contends.
While a normal distribution would be the default way of viewing a problem, where the offenders fit into a category along with many others, radically asymmetrical problems defy a normal distribution, placing the culprits on the extreme.
Normal distribution “is our default for making sense of the world,” Gladwell said. “When we look at data, it’s going to organize itself in that kind of shape. We have an expectation about the story that data tells us, and the expectation is that the story is going to be about the middle … My question is, what happens when we have a problem where that story doesn’t work?”
The COVID-19 Superspreader Conundrum
At the onset of COVID-19, one of the earliest reported largescale outbreaks happened after a Biogen event in Boston, Mass. Many attendees were infected and then traveled to various destinations around the country. According to a report in Science, as many as 300,000 people wound up being infected because of that one event. Gladwell said researchers believe the source was a single person -- a superspreader -- someone who was genetically inclined to release a much higher level of aerosols.
“This was the Taylor Swift of aerosols,” Gladwell said.
In this case, the source of the problem was an example of a radically asymmetrical one. Had authorities been able to focus their efforts on so-called superspreaders, instead of focusing on social distancing measures for the general public, the outcome may have been different, Gladwell says. Leaders could have responded differently if they thought in terms of radically asymmetrical possibilities.
What Leaders Can Learn?
Gladwell offered up other scenarios that illustrated his point about radical asymmetry, including a slew of bank robberies in 1990s Los Angeles, the ongoing opioid crisis, and one that hit very close to home for attendees: the case of Park Jin Hyok, a North Korean hacker at the center of several massive cyberattacks, including the massive 2014 hack of Sony Pictures.
“If you talk to people who are in the … high-end cybersecurity business, they will say, ‘Look, a lot of the time, all I'm doing is worried about Park Jin. I'm not worried about those hundreds of everyday hackers in Romania or Bulgaria. No, this one guy who had little crew somewhere in North Korea, and he's the one who keeps me up tonight.’ That is a radical and radically asymmetrical distribution.”
The number of doctors who overprescribed opioids in the 1990s was a relatively small subset of doctors. But those exceptional cases launched an epidemic of drug addiction still lingering today, Gladwell says. The slew of bank robberies in Los Angeles -- many of those were carried out by one gang. All these problems may have been better addressed if there was more focus on radical asymmetric problems.
“So, I would simply say to all of you as you go back home after this conference is over and you participate in society … When a problem comes up and people come up with solutions, just raise your hand and say, ‘Before we go any further, what’s the shape of the curve?'”
About the Author
You May Also Like
More Insights
