The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point describes a simple idea. Fashion trends, waves of crime and their decline, and so on spread like epidemics. Eventually an epidemic reaches the moment when it dies away or, conversely, takes off. This is called the tipping point. Gladwell gives examples of epidemics that broke out or subsided at a particular moment and uses them to explain the principles behind epidemics in general. To begin with, an epidemic needn’t be a bad thing. Most people will think of a flu epidemic, but the book includes favorable examples, such as the rise of a fashion trend or a book becoming a bestseller. All of them were marked by how quickly they took off, how contagious they were, and how small the changes were that set them off. Three agents of change determine the tipping point, whether the epidemic subsides, which can also mean it reaches equilibrium, or takes off. They are the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The Law of the Few

The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen are responsible for starting epidemics that spread by word of mouth. Who carries the message is critical to an epidemic. Shoes, warnings, infections, or a new film can be highly contagious and tip simply because they’re associated with a certain kind of person.

Connectors
 These are people any of us can reach in a few steps through a few acquaintances, because for one reason or another they can inhabit many different worlds, subcultures and settings.
 Mavens
 Maven is a Yiddish word for someone who collects information. Mavens are a storehouse of information and want to share it.
 Salesmen
 These are people who can persuade us when we don’t believe what we hear.

The Stickiness Factor

The Stickiness Factor says there are ways to make a contagious message memorable. Fairly simple changes in how you present and structure a message can have a big effect on its impact.

The Power of Context

Small, specific features of an environment can play a crucial role at the tipping point. People are much more sensitive to their surroundings than you might think.

The book mixes findings from economics and behavioral psychology with case studies. If you ask what I took away from it, the answer is quite a lot. I don’t intend to start an epidemic of any kind, but some of the ideas carry over rather well.

Groups, their size, and the rule of 150

Small, close-knit groups can multiply the epidemic potential of a message or an idea. Whether you want to start an epidemic or simply make sure your company can scale as it hires, keep the critical group size of 150 in mind. We can’t maintain the same contact in a larger group.

The number 150 seems to be the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, in the sense that we know who they are and how they relate to us. Another way to put it is that this is the number of people you’d feel comfortable joining for a drink without an invitation if you happened to meet them at a bar.

Gore Associates

The company, which applies the rule of 150 strictly, has a few other peculiarities.

• It’s a technology company.
• Its work includes waterproof Gore-Tex fabrics, Glide dental floss, and development for the pharmaceutical, electrical and automotive industries.
• There are no titles, however much people earn, whatever position they hold and however long they’ve been there.
• People have sponsors who look after their interests in place of bosses.
• There are no organizational charts, budgets or elaborate strategic plans.
• Pay is decided collectively.

We’ve repeatedly found that things start getting unwieldy around 150.

The rule of 150 creates room for peer pressure. Gore doesn’t need formal management structures in its small factories, with the usual lower and upper levels of management, because informal personal relationships work better in such small groups.

Peer pressure

The peer pressure you feel when the plant is inefficient or sales aren’t good is incredible. That’s how it is when you work in small teams where everyone knows everyone else. Peer pressure is stronger than a boss. Much stronger. People want to do what’s expected of them.

…the pressure I’m talking about comes from salespeople inhabiting the same world as the people in production. A salesperson who needs to fill an order can go straight to someone they know in production… There are two people, one trying to make the product and the other trying to sell it. They face each other and talk it through. That’s peer pressure. In … you won’t see anything like that because everyone is on their own. Production had 150 people who worked closely together, and you could feel the pressure to be the best and most innovative. Beyond the group that pressure didn’t reach, because they didn’t know the people outside it.

Military planners came to the same conclusion about a limit of 150. Their experience produced a rule that an effective fighting unit couldn’t exceed 200 men. Here’s the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who looked into the rule in some detail.

In my view this reflects more than the way generals exercise control and coordination from the rear. Despite all the advances in communications technology since the First World War, companies stubbornly remain this size. It seems more likely that, over centuries of trial and error, planners found it difficult for larger numbers of men to get to know each other well enough to act together as an effective unit.

You can, of course, have a larger group… but maintaining loyalty and cohesion calls for a complicated hierarchy, rules, regulations and formal measures. Below 150, you can achieve the same thing informally. At that size, orders can be carried out and discipline maintained through personal loyalty and direct human contact. That’s impossible in larger groups.

Broken windows, or why details matter

Criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling came up with broken windows theory. I find it thought-provoking because in development we often see little things and wave them away. According to the theory, those very things lead to bigger and more serious problems.

…crime is the inevitable result of disorder. When a broken window is left unrepaired, people walking by conclude that nobody cares and nobody is responsible. Soon there are more broken windows, and the sense of anarchy and the signal that anything goes spread from the building to the street it stands on.

According to the authors, relatively minor problems such as graffiti, public disorder and aggressive panhandling are all versions of broken windows. They are invitations to more serious crimes.

…thieves, whether opportunists or professionals, know they are less likely to get caught if they operate in streets where potential victims are already intimidated by existing conditions. If a neighborhood can’t get rid of an obnoxious panhandler bothering passersby, a thief may conclude that people are even less likely to call the police, identify a potential thief, or intervene if someone is robbed.

Conclusion

In the end I gave the book four out of five stars on Goodreads. I found it very thought-provoking even though it comes from outside software development and programming. There are parallels galore.