Full Circle Associates

We grabbed some seats early for Malcolm Gladwell's keynote on Blink. Ten minutes before the start the room is pretty full. I'm going to try and liveblog this session, but I won't be doing too much liveblogging. I've been attached to a keyboard too many hours a day lately. I am trying to take more pictures to scan for the gender ratio. It seems slightly higher than the last session.

Malcom Gladwell

I’m happy to be here. There is a bridal show at the other end of the convention center. I walked into that and went into the room and said huh, the blogosphere is different. Only goes to how first impressions can be misleading

First book was about social power. People’s position in social networks can matter as much or more than political hierarchies. I’m addressing a room rich in social power, so blog my new book. It is called Blink and is about rapid cognition.

It is a whole series of stories about this asking us to take it more seriously. Today I’ll talk about one of the stories. The story is about a woman named Abbie Conant who played the trombone. She was just starting her career in Europe. Applied to the Munich Philharmonic, one of the oldest in Europe, ruled by the oldest of the old school, crusty of the crustiness with ideas about how and who should play classical music – white, German men. Any thing else was a deviation. There may be one or two women playing the harp. She applies and gets a letter back started, Dear Herr Conant, we’d like you to audition. She things of the error and thinks nothing of it. She packs her bags to attend the audition. It is in a room like this, but grander, being Munich. 33 people selected to audition with a war horse audition piece. That day they put up a screen so the auditioners can’t see those auditioning. Very rare, but one of the 33 was a relative of someone on the committee, so they put up a screen to take the issue of the table. Abbie is 16. She thinks she blows it. Despondent. Cracked a G. Once in a lifetime opportunity blown. She packs up her trobone and heads downstairs to leave.

What she doesn’t know is the maestro is blown a way. Classic snap judgement. He was like, wow, this is who I want, what a player. He is so ecstatic he sends the remaining 17 people away. He turns to his assistant and tells him to go bring him back so he can meet the new first trombone. The maestro wants to meet you? Why? Because you blew him away. She steps out into the audition room and dead silence. All she hears is Mein Gott. They were expecting Herr Conant. They got Frau Conant.

The very similar thing happened years after year in the US. Maestros would say men are inherently superior musicians. How do you know? Auditions. The men are always better. What more objective way? IF the men are already selected, what else would we conclude. Articles written pondering why men were inherently better musicians. Natural affinity between white males who play and those who wrote? The hands? Power and brio? Hypothesis, but no one ever questions the fundamental premise.

In the early 1980s a strange thing happened in the US> They formed a union. One of their demands, way down the list, is we’d like to have the screen up all the time for auditions. We think this problem of favoritism is lingering. Lets just get rid of it.

The moment they put the screen up they start hiring women all the time. Now the percentage rises from 5% to 50% which suggests that women have won the majority of auditions which suggests women are inherently superior. The evidence of the maestro’s eyes were corrupting the evidence of their eyes. Interfering with their ability to make fair judgement

When we think about snap judgements we think of them being transparent and simple. Occupying the margins of our thinking. When you peel away, there is an enormous amount of complexity beneath the surface.

What can we learn from classical music and screens?

The first and most obvious is that snap judgements are the way we make sense of the world. My assumption was that when you had auditions, you listened, you took notes, recorded, think and over some long deliberative process you made a decision. Conscious, deliberate decision making. Audition belong to this kind of thinking (snap). Some make up their mind when the musician is warming up. Even as something as extraordinarily complicated as auditioning belong to the category of snap judgement.

Suppose I divide this room down the middle. Over here I’d like you to take a course with Professor smith. At the end of the course you will fill out an evaluation of Prof Smith. On the other side I’ll just show you a one hour video. The evaluations were the same. Over the course of the course, constantly readjusting, and having a nuance understanding of Prof smith. But in fact you made up your mind in the first hour and stuck with it.

Let’s play with this. I show you a half hour. Same evaluation. 5 minutes… same evaluation. Now its getting a little bit creepy, particularly if you are smith. IN 5 minutes you reached your conclusion.

Lets show you 5 seconds with the sound off? Still largely. You think this is a long drawn out decision was false. IT belonged to the snap judgement and that conclusion stuck. Good example at how striking this is and how good we are at thinking what we are doing is deliberate and conscious.

Lesson #2. The Maestro was a bad decision maker. He thought he was doing good, but he was terrible. His feelings about women impaired the way he made decision in ways that he was unaware of. If you had gone to him and noted that he had never hired a woman and say he is sexist, the Maestro would have said “How dare you impugn my expertise, dare to suggest that I am making a decision upon something as irrelevant as gender.” But the maestro is wrong. Thinking he is right doesn’t change the fact that in some profound way his judgement has been compromised. We are really bad at knowing the forces that influence our snap judgements and keeping bias out. These are fundamentally fragile decisions impacted by bias. Racial prejudice is an example

I got very interested in male height. So I called up 300 of the Fortune 500 and asked them how tall their CEOs are. Now we know they are white, male and really tall. The percentage of CEOs over 6.2 was over 60%. In the population it is 3.9%. If you gather all the CEOs in a room it looks like an NBA reunion. Why are they getting appointed to the corner office? The arguments people will give: unconscious association with height and leaders, people who are tall have self confidence which serves them well. Don’t find that compelling, but there is something to it. There were times in human history when it was important for our leaders to be tall and male. 500,000 years ago in a clan, we’re 4.9, but Thor is 6.6. Clearly he has a better trajectory with the club and can see over the grass.

Let’s focus on a second, more pertinent point. Do you think that boards of directors are conscious of their decision bias in form of the tall white guy? If this was the annual meeting of the boards of the American Association of Boards of Directors. If I said I had done an analysis that in 71% OF THE CASES YOU gave the job to a white tall male, is there some conscious policy? An affirmative action for this stigmatized group? You would turn red and say how dare you come here to our meeting and impute our search decisions. Coincidentally that they are tall. Height is not the most important thing, but it is foolish to suggest that it has not biased the selection process in favor of the tall in a way that the decision makers are unaware of. We are not good at knowing when our snap decisions have been hijacked.

Lesson #3:
The maestro was a bad decision maker but we made him into a better decision maker by taking information away from him. What percentage of an audition is visible? Most of what you are picking up is with your eyes. Dress, posture, body language, nervous… things coming in through the eyes. Let’s say for argument 80% is visual. We take away 80% and he becomes a profoundly better decision maker. We have a powerful cultural of saying more data makes better decisions. That the quality of outcome is directly related to the quantity of information. When making instinctive decisions, frugality matters, that we can do more with less and there are dangers of giving people too much information.

Diagnosing chest pain is really hard. Accuracy diagnostic rates is low. At a certain point they are just guessing. There has been a movement to make ER doctors better decision makers regarding chest pain. You don’t have all day. The more you linger, the worse their case gets and this is the ER. So how do you help the doctor make a better decision? You take information away. If you limit a educator to just four pieces of info and take every other piece of data off the table. When we are faced with less we can see the distinctive pattern in a second.

Lesson #4:
The most interesting, to mind mind, is we fix the problem. It is not obvious we could have fixed the problem. None of us buy the idea that women can’t play classical music. We say the problem is the maestros, from Europe, sexist, fiefdoms. How are we going to fix this> Sit down with them and say they are sexist? Wait for them to retire and be replaced by pure clean liberal hearts? That is not a strategy for fixing the problem. That is a profoundly depressing solution. Who has time to wait 30 years. But suppose we think about the issue a different way. Instead of changing their hearts and minds, think about changing the way they perceive the problem. The problem in the musical world was changed the day they put up the screen. The Metropolitan had no women. They used the screen and they hired 4 out of 4 violinist. Can you imagine the strain on the hearts of the audition committee. That problem was solved right away, a profoundly important. We don’t have to be held hostage. Thinking creatively about the environment in which decisions are made.

Amadou Diallo story. Cops jumped to conclusion that Black young man in the Bronx was up to no good, he doesn’t run, not good, he goes for his pocket (wallet), he has a gun and they shoot him 41 times. Hugely bad snap decisions made in 7 seconds. All wrong. One thought is we need cops who aren’t racist. Fine, I agree. That is not a solution. How long would it take to eliminate everyone who makes an unconscious association between young black men late at night. Don’t know how to do it and don’t have the time. Some kid could be shot tomorrow? How do we attack that problem? In addition to changing hearts and minds we have to change the environment in which decisions are made. We have to give them a little help.

IN last chapter go through some of those strategies. Here is one. Police officers in group make poorer decision in groups than alone. Groups of young cops, young men in general, do stupid things. They feel emboldeded by their buddies. A cop by himself slows things down, is more cautions and is less of a risk to himself and his community. One cop in a car does not jump out of his car and race after a guy and have to make that quick judgement of friend or foe. No, one copy stays in the car, calls for backup, describes the situation ‘ what do you got? A guy standing in front of his apartment. What is the problem, well he looks like a rapist form lsat year? What does the rapist look like? A young blank man. Where are you?

Slow down and you remove the situation that created that bad judgement. That is the kind of thinking I’d like to encourage. Examine the environment we make decisions. To recognize cases where our snap judgements are compromised. IN those moments, step back and restructure the environment in which we are making decision. In doing that I think we can end up with a better and fairer world

Applause.

Q: How do you decide which information to take away?

A: Two answers. IN the heart attack, we used rational deliberate analysis to retrain snap judgement. There is another line of thinking that says it doesn’t matter what you take away, but that you take it away. Open Source intelligence gathering. People with less information, regardless of quality, tended to make better decisions than those who had access to more information from Pearl Harbor. The US failed to see the Japanese attack. If you just read the papers you would have a profoundly stronger sense of the attack, but with less information, they were able to see the critical papers. I think about that when I think about bloggers. Not having 6 months of analysis gives you insight you would not otherwise has.

Q: Email with Suroweiki, political elections are man dances, watching behavior rather than policy. How do you prevent the populace from making stupid snap decisions (elections.)

A: I’m a Canadian and I have limited understanding of American politics. Political decision making is weird. My arguments are mostly about cases where we are making ambiguous, time limited, high stake decisions. Political decisions are not ambiguous or time limited. So it is hard to make remarks, with the exception of my discussion about Warren Harding. I found that, on my book tour, to the extent that I’m speaking groups more reddish or blueish, any comment I make on politics gets me in trouble. Warren Harding got elected because he was good looking. I said he was one of our dumbest presidents but there was some competition. I was thinking about someone else. Who was thinking about our current president? Aren’t you a little defensive?

Q: How much is great information that is useful and how much just sits on the table. How many of these ideas in the book get adopted?

A: Cook County hospital was one of the first in the country to adopt the heart attack approach and was backed up with lots of data. But it is incredibly difficult because doctors have built their profession around the idea that if something is critical it must be complicated. What we are saying about chest pain is that it is not complicated. You are challenging the fundamentals of a profession, sot it is not easy. But having data to support the method then it is only a matter of time until the legal or medical community forces a change.

Q: What about college admissions. Some are easy, others are complex (UT/Harvard)

A: The notion that places like Harvard have that they can make a distinction between the top 20% of the applicants, who are they fooling? That test score difference is a useful prediction rate? Those predictions are so bad. They have no clue who is going to do well. The whole system is intellectually bankrupt. IN Canada I got a sheet from the province and ranked the schools I wanted to go in, and then I get a letter back in 2 weeks that tell me where I was accepted. Beyond a look beyond grades we don’t have clue so we aren’t going to try and make that prediction.

Q: Connection between Tipping Point and Blink. In the book why isn’t Kenna making the tipping point. How are the arguments linked?

A: I wrote this book to escape the burden of the first book. Escaping Gladwell, comma, 87, comma, wrote the Tipping Point. I am returning to certain theme that as a society we greatly overestimate our personalities and underestimate the ability we can change ourselves and our society by changing our environment. I do hope Kenna tips very much.

Q: You have great anecdotes. How do you find them?

A: I don’t know. I believe that writing is a fundamentally social process. You find out great stories when you have an idea you want to pursue then you tell everyone about that idea. That scary guy at the party. There is a lot of that. I could go through the books and tell you the name of the person that gave me the story. I have enormous faith in the kind, in how much gold there is to be found in random social encounters.

Q: I find that 100% of my snap judgements about people are wrong and they change over time.

A: It’s probably not true that 100% are wrong. When you meet somebody, there are certain things that all of us are really good at knowing, and things that we think we are good at knowing and are profoundly not. Everyone can make a judgement about extroversion and that would be really good. Judging open mindedness is much more difficult. Once you look at it that way. Sexual attractiveness you can do it like that. If you are making bad judgements there, I can’t help you. Help us distinguish between when we are good and where we need a lot of help.

Q: Now I’m second guessing. Do you see anything positive in trying to make snap decisions more of a conscious than subconscious decision.

A: If we concealed the defendant in trials we’d reduce the racial imbalance in judgement. A change in the environment profoundly change how justice is served.








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Malcolm Gladwell