Artur: I still can't send it to you!

Tue Mar 4 07:45:47 PST 2003

Artur:  I have tried replying to your e-mail and putting in the address
separately.  It get the following response every time.

"This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

Each of the following recipients was rejected by a remote mail server.
The reasons given by the server are included to help you determine why
each recipient was rejected.

    Recipient: <artsilva at mail.eunet.pt>
    Reason:    5.0.0 message unaccepted.. contact
postmaster at KPNQwest.pt"

Sorry to use the List, but I don't have another  route.

Larry

Larry Peterson
Associates in Transformation
Toronto, ON, Canada
416.653.4829

larry at spiritedorg.com
www.spiritedorg.com

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>From  Tue Mar  4 17:40:15 2003
Message-Id: <TUE.4.MAR.2003.174015.0900.>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 17:40:15 -0900
Reply-To: chay at alaska.com
To: OSLIST <OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU>
From: Heidi and Dan Chay <chay at alaska.com>
Organization: Horizon Mediation Services
Subject: The Tipping Point
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=Windows-1252
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

Hi,

I shared the following to the learning-org list last night, and Artur
read it and invited me to share it here as well.

Dan Chay

Hi LO my virtual friends,

On the possibility you haven't come across the book already, I thought I
might share with you a quick summary/interpretation/taste of "The
Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," by Malcolm
Gladwell (2000): http://www.gladwell.com/ .

Evidently Gladwell was a reporter for the Washington Post, and since
1966 has been a staff writer for the New Yorker.  This book of 275 pages
plus endnotes is an easy and pleasurable read.

Gladwell builds his observations around the metaphor of an epidemic.
Using a myriad of entertaining academic and anecdotal examples, he
observes three primary categories of variable that can "tip" a linear or
close-to-equilibrium dynamic into geometric or exponential growth. Under
each category below, I've included a number of excerpts.

1) "THE LAW OF THE FEW"

This refers to the observation that typically a few highly interactive
agents may be the key to "tipping" an epidemic-like dynamic.  These may
be identified as: infectious agents, messengers, umlomo, connectors,
people who bridge identity groups, opinion leaders, "otherness"-people,
mavens, salesmen, etc..

"...a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few
steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special
few."

"...the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on
the involvement of people with a rare set of social gifts."

"...Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world
together."

"They are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because,
for one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds
and subcultures and niches."

They care: "I love my clients, okay?  I'll bend over backwards for
them," Gau said. "I call my clients my family. I tell my clients, I've
got two families.  I've got my wife and my kids and I've got you."

2) "THE STICKINESS FACTOR"

Very small changes in the expression of the message, content, disease,
etc., can make a huge difference in "stickiness" or fruitfulness.

"Winston tastes good ..."

"If they couldn't make sense of what they were looking at, they weren't
going to look at it."

"At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow
complicated plots and subplots.  But the narrative form, psychologists
now believe, is absolutely central to them."

"There is a simple way to package information that, under the right
circumstances, can make it irresistible.  All you have to do is find
it."

3) "THE POWER OF CONTEXT"

Very small, not-intuitive changes in the surrounding environment can
make a huge difference in tipping an epidemic-like dynamic.

"...human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they
may seem."

"But the lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just
sensitive to changes in context.  We're exquisitely sensitive to them."

"It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's
equilibrium."

"The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from
a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment."

"...what we think of as inner states -- preferences and emotions -- are
actually powerfully and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly
inconsequential personal influences..."

"...there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm
our inherent predispositions."

THEORY ESPOUSED VERSUS THEORY-IN-USE (My interpretive heading.)

What are the variables that really make a difference?

"If I asked you to describe the personality of your best friends, you
could do so easily, and you wouldn't say things like "My friend Howard
is incredibly generous, but only when I ask him for things, not when his
family asks him for things..." "...when we think only in terms of
inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we're deceiving
ourselves about the real causes of human behavior."

"The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and
all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we
process information.  Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental
Attribution Error, which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to
interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the
mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits
and underestimating the importance of the situation and context.  We
will always reach for a 'dispositional' explanation for events, as
opposed to a 'contextual' explanation."

"A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of
vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of
information.  The same is true of humans.

HOW DO WE CREATE A MOVEMENT? (My interpretive heading.)

"...in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create
many small movements first."

"She needed a place where women were relaxed, receptive to new ideas,
and had the time and  opportunity to hear something new....She also
needed a new messenger, someone who was a little bit Connector, a little
bit Salesman, and a little bit Maven....Her solution? Move the campaign
from black churches to beauty salons."

***

The question often is posed to this list, "How to transform an OO
(ordinary organization) into an LO (learning organization)?"  We've seen
all the ideas illuminated by Gladwell featured on this list: Otherness,
Fruitfulness, Liveness, Spareness, Openness, Sureness, Wholeness,
entropy production, leverage, etc.. Still, I came away from reading it
with some new insight.

Grins and best wishes,

Dan Chay

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