The weekend before Memorial Day, I rattled through Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. This short book does feel like an extended New Yorker article (which it is), but that is not perjorative. I found this book fascinating, and some ideas I’ve had in my head found words… well, Gladwell found the words.
I never read the magazine piece, but I had heard/read various characterizations of its main points, so the book felt familiar to me right from the start. Guess that’s a telling proof of how well Gladwell captured and reported on something which was a rising meme when he published in the late 1990s (book was 2000).
That said, the examples and the labels were new and intriguing to me, particularly (as a parent) those on the application of these ‘marketing’ principles to children’s television, both with Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. I knew Sesame Street was “educational,” but I had no idea it was so carefully planned (and tested!) to be that way. I’m even more impressed now… and I watched a lot of Sesame Street as a child!
Big Bird aside, it was Chapter Five that had me nodding. Titled “The Power of Context (Part Two): The Magic Number One Hundred and Fifty,” this section spells out the “social channel capacity” attained through evolution. Gladwell pulls together examples of book clubs, religious communities, brain size, anthropological literature, and Gore Associates (makers of Gore-Tex, among other high-tech fabrics) to make a single point: humans have the capacity to handle relationships within a group of, at most, about 150 people. Beyond this number, context changes and “people become strangers to one another,” in the words of one religious leader Gladwell interviewed. Another quote, from the Gore who founded the company: “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty.”
One of my goals is to work with a small enough group of people (even in a larger company) that the friction of communication remains low enough to avoid being a problem. So far, this has worked out fairly well, and I strive to work transparently enough to spread beyond that small group. Whether it works or not is something to ask my colleagues. Gladwell goes into further detail about “transactive memory.”
When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t remember most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them — in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex. … Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people.
Gladwell continues on to discuss how this plays a part in couples’ relationships with each other. However, this is part of what people mean when they talk about the ‘institutional memory’ of a company. Knowing who knows what is often half the battle. Making this kind of memory available beyond small groups, and even beyond the limits of individuals’ employment with the company, is the whole kit-and-kaboodle that has come to be called “knowledge management.” All because of The Rule of 150?!?
I’ll have to move this book to the top of my wife’s ‘to read’ pile, which is where I borrowed it from. Find your own copy… it’s a quick, worthwhile read that gives you a new way of thinking about patterns you’ve seen all your life.