Malcolm Gladwell is an author and public speaker. Although he is not a technologist, the topics he writes about are widely applicable. He is informative and entertaining to listen to. A collection of his speaches have been listed below along with some notes about how they might apply in professional specializations such as Operations and Site Reliability Engineering.
Gladwell talks about one of the chapters from his book Outliers to illustrate how failures in cockpit communication can lead to catasrophic outcomes in commercial aviation. In his talk he discusses Avianca Flight 52 and Air Florida Flight 90 to demonstrate how subtle human errors rather than engineering failures ultimately led to the plan crashes.
This story is relatable in a number of ways:
Similar to the analysis of plan crases, the software industry has it's own hierarchical structure that can interfere with communication and lead to catastrophic failure. Age, race, gender, and job title can all be factors in how well communication functions throughout the product development lifecycle. In an industry where communication must flow between product managers, developers, testers, documentation, and sales there are often barriers to communication which leave certain job functions with less input or authority of how decisions are made. The software industry has tried to improve the situation by inventing the role of DevSecOps to introduce many of these roles earlier on in the develpment process, but it tries to address a human problem with a technical solution. In the end, developers try to assume too much responsibility and expertise rather than extending communication and working more closely with other roles who have the appropriate depth and expertise in that area.
In his talk at The New Yorker Conference on May 8th, 2008 Malcolm Gladwell talks about the challenges of hiring and interviewing in the modern business environment. He talks about how the draft process in professional sports frequently has no correlation to how sucessful an athlete will actually be in their professional career.
Why is this important:
When we interview potential candidates, we often use technical interview questions or programming problems to determine how qualified a candidate is for the job. However, the ability of a candidate to answer these questions is often no more indicative of their future success than measuring how high a basketball player can jump during the scouting and drafting process.
In this talk given in 2003, Malcolm Gladwell discusses topics from his book Blink. By relating a story about Kenna Zemedkun, a musician who was loved by experts but failed to break through in radio market. Other examples given in the talk are the Pepsi Challenge, Aeron chairs, and various forms of market research are wrong.
The important message I took away from this talk was that subject matter experts can often conciously make informed and correct judgements about their areas of expertise when prompted. Non-experts, on the other hand, lack the vocabulary to articulate the reasons for their preferences, which often causes their decisions to be heavily influenced toward ideas that they are able to articulate and explain using the vocabulary they do have.
At the TIBCO NOW 2014 conference, Malcolm talks about how attitude affects people's ability to drive or adopt transformative changes. He talks about the story of Malcom McLean, an American businessman who transformed the transportation business through the use of intermodal shipping containers.
The story of how shipping containers became widely adopted has a lot of similarities to the use of Kubernetes and containers in cloud computing. The adoption of these ideas as well as the underlying efficiency drivers have brought about a fundamental shift in the way companies run their operations.
In this talk at the New Yorker Summit on May 5th, 2009, Malcolm uses examples of military battles to illustrate how miscalibration contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. For a similar talk, see his talk at High Point University in 2012.
The risk of miscalibration is an ever present danger in software development. As developers rely on metrics and data to improve their confidence in ever larger and more complex applications, they risk falling into the belief that they can anticipate any failure. As they perform security scans and automated testing, they can become complacent in the belief that they can prevent security holes. However, the risk of a catastrophic failure or security breach is ever present and any disaster recovery plans should account for all reasonable possibilities.
At The New Yorker Festival in 2014, Gladwell talks about how Marvin Miller, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to 1982, was one of the leading figures to bring about the extraordinary income inequality in 1975.
This talk is particularly interesting when considered in the context of salary negotiations and the trade-offs we make when negotiating our salary. Not all factors are monetary, and as freedom and flexibility become more important, salary offers and negotiations reflect a wider range of variables to consider.
In this talk and his book Blink, Malcom uses the shooting of Amadou Diallo an example of how stressful situations and time pressure radically shape the way our minds process information.
Beyond the tradgedy of Amadou's death and what it says about racism and police training in this country, there are other aspects that can be applied to everyday office settings. Situations where time is compressed and unplanned tasks are undertaken, the opportunity for snap judgements abound. This is one of the reasons why Change Requests require both an implementation plan and a backout plan to be provided in detail. Not only is it important for the approvers to review this information, but also for the implementer to reference it during a change to ensure that a planned course of action has been prepared ahead of time. If something goes wrong during the maintenance, the pressure of trying to restore service without a detailed plan often leads to mistakes which can make the situation even worse or unrecoverable.
In this talk given at the Dominican University of California on September 22, 2019 he talks about a story from his book, Talking to Strangers. He uses examples such as CIA spies, financial fraud, and other criminal acts to examine why people are so easily convinced to believe what they're told by others.