Malcolm Gladwell
Focussing on his latest book, Blink, Gladwell delivered a compelling address that managed to both repeat anecdotes from the book and share new content.
After a strange introduction by someone from SxSWi, he launched into the story of women in symphony orchestras. As any lover of classical music knows, the world of the orchestra is traditionally a world of men. Men are conductors, men are administrators, men make the calls and men choose not to hire women.
Even worse, the music world has the pretense of objective selection through the audition.
Strangely enough, male dominance of the profession has diminished at an alarming rate over the last twenty year dispelling any notion of inherent male superiority. From the early 80's until today, the number of women in orchestras has gone from less than five percent to fifty.
The reason this is interesting is that what changed was the nature of the audition. As part of an organizing effort the musicians insisted added a new element to the usual list of demands. Yes they wanted health care, better working hours, and stronger salary negotiation but they also wanted anonymous auditions.
Historically, screens were used in situations where a member of the applicant pool presented a conflict of interest for someone on the selection panel. Musicians wanted the anonymity because they were concerned that favoritism still lingered in their profession. What they didn't realize was the impact this would have on the gender makeup of America's orchestras.
Orchestras had what Gladwell calls a "my god" moment where they realized that all their assumptions about the skills of women were wrong to the point where they were now picking them more often than men based only on their ability to play.
The interesting lesson of this example for Gladwell is that auditions represent split-second decisions made more accurately with less information. Like many environments, audition panels decide who they like in the first few seconds. By removing information, the panel is able to eliminate the overwhelming amount of visual data presented to them and focus instead on what matters.
He also talked, as he does in his book, about the shooting of Amadou Dialo in the same context. From getting out of the car to shooting an innocent man the police took seven seconds to make a series of three horribly wrong decisions. While it would be nice to retrain these cops, there are situational changes that can be made to help improve the quality of the decision made in these important situation.
The main thesis of his talk, like his book, is that we need to learn to trust our instincts and think about what information we are considering when we make decisions.
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Who is this guy?
I miss Sam. That is all. You would have had a hell of a blog from Michael J Fox tonight.