Gladwell at Gartner Event: Look out for Radical Problem Superspreaders
The best-selling author and host of the “Revisionist History” podcast explored leadership lessons from the pandemic, cyberattacks, bank robberies and more
Author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell probably wasn’t an obvious choice to give a guest keynote for an audience of IT leaders gathered this week at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida. His books and talks mostly focus on looking at social issues from different perspectives.
But a packed ballroom of CIOs and other IT leaders learned that a conventional approach to problem solving could lead to catastrophe – especially when dealing with “radically asymmetrical” problems that don’t adhere to a normal curve of distribution. Gladwell cited several events that defied conventional wisdom, where the culprit was an exception.
From a faulty assumption by health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, to a particularly gifted North Korean cybercriminal, to LA’s explosion of bank robberies in the 1990s – homing in on outliers may have produced better outcomes and solutions, Gladwell contends.
While a normal distribution would be the default way of viewing a problem, where the offenders fit into a category along with many others, radically asymmetrical problems defy a normal distribution, placing the culprits on the extreme.
Read the full story from AI Business' sister publication Information Week.
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