The following contains excerpts from the book, The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell).
At our music school in Midland, Texas we believe that music is more than sound, it is relationships. Relationships and the subject of leadership work hand in hand, and the principles in this book are critical for successful leadership, both personally and organizationally.
The author equates principles that cause diseases to spread with how social movements are caused. Using key ingredients, 1) The law of the few, 2) The stickiness factor, and 3) The power of context, Gladwell shows how social influences can take on massive proportions.
“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do…The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”
“The stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes…Epidemics…are strongly influenced by their situation- by the circumstances and conditions and particulars of the environments in which they operate…The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.”
One of the most profound factors for students who are studying at our music school in Midland, Texas is that music enables and fosters community. Music creates an environment and context for our relationships.
The Stickiness Factor
Making small changes can make the difference between success or failure.
“They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television’s weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.
To encourage students to receive tetanus shots at Yale University, the ratio improved dramatically by making a small change. “One small change was sufficient to tip the vaccination rate up to 28 percent. It was simply including a map of the campus. With the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.”
In Sesame Street, they discovered the concept of the Distracter. “The Distracter showed that no single segment of the Sesame Street format should go beyond four minutes, and that three minutes was probably optimal.”
“We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas…There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstance, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”
We help our students learn core disciplines at our music school in Midland, Texas while, at the same time, help them to apply these disciplines to their unique strengths. The combination of established disciplines with their unique direction is what sets our teaching approach apart from others, and causes it to ‘stick’ with our students.
The Power of Context
“Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur…The Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect.”
To turn a crime wave around in New York City, instead of focusing on large-scale issues, leaders made small changes to the environment that ended up having a dramatically improved effect.
“Bratton turned the transit police into an organization focused on the smallest infractions, on the details of life underground…Bratton and Giuliani pointed to the same cause. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.”
By focusing on fixing broken windows of old buildings and cleaning up the graffiti on subway cars, the crime wave was reversed.
“Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment…The Power of Context says that what really matters is little things.”
At our music school in Midland, Texas we have a big picture framework, but are focused on minor details. This helps the student grow to their potential while at the same time staying comprehensive in their mindset.
“When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the context of communication, by making a message so memorable that is sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the Stickiness Factor. I think that both of those laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.”
Power of Context experiments have successfully shown “that it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.”
John Wesley, in establishing the Methodist Church, made sure that small communities were formed throughout his nation to foster and nurture new converts. “Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”
One of the most important factors at our music school in Midland, Texas is to understand music from a community dynamic. Music fosters community, and we encourage this through participation in ensembles.
According to studies, our brains can handle relationships of about 150 people successfully. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”
Military planners have also recognized this, finding that units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men. Other successful organizations found that “in a group of 150…orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts…Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.”
In the context of a community, we develop a Transactive Memory with the people we know.
“Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them…when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system- a transactive memory system- which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things.”
This is why divorced people can many times suffer depression. “The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one’s own mind.”
“‘When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable’, Wegner says. ‘Each domain is handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is continuous over time rather than intermittently assigned by circumstance.”
At our music school in Midland, Texas we encourage students to learn appreciate their colleague’s unique giftings, and rather than compete with them, to see how each participant completes the mission of the ensemble.
“It’s knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty. It’s the re-creation, on an organization-wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.”
The large company, “Gore had to break itself up into semi-autonomous small pieces. That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”