Gladwell at Gartner Event: Look out for Radical Problem Superspreaders

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 IoT World Today’s sister publication Information Week.