Fixable
How to fix the unfixable with Malcom Gladwell
June 10, 2024
[00:00:00] Anne Morriss:
Frances, I wanna talk about problems that seem impossible on the surface to solve.
[00:00:05] Frances Frei:
Oh, my favorite ones.
[00:00:06] Anne Morriss:
One of the things I love about the work that we get to do is we are often invited into situations where even just showing up with a sense of possibility. Even just showing up with conviction that progress can be made quickly.
I'm trying not to overstate this, but it can change the structure of the problem and the way people experience it.
[00:00:30] Frances Frei:
I think it's true when I watch an organization that has an intractable problem. We have no senior women and we have to go and have them graduate from high school at a different rate for us to have senior women or a company.
[00:00:42] Anne Morriss:
Like we gotta.
[00:00:43] Frances Frei:
It's a decade.
[00:00:44] Anne Morriss:
We gotta address the pipeline in high school, the second grade classroom curriculum.
[00:00:48] Frances Frei:
Yeah. So, and it just like, oh my gosh, I, the only thing I could think of is to go and do it there. It feels very intractable, but when we bring a, a sense of what we often refer to as can do lesbian spirit, but when we bring that possibility and optimism and rigor.
I, I find that people just gravitate towards it so quickly. At first, they're like super resistant 'cause they don't believe it's possible. And then it's like the clouds part and the sun shines in.
[00:01:18] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Yeah. I know we joke about it and we've joked about it on the show, but there is something very serious at the center of it, which is that you can't solve a problem until you believe that it is solvable.
[00:01:32] Frances Frei:
That's such a good point.
[00:01:33] Anne Morriss:
And part of the privilege of being an outsider is we get to come in with high conviction that the problem is solvable, which can be harder to access when you're in the middle of it.
[00:01:46] Frances Frei:
And we don't do it with false optimism. We do it with rigor and optimism, so we know it can be solvable because we've been able to pattern match in so many other places.
[00:01:59] Anne Morriss:
I’m Anne Morris. I'm a company builder and leadership coach.
[00:02:01] Frances Frei:
And I'm Frances Frei. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School and I'm Anne's wife.
[00:02:06] Anne Morriss:
This is Fixable from The TED Audio Collective. On this show we believe that meaningful change happens fast. Anything is fixable and good solutions are often just a single brave conversation away.
Frances, we have a very special guest today, someone whose work we both admire very much. We get to talk with the ultimate, rigorous, optimistic outsider today, which is the incredible Malcolm Gladwell.
[00:02:35] Frances Frei:
I don't know who pulled what string, but I'm really grateful for it.
[00:02:39] Anne Morriss:
Strings or pulled, we're just gonna leave it at that.
So just to state this all for the record.
[00:02:48] Frances Frei:
Mm.
[00:02:48] Anne Morriss:
Malcolm Gladwell is a prominent writer and thinker whose work often focuses on the counterintuitive implications of social science research AKA Impossible problems. So, you know listeners, you may know him from his bestselling books, Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point.
He's also the host of the very wonderful Revisionist History podcast, and he's the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, which helps us make this very show.
[00:03:21] Frances Frei:
One of the things I love about what Malcolm does is he not only addresses hard problems, and every time I listen to him, my mind opens and I see things differently, and his mind opens and he sees things differently and you know what he's doing, which very few people have the courage to do.
He has a wildly successful book, The Tipping Point, and he's rewriting it. Who does that? Who does that?
[00:03:48] Anne Morriss:
Uh, we do not do that. Yeah. Um, just to answer your question, he's coming on Frances as a master fixer on how to fix seemingly unfixable problems, things like effectively and fairly ranking colleges or how to move the needle on the homelessness crisis.
These are issues that he has written about or engaged with in his podcast where he's actually revealing pathways to solutions. Today we wanna get inside his brain and see what we can learn about achieving the impossible.
[00:04:22] Frances Frei:
I am so excited. Let's get into it.
[00:04:33] Anne Morriss:
Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to Fixable.
[00:04:35] Malcolm Gladwell:
Thank you.
[00:04:36] Anne Morriss:
So, I'll try to establish some, just some quick context for this conversation, because we could talk to you for hours about many things. But in our work, we are very interested in how to fix things and solve seemingly entrenched problems at any scale. But we're particularly interested in organizations.
You have an astonishing track record of telling stories and reframing problems in ways that create possibility where it seems like truly there is no room for progress. And the list of issues where you've moved the needle include gun control, homelessness, our wacky college ranking system. I think you, you probably would use stronger words, but these are all problems where we've kind of thrown in the towel as Americans.
[00:05:27] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:05:27] Anne Morriss:
And you fearlessly from our perspective, went after it. And I'm curious how you see your work from a mission standpoint. It are you setting out to create a sense of possibility? 'Cause that's what it feels like in terms of a byproduct.
[00:05:46] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah, I don't know how explicit it is. I certainly feel like there's sort of no point to doing what we do as journalists, unless you're gonna point the way forward in some way.
I always think of it, it this, it's a two part job. Job number one is identify the problem and job number two is to point to some kind of solution. And I think readers and listeners, they want that, right? That's, it's sort of like what they're waiting for. But I also, I am also a chronic optimist, so I can't help myself but try and come up with solutions even if, you know they might not work.
I think a even a bad solution is better than no solution at all.
[00:06:29] Anne Morriss:
Oh, for, yeah. It's all iteration. S,o what we'll say to people a lot is, is simply begin, just get out there and then there's a gravitational pull towards you know making progress in some way.
[00:06:41] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:06:42] Anne Morriss:
So, let's use the college ranking system as an example here. 'Cause we wanna ground this for listeners right away, and hopefully they'll walk away with some ability to create a little Gladwelling possibility in their own lives. So, for folks out there who are not devoted listeners of Revisionist History, at least not yet.
Can you describe the problem as you saw it?
[00:07:08] Malcolm Gladwell:
Well, I have devoted so many episodes of Revisionist History to my loathing of college rankings and my, and my concerns about American Higher Ed. But fundamentally, there's a conflict between two things. One is a very human and in particular a very American need to declare a winner.
Right. So, we really wanna rank things 'cause we wanna know who's on top. And I'm, you know, I'll say I'm complicit in this as well. I love nothing more than a good ranking myself. Who listens to endless sports podcasts, ranking the best players in the NBA? I do.
[00:07:43] Frances Frei:
I do too.
[00:07:43] Malcolm Gladwell:
Right? I love that.
[00:07:44] Frances Frei:
I do too.
[00:07:45] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yes. So, um, you know, so there's that desire and it runs into conflict with the problem in the case of colleges, that you really can't rank them.
What makes a college great is not really measurable, at least in a ranking system. Are some colleges better than others? Yes. Can that be captured by an institution like the US News in in using the methods they use? No. And then the further problem is that a lot of what makes a college good or bad is up to the student.
So you.
[00:08:19] Anne Morriss:
Oh yeah. It's the ultimate co-production of a certain service.
[00:08:22] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yes. It's like if you are curious and open-minded and enthusiastic, you can get a world-class education at any number of hundreds of American colleges. And if you're lazy and indifferent. You can go to MIT and graduate no further ahead than when you started.
So, there's this problem that we're trying to measure something that can't be measured and we're we're looking at the wrong dependent variable. The dependent variable is the student and you know, the time that's spent agonizing over a college choice should really be spent agonizing over asking people, what do you want?
Where do you find excitement?
[00:09:03] Anne Morriss:
Mm-hmm.
[00:09:03] Malcolm Gladwell:
Where do you think he would feel at home? What matches your personality, your character, your what makes you happy? Right? Are you gonna be happy in the city? Are you gonna be happy and off by yourself in a, like, those are important questions, but they have nothing to do with some arbitrary ranking system dreamt up by a magazine in Washington DC that wanted to sell copies.
[00:09:25] Anne Morriss:
So, you went after the, the fundamental flaws of this system and.
[00:09:30] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:09:31] Anne Morriss:
Tell us what you were going after.
[00:09:33] Malcolm Gladwell:
Um, well, I was, what I, I mean there were many, many different kind of, uh, stabs I made at this fundamentally though. What concerned me beyond what I just described was the idea that if you insist on believing strongly in a ranking system, you fundamentally distort the incentive structure for both parents, students, and particularly the institutions themselves.
That the rankings basically are biased in favor of schools that spend a lot of money closely tied schools that charge a lot of money. The ranking system rewards you for spending money. It doesn't reward you for necessarily providing a great education or particularly a great cost effective education.
And so they were dreamt up without taking into account the central problem with American education, which is that we're graduating a bunch of people who have thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, and we've created a system that just gets more and more expensive every year. The solutions to this are, there are many.
One would be, you know, I, I do this when I hire my assistants, which is, I, I don't let them tell me why they went to college.
[00:10:42] Anne Morriss:
Mm.
[00:10:42] Malcolm Gladwell:
So, I've removed the bias. So, to the extent that we get really worked up about where you go to college, because we think that employers have the same set of prejudices about colleges as we do.
Let's just remove the employers from the equa equation, let's say. Don't ask, don't tell. We did, don't ask, don't tell for the wrong thing. We were, we were so obsessed with like, you know, are you gay or are you united? No, no, no, no. We should have done it for the name of your college. Just don't, just you. If you wanna go to Harvard and pay 60 grand a year, you can, but you just can't ever disclose that to anyone and no one can ever ask you. Solve so many problems.
I'm more now obsessed with the idea of using lotteries for admission. I love that idea. Basically you just set a floor for your institution and each, each institution can set their own floor. If you wanna set the floor really, really high, you can. If you're MIT and you wanna say, look, you gotta be in the 97th percentile to apply, fine.
But then you just say, everyone gets thrown into a bucket. And then we pick out however many names we're gonna admit this year, and it removes all of the crazy biases around. You know, rich people getting in and children of alumni getting in and all that kind of stuff. It just kind of cleans the decks.
And also fundamentally, it also removes this kind of phony distinction that comes from being one of the lucky few who get in. So, you can no longer look yourself in the eye and say, I got into Yale. Because I am one in a million. No, you got into Yale 'cause you won the lottery. Right? So I mean, you were good enough to be above the floor.
[00:12:15] Anne Morriss:
To be in the lottery. Right?
[00:12:15] Malcolm Gladwell:
But yes.
[00:12:16] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:12:16] Malcolm Gladwell:
But you can't say, you can't look at someone who didn't get into Yale and say, “I'm better than you.” You have to own up to the fact you got lucky.
[00:12:25] Anne Morriss:
So, if we step back out to this question of problem solving, do you think of it as a playbook that you're following? You know, one, identify the problem and then kind of reveal the solutions.
Do you think about it in that kind of structured way, or do you follow what is interesting to you or, or something else?
[00:12:44] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah, I don't think it's that structured. A lot of the times what you're doing is you are inviting the listener or reader. The point of the exercise is to invite them to.
[00:12:57] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:12:57] Malcolm Gladwell:
Try and dream of solutions by alerting someone to a problem and explaining it.
What you're doing is you're creating a path for people to imagine, to use the college's example, there is no single solution for the problem, but what you really wanted for parents to sit down with their kids and just be able to have honest conversations about the choice they're about to make. The solution is really about can you get to that honest conversation or you, you know, like you mentioned homelessness, which is something I've returned to a bunch of times, but, you know, and my first thing I ever wrote about homelessness was in the New Yorker called Million Dollar Murray, and simply made the point that not doing something about homelessness is more expensive than doing something about homelessness.
That the homeless are you know, quite apart from everything else, we just wanna talk dollars. Somebody living on the street costs a lot of money. You may not realizing it, but you're paying for it, and to put them in a house will save society bump quite apart from the moral question and the.
[00:14:01] Anne Morriss:
Right.
[00:14:01] Malcolm Gladwell:
And the question, you will also restore their dignity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
A lot of people are thinking about this in money terms. That first thing I wrote on that was simply to those who think about this in financial terms. Just be aware. Your refusal to engage with this issue is costing you money. And then that starts a different conversation.
[00:14:23] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. well, what was so powerful.
[00:14:25] Malcolm Gladwell:
So let's.
[00:14:25] Anne Morriss:
What I think about that article too is the character Murray was so.
[00:14:30] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:14:31] Anne Morriss:
Vivid.
[00:14:33] Malcolm Gladwell:Yeah.
[00:14:33] Anne Morriss:
What do you think the role of kind of stories and storytelling as in.
[00:14:40] Malcolm Gladwell:
Huge.
[00:14:40] Anne Morriss:
Creating this opening of possibility?
[00:14:43] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah. I think it's hugely important. So to go back to that, that that article was called Million Dollar Murray, and it was about a guy, homeless guy who lived on the streets of Reno, Nevada, had a serious drinking problem, and the police officers, the people who you know, who picked him up in the ambulance, the people in the ER, the people, everyone in the world in which he moved in Reno, knew him and loved him.
[00:15:09] Anne Morriss:
And loved him.
[00:15:10] Malcolm Gladwell:
I mean that journey
[00:15:10] Anne Morriss:
One really came forward.
[00:15:11] Malcolm Gladwell:
That direction for him.
[00:15:12] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:15:12] Malcolm Gladwell:
And he broke their hearts, but they still viewed him as a human being. And all these people who loved him also were aware of the fact that he was costing Reno a fortune. That the inability of the city to deal with, to help him meant that he was shuttling in and outta the most expensive institutions in the state.
On a regular basis, namely mostly ER rooms, and they had a kind of two-part, a beautiful and powerful two-part response. One was from the heart, “I love this man. He's suffering”. One was from the head, “Why are we doing this? This is nuts.”
[00:15:52] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:15:52] Malcolm Gladwell:
Like just get the man an apartment and you know, have someone visit him twice a week and we're all better off including him.
That's when I, I remember hearing about him and thinking, “Oh right, this is the way to do it.” You know, you have to meet people who care. And meet someone who's suffering. If you're gonna accept the kind of conceptual argument about what's wrong with, with the way we think about the homeless.
[00:16:17] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. So if I'm listening to this, I'm not a professional storyteller, but I wanna get people's attention on a problem.
What advice do you have for me? And how much do I need to care about this story thing?
[00:16:29] Malcolm Gladwell:
The importance of stories is not just that they're stories, it is that stories are disarming. It is a way for us to put other sorts of obstacles and differences aside and I think that's their power. Now, if you could disarm in other ways, God bless. You should use that strategy.
For my purposes and for many people's purposes, the story is the best route to disarm people. I'm doing this project I, it was top of mind 'cause I was interviewing a woman yesterday who's a psychologist who deals with mass killers and like just the. The people who are on the absolute fringes of society, who in many cases we wanna kill, and she manages to have an enormous amount of empathy for them.
[00:17:15] Frances Frei:
Wow.
[00:17:16] Malcolm Gladwell:
And there is no way I can get anyone to have sympathy for a mass murderer unless I see that mass murderer through the eyes of someone who cares about them.
[00:17:28] Frances Frei:
Mm-hmm.
[00:17:29] Malcolm Gladwell:
Right? There's just no way's, no other way to do it. Now. Now maybe you don't ultimately agree with her, but if I tell you a story from that perspective, you will, for at least for a moment, forget all of your preconceived notions and biases and just see that person through the eyes of my subject, through the eyes of that person who cares.
That's, that's what you, that's all you can really ask for.
[00:17:54] Anne Morriss:
What role do you think your own mindset plays in your ability? To kind of create possibility or see possibility. I mean, maybe it's about seeing possibility in these problems that the rest of us just decide are intractable, impossible.
[00:18:12] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm. Well, it's rarely the people who know a lot about a subject who are despairing.
The despair is always those who know a little or not quite enough is maybe a better way of saying it. And so the trick is to dig deeply enough to find those people who know enough not to be despairing anymore, right? I'm writing this new book and I have a chapter about the marriage equality fight, and there's a moment in the marriage equality fight in like 2004.
[00:18:43] Anne Morriss:
Close to our hearts.
[00:18:44] Malcolm Gladwell:
Uh, where everyone was despairing.
It was really bleak. Defensive Marriage Act had passed a couple years earlier. Everything was falling apart all at once. And I interviewed all the kind of, many of the key activists of that era. And the the core people, I would say, how did you feel in 2004? They would say, “Oh man, I was just sparing. It was like falling apart.”
And then you, the conversation continues. You're like, “Well, I still thought we were gonna win.” I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” And so an outsider looking at that says, “They're all despairing. Oh my God, it's never gonna happen. It's too hard, blah, blah.” No, no, no. You gotta continue the conversation. And you can say, “Well, wait a minute.”
They're like, “Oh, no, no, no, we are gonna get there. We, they just thought it was gonna take 30 years.” But the other thing is, you know, will you fine with it? Were you still gonna be around 30 years on the fight? “Oh, yeah, yeah. We're not going anywhere.” You know, it's like, so you're like, oh, okay. So. I gotta be a little patient.
And it turns out we didn't have to be that patient at all. But that's the example of like, you find someone at the core who knows a lot and you have a conversation that goes beyond pleasantries and the superficial, and what you discover is, oh, they just have a different timetable, but they think they're gonna win.
Do not, you know, if you gave them, if you asked them to put money on it, a hundred percent, every one of them would've put their life savings on them winning someday. They just would've said it was 2030.
[00:20:10] Anne Morriss:
Frances. I feel like this is your relationship with your own trajectory.
[00:20:14] Frances Frei:
It is. It's, it's a hundred percent.
It's, you're just speaking to me the whole time. I believe in luck, the way I describe my senior colleagues, the Harvard Business School is the number one characteristics that they share is luck.
[00:20:26] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:20:26] Frances Frei:
The way they often describe themselves to me is that their number one characteristic is awesomeness, but I'm the sort of person where people say no to me a lot, and it doesn't.
I always say, I don't let the decisions of mortals get in the way of my life's trajectory. That just happened to be the decision at this point in time. I'm of course gonna keep going. Um, I'm not fragile to these things, so you're speaking my language in, in so many ways. The most recent book that we wrote is called Move Fast and Fix Things.
And so if I were to, it's how to accelerate that time, like if you know it's gonna work. Now we're, now we're just pulling forward the end zone. Like we're just pulling forward how long it's gonna take.
[00:21:09] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah.
[00:21:09] Frances Frei:
To get there.
[00:21:10] Anne Morriss:
Malcolm, what do you attribute your own ability and willingness to play the role that you do in the world, in addition to luck?
If I had to push you past luck, is it.
[00:21:18] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:21:10] Anne Morriss:
Mindset. Is it talent? Is it a set of experiences that shaped your worldview? What, what are the other variables?
[00:21:18] Malcolm Gladwell:
Well, you know, I, I have a lot of fun.
[00:21:27] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:21:28] Malcolm Gladwell:
I had. I will go back to luck briefly. One of the many things I was lucky in having was two parents who enjoyed their work and who communicated that enjoyment to their children.
My dad, and he was a mathematician. He'd get up every day and go to his office and he was, he was just happy. I mean, he wasn't grinning, but he was so clear that that's what he wanted to do. Right. And it didn't obs take him over. It didn't obsess him. It didn't, he didn't lock out his family to the contrary, but it just was like, it was clear that part of what it meant for him to be a fully evolved human in the world.
Was to have found something, an intellectual activity that made him happy. My mom also, she was a family therapist.
[00:22:16] Anne Morriss:
Mm.
[00:22:16] Malcolm Gladwell:
She just enjoyed it. She thought that sitting down and talking to people and helping them was just about like the coolest job in the world. I don't believe my mother made a dime. She would claim, she, she would say, we would say, “What are you charging people?”
Like, we're in a little small town in Southern Ontario. It's like the eighties, nineties. And she, she was told she had to charge, otherwise, you know, you're supposed to charge, right. I think she charged like $5 a, you know, a session or something ridiculous. It wasn't about the money. Right. And she had less than zero interest in that part of it.
It was about sitting down and, and, and the other thing that was interesting about when I observed my parents as a kid, it was that. Everything is a skill. You know, my mom is a great listener, but what I realized watching her listen to people was that listening was not something we're all born with. It was something she worked at.
[00:23:16] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:23:16] Malcolm Gladwell:
You learn how to do it.
[00:23:17] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I think that's a great myth that's out there, that you're either born with it.
[00:23:20] Malcolm Gladwell:
But that was part of why it brought her pleasure. It was a difficult thing she mastered, and she could see the results of her mastery. If it was easy and natural, why would it have any hold on her imagination, right?
If it was just like walking in a park.
[00:23:36] Anne Morriss:
Right.
[00:23:36] Malcolm Gladwell:
Why would you wanna be in a, a therapist? Like, no, it's, it's interesting 'cause it's hard.
[00:23:42] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:23:43] Anne Morriss:
What's the role of comfort with discomfort for you? Because it, it seems like, you know, there's this kind of joyful troublemaking element of what you do, but it requires, uh, comfort with being separated from the herd along the way.
[00:23:58] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah. I've gotten more comfortable as I've gotten older with the fact that some people are not gonna be into what I do. And I also accept the fact that if you're gonna be mischievous, there's always gonna be people who don't understand what you're doing. And that's actually, that's part of the mischief, it's part of the joy of mischief.
Um, I once went on the Bill Simmons podcast years ago, and I, I wanted to make this argument that the men's basketball game is increasingly internationalized in a way that. We sort of realized that, but I was like, we're pretty close to the point where all the best prayers are gonna be international. So, I went on this long elaborate thing where I argued, you know, what if we just constructed a team only of Nigerians and had them play everyone else?
I thought this was like so clearly parody and like to this day there are people, if I go online who would talk about like, “That ridiculous thing about the Nigerian mask.” Like, so like it's, to me that's funny. Like it's like someday they may wake up and like, wait a second, was he pulling my leg?
[00:25:02] Anne Morriss:
But that's quite a radical choice to bring some of these emotions into some of the domains that you're talking about.
I mean like the joy and playfulness and mischievousness, and that's the path to that kind of superpower. It's not the 10,000 hours.
[00:25:21] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:25:22] Anne Morriss:
And a path of mastery, it feels like a choice or permission that you're giving yourself. How do you think about that capacity? Is it just a decision?
[00:25:33] Malcolm Gladwell:
Well, I'll give you another example.
It is a decision. The way I think about it is, uh, if you have been lucky enough to be successful, you have a certain amount of credibility and you can spend it however you wish. Right. You got a bank account, you should use it wisely, but you should use it.
[00:25:52] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:25:52] Malcolm Gladwell:
It, it's okay to spend a little credibility in the cause of something that cause can be bringing hope to a situation, saying something that's outside the mainstream, expressing a radical belief.
And you will, if you have enough in the bank, people will, will allow you to do that. I think a lot of what has happened as a result of the length of my career is that people are now perfectly happy disagreeing with me, and still coming back.
[00:26:22] Anne Morriss:
Mm.
[00:26:23] Malcolm Gladwell:
It's because I've got a lot in the bank that they'll say, “It's okay. I, I can remember seven things I liked of his, it doesn't matter that I disagree with him on this.”
Once you realize you do have freedom like that, then that's what kind of allows you to be, um.
[00:26:39] Anne Morriss:
That's nice.
[00:26:39] Malcolm Gladwell:
Playful. And people will say, okay, you made a mistake. They're willing to accept that.
[00:26:44] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. I mean, part of what we observe in our work is that there are a lot of leaders and humans who have a lot of capital or have a lot more power than they're using or agency.
[00:26:55] Malcolm Gladwell:
Mm-hmm.
[00:26:56] Anne Morriss:
Than they're using to impact a problem or a situation. So I think what you're articulating is a, is a variation on that.
[00:27:03] Malcolm Gladwell:
The turning point, I've told this story many times. I was in a coffee shop in Houston, in a fancy part of Houston.
And this woman drives up in a Range Rover with like the full on Houston regalia. And she comes up to me and she says, “You Malcolm?” I go, “Yes.” And she goes, “I have read everything you've written and listened to everything you've done in your podcast, and I disagree with everything you say.”
[00:27:28] Frances Frei:
Victory.
[00:27:29] Malcolm Gladwell:
I was like, yeah, exactly.
[00:27:31] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:27:32] Malcolm Gladwell:
Victory.
[00:27:32] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:27:33] Malcolm Gladwell:
That's it. That's it.
[00:27:34] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:27:34] Malcolm Gladwell:
It made me so happy. I was like, I wanted to hug her. You know? She, she keeps coming back. She's something about it. She understands the spirit. Right. She understood the spirit of what I'm. I'm doing and she was happy to go along for the ride. But
[00:27:48] Anne Morriss:
So Malcolm, we are in the advice business, so I wanna give the people what they want a little bit.
So, what advice do you have for our listeners about how to make things better in their own organizations and communities?
[00:28:03] Malcolm Gladwell:
Um, in this new book I've been writing, I've been going back to a lot of the kind of social change literature and this fundamental idea that people's opinions and situations are far more unstable and volatile than we think.
In other words, what we think of as an intractable problem very often is not. It just looks like that, right? It looks like that. And people can swear up and down, they're speaking their mind to you. And then they can wake up the next morning and they can think something different. And you just have to remember how the world is a really in a wonderful and beautiful way and unstable place.
And if you don't believe that, you haven't been paying attention. Right? Like it's.
[00:28:47] Anne Morriss:
It's so.
[00:28:48] Malcolm Gladwell:
It's.
[00:28:48] Anne Morriss:
So important and so, right. I love that.
[00:28:51] Malcolm Gladwell:
It's like, yeah, you couldn't, you, these things are winnable like it's why I love the.
[00:28:57] Anne Morriss:
Totally.
[00:28:58] Malcolm Gladwell:
Marriage equality story so much. It's fantastic. I remember as I must have been maybe in my twenties or teens driving with my parents, I'm in a backseat.
Dad's driving. This issue comes up, so this must be the late seventies, eighties. Really early. Uh, somehow they, this issue comes up and my father says super rational. He says, “Well, why would I do that for homosexuals? It's a choice. And if they don't like the way society is treating them, they should just.”
[00:29:33] Frances Frei:
Choose differently.
[00:29:33] Malcolm Gladwell:
“Go back.” Yeah, choose different. And my mother says to him, “Graham, it's not a choice. They're born that way.” And my father says. “Really, I had no idea.” And that was it. And I remember seeing it back and thinking, “Holy shit, this can happen.” Like people can just, you present somebody with new information and from someone he loved and respected.
[00:29:55] Anne Morriss:
Right.
[00:29:56] Malcolm Gladwell:
Presented him. He had never thought about this ever.
[00:29:59] Anne Morriss:
Mmmm.
[00:29:59] Malcolm Gladwell:
He's a mathematician and a gardener and he walks his dog. You know, my mother thought about this deeply. He cared about my mom. And my mom said, “No, Gram, it's not what it is.” And he's like, “Okay.” And that was it.
[00:30:11] Anne Morriss:
Uhhuh.
[00:30:11] Malcolm Gladwell:
And I was like.
[00:30:12] Anne Morriss:
So good.
[00:30:12] Malcolm Gladwell:
It really can happen.
[00:30:15] Anne Morriss:
So good. Well, thank you for joining us and being so generous with your time and insight was really kind of you.
[00:30:21] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah. Thanks guys.
[00:30:22] Frances Frei:
Okay.
[00:30:22] Malcolm Gladwell:
Have a good day.
[00:30:23] Anne Morriss:
Bye.
[00:30:23] Malcolm Gladwell:
Yeah.
[00:30:23] Anne Morriss:
Bye.
[00:30:23] Malcolm Gladwell:
Bye-bye.
[00:30:33] Anne Morriss:
Oh, Frances, I loved that conversation.
[00:30:35] Frances Frei:
Uh, I learned so much.
[00:30:36] Anne Morriss:
I think there are two threads that I think will really stick with me.
[00:30:41] Frances Frei:
Oh, wonderful.
[00:30:42] Anne Morriss:
So, I mean, the, the, the place he ended with the world being this unstable place in a wonderful and beautiful way that is actually more changeable than we think it is.
It's such a powerful reminder. 'Cause we, we get stuck on these stories that all of these things are immovable. And not only are they movable, but they're, they're easier to move than we think they're gonna be.
[00:31:11] Frances Frei:
It's such a optimistic view of the world and I want it to be true.
[00:31:16] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Do you, do you experience that as true in our work changing organizations?
[00:31:20] Frances Frei:
I do. When in our work we often say, “Change can happen in an instant.” And it's always a surprise to organizations when we go in at how much can change and how quickly it can change.
[00:31:32] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. It just may take a while to get to that instant.
[00:31:35] Frances Frei:
Yes.
[00:31:36] Anne Morriss:
Um, and in some situations.
[00:31:38] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:31:38] Anne Morriss:
I think, uh, the other piece that I, I know I'm gonna hold onto and think about is his point about. You know, 'cause despair is this emotion that we also deal with all the time in our work and his own experience, that the people closest to the problem are the ones that are experiencing the least amount of despair.
And so, in some ways, you gotta keep going.
[00:32:02] Frances Frei:
You gotta get in there.
[00:32:03] Anne Morriss:
You gotta get, first of all, you gotta get in there yourself.
[00:32:06] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:32:06] Anne Morriss:
And if you can't get past those kinds of emotional barriers, then you gotta find the people who,
[00:32:11] Frances Frei:
Who can yeah.
[00:32:12] Anne Morriss:
Have their sleeves up and are making progress. 'Cause they have enough information to see where the pockets of opportunity are gonna be.
[00:32:20] Frances Frei:
And, and in my Thomas, the train is a useful engine view of life. This totally tracks. That, those of us that are really close in doing the work that like metabolizes despair, we have the can-do spirit.
[00:33:35] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:32:35] Frances Frei:
Associated with it. It's just the passive observers often from the cheap seats that are feeling the most despair because they're not useful engines.
[00:32:44] Anne Morriss:
Yes. Yes. I love that.
[00:32:48] Frances Frei:
That's our show. Thanks for listening. We'll be taking a publishing break for the next few weeks and returning on August 26th. In the meantime, Fixable will still be in your feeds with some episodes from other shows we think you might like.
[00:33:00] Anne Morriss:
Take care everyone. Thanks for listening. If you wanna figure out your workplace problem together, please send us a message.
We would love to have you on the show. Email fixable@ted.com or call 2-3-4-FIXABLE. That's 2-3-4-3-4-9-2-2-5-3. And if you're under the age of 35, you can also text us, honestly any way you wanna communicate with us. We are delighted to hear from you. We are so grateful for everyone who's written, called, texted.
We couldn't make the show without you, quite literally. Fixable is brought to you by The TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.
[00:33:41] Frances Frei:
And me, Frances Frei.
[00:33:43] Anne Morriss:
Our team includes Izii Carter, Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.
[00:33:55] Frances Frei:
If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.