I went along to see Malcolm Gladwell last night. The author of “Blink” and “Tipping Point” is on tour in the UK, promoting his latest title “Outliers”.

To be completely honest I had no idea what to expect. I’d enjoyed “Blink” and some of the colour supplement excerpts of “Tipping Point”. I didn’t know if it was going to be a spectacle, stand-up or – gulp – a lecture!

I needn’t have worried. Gladwell presents his ideas simply and elegantly. His presentation style is gently self-depreciating and has the story telling skills of the greatest orators. Part of the pleasure of the hour or so he spoke, was his warm manner and quizzical attitude. The other enjoyable element was the wonderful novelty of bathing in his expansion of just one idea.

His central position was in relation to the phenomena of miscalibration, applying the idea to the current financial crisis with reference to the Battle of Chancellorsville during the American Civil war (stay with me here….also he explains it better than me – take a look at this video)

Basically miscalibration takes place when people become increasingly confident – eventually over-confident – when they perceive themselves as well informed. Gladwell used various research, anecdotes and observations to illustrate this. Because of my interest in Safety Assessment/Risk Assessment, the one which sticks in my mind is a piece of research conducted with a group of clinical psychologists.

The psychologists were introduced to a subject and 25 questions to answer about that subject (without interviewing him) and asked to answer the questions themselves, based on their assessment of what they observed. They were given increasingly more information, eventually the whole file on the guy, and asked to repeat the exercise.

Of course you would think that as they were given more information the accuracy of their answers would go up – right? Well I did.

However – not true. The accuracy improved marginally – 1 or .5 of a percent with each round of information. The initial score was around 25% and the final around 28%. That isn’t the end of it though. The study also asked the psychologists to estimate how successful they were in answering correctly – and this is the real value of the study.

They started off believing that they were going to be 30% accurate. Not bad (they are experts after all). This rose with each piece of information. On receiving the file they become around 90% sure that they had the whole story. So let’s recap.

With little knowledge about they subject they could accurately estimate how much, or how little, they knew about him. When they were well informed they knew just a little more but believed that they knew (nearly) everything!

Hence the references to Chancerville, when Fighting John Hooker had the best possible knowledge about his enemy and became overconfident. The financial crisis where the evening before bank leaders were talking confidently. Gallipoli where the British generals were hopelessly overconfident about their landing which led to great casualties – particularly among the Australian troops.

Does this mean that we shouldn’t gather knowledge? Should we not become experts in our chosen field?

Not necessarily the case.

• Our approach to making sense of the world is often to make our assessment and respond. We are happy with our assessment and therefore we are perhaps less than keen to go back and re-evaluate.
• Sometimes our professional roles require us to be certain about something – maybe to defend it. In every disaster movie there’s the dogmatic captain, pilot, sergeant, politician who doesn’t listen to the underling pointing at the danger just lurking over the ridge
• Our self-image as adults sometimes requires us to hold certain belief about events and people. In the nastiest of forms this surfaces as prejudice. To shift from this requires a flexible mind and an enjoyment of the diversity that our experience of the world brings.

What can we do?

• 1. We can think about the dynamic nature of our experience and the relationship of new information to our assessment. This may bring us into a fluid state of re-evaluation – or in other words a quick turn around between assessment and observation
• 2. We may need to let go – to those positions, professional badges, accreditations which allow us to feel confident in our knowledge

As Gladwell said – what we need from our experts is not certainty, but humility.

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