What world awaits Gen Z? | Malcolm Gladwell x Brain Bar

I was asked to talk a little bit about what the future looks like for Gen Z for the for the digital generation and I thought the best way to try and answer that question is to run a theory by you and it's a theory about football that comes from two economists named David Sally and Chris Anderson who a couple of years ago wrote a book about football called the numbers game which is the kind of book about football that you would imagine two economists would write they they do a kind of rigorous analysis of the game and come up with a series of conclusions about football and in one of the most interesting chapters they asked the question what is the best way to make a football team better is it to improve the quality of your best player or to improve the quality of your worst player and their answer is that without question the best way to improve a football team is to improve the quality of your worst player right now why is that well if you think about it it's obvious football is a game of mistakes right games can typically be decided by one or two goals if you look at why a goal happens it's often because somebody a Defender makes a critical error deep in his own end and that leads to the other team capitalizing on that mistake uh and and scoring a goal to the extent that your weaker players are more likely to make mistakes than your stronger players it makes sense to upgrade your weakest player it's also the case that football is fundamentally interactive the only way to move the ball effectively up and down the pitch is to for everyone to share in that burden right you have to pass the ball around there's a famous clip on YouTube of Tottenham Hotspur in a Premier League game and they passed the ball 48 times amongst their own teams before they score a goal so if you can find it easily on YouTube it's a kind of riveting video but the point of that is that every single player on Tottenham touches the ball at least once in that goal sequence and had even one of those players not been up to Snuff the whole goal would never have happened they would have turned the ball over to the other team right and not only that when you analyze those 48 passes that made that goal you discover that the lowest paid members of Tottenham Hotspur touched the ball the most in that 48 uh goal past sequence that was that whole sequence was wholly dependent on the talents of the weakest players on the team you can actually break this down um statistically and and Sally and Anderson do that they you know what so those of you who are football fans will know about Castrol scores which is used in the Premier League where you assign every player a score from zero to a hundred the best players 100 and they ran a simulation over a 38 Game season and they said suppose I have a I upgrade my best player who's in 87 five places so he's in 92. how much better does that make my team and the answer is it makes your team a lot better uh you will score 10 more goals and five more points over the course of a full season then they said suppose you do the same degree of improvement in your worst player so suppose your worst player is at 25 you upgrade them to a 32 how much better is your team you will score 30 percent more goals and twice as many points over the course of a given season if you had than if you had upgraded your best player it's not even close there is only one route to improving a football squad that is to identify your weakest link and make it better football is a weak link sport now compare that to basketball right huge sport in America where I live uh what is basketball well the first thing you notice about basketball is that it's not mistake driven like football is basketball players make mistakes all the time it doesn't matter they just recover and you do other things basketball is not interactive in the same way that football is the greatest basketball player in the world LeBron James if he wants to move the ball from one end of the court to the other all by himself he can do that nobody can stop him he doesn't require the participation of every one of his teammates in order to score a basket in fact if you look at the two greatest basketball teams of all time and and I realized now that I'm probably venturing into territory where a few of you can follow but the two greatest basketball teams of all time with a Chicago Bulls teams of the 1990s and the the Golden State Warriors teams of five years ago the Chicago teams had three great players Scottie Pippen Dennis Rodman and the great Michael Jordan right the rest of their the two other players on that team were they were okay they weren't great their fifth player their Center was a big slow lumbering white guy from Australia not terribly gifted at basketball if you look at the other greatest team of all time the San Francisco warriors so a few years ago three great players Steph Curry jaymon Draymond Green and Clay Thompson who was their fifth player a big slow lumbering white guy from Australia if you're trying to build a great basketball team it doesn't matter who your fourth and fifth players are you could you could randomly walk point to some tall guy and say come and join our Squad basketball in contrast to football is a strong link sport you make your team better by upgrading your best player right the quality of a team is wholly dependent on how good their greatest player is that difference is quite dramatic and I think it's a very useful way to conceptualize the way organizations function in the world we can look at any group of individuals and we can ask the question is that group a weak link organization or a strong link organization right so my question for you is what does the future look like when you look out 10 and 15 years do you believe the future is going to be strong link or weak link right now we all know what the past is the past was struggling it 200 300 400 years ago you wanted to make your country great what did you do you focused on making the strongest Links of your country even stronger I've just been on holiday in Italy and if you travel around Italy you see these even in the poorest parts of that country these magnificent churches and monasteries and castles from the 15th and 16th century those were not built for the benefit of the ordinary peasant working in the fields no they were built for the benefit of a very very small group of Elites right educated clergy noblemen you know wealthy people there the idea that drove medieval Italy to Greatness was the way we can out-compete our enemies is to make our cultivate an elite that's better than everyone else's Elite you could make the same argument about the latter half of the 20th century what is the dominant uh sociological transformation of the post-war era in the western world it is the construction of extraordinary centers of elite excellence the rise of the research University right which happens all across the West Harvard Yale Oxford Cambridge I could go down the list right that's what emerges the rise of elite hospitals right that you no longer have no longer you the way that you achieve excellence in the field of Health Care is to build a handful of centers of true quality in urban areas where everyone migrates to if they want uh Quality Health Care or you look at even in the corporate realm what is the dominant Narrative of the the last 20 years of the 20th century it's the rise of these of elite Banks like Goldman Sachs of elite software companies like Microsoft of that was the notion of how you built your country your economy into a world leader you focused on the very strongest links and made them better all right that's the past what about the future is the future different from that is or is it the same is the future football or is the future basketball well let me give you a couple of stories that will maybe help you with this one is some of you will be will will know about the extraordinary situation that the Aerospace manufacturer Boeing struggled with um or in recent years probably the biggest uh crisis in their history they had a plane called the 737 Max which uh was the one of the most sophisticated planes they'd ever built they spent four billion dollars uh uh planning it it cost a hundred million dollars to buy it it was supposed to be the savior of the company and they introduced it to Great Fanfare and what happens it's grounded for several years why because of a flaw in something called Max the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system what is Max Max is a software system which 99 of Pilots will never use it's a relative to the the sophistication of the entire airplane it is a tiny amount of computer code that costs a handful of dollars but because of a defect in that handful of computer code the entire aircraft was grounded and Boeing ended up losing 20 billion dollars over the course of five years right does that sound to you like basketball or does that sound to you like football give you another example I was chatting with a friend of mine recently who is a physician in a large teaching hospital and he was describing to me a case of a man had come in after being in a dreadful traffic accident he had nearly died in fact he would he would have died under normal circumstances but it so happens that they would manage to get a helicopter to the crash site very quickly bring the man to one of the great Trauma Centers in the region a team of world-class surgeons to descended on this man did a series of operations over the course of the next 24 hours saved his life man leaves the hospital you know goes is brought back to health gets married has children and one day is walking along the beach and he collapses and goes dreadfully sick he's taken back to the hospital they realize he has a raging sepsis infection they end up having to amputate one of his legs he nearly dies his life is derailed for months and months why did he get the sepsis infection because one of the things that happened to him when he was being operated on was that his spleen was taken out and when you take on someone's spleen you have to give them a vaccination against a very common type of bacteria that your spleen will normally protect yourself against somebody forgot to give him the vaccination so here's a man being operated on for 24 hours by a team of world-class surgeons at a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars someone forgets to give him a two dollar infection and what happens he nearly dies again all of that work nearly comes to not what is that what are those two examples tell us they tell us that as systems get more complicated as the as the as domains of activity professional activity get more interconnected things start to resemble football and not basketball in the old Paradigm medicine was strong Link in your Paradigm when we talked about what good Medical Care was we talked about the quality of the surgeon or the quality of the diagnostician you know it was all about was that doctor really good what medical school did they go to what kind of training did they have what was their record we focused on the individual but now in a complex world where you're doing far more in medicine to help people and where an operation involves 10 15 20 people we're not talking about the Excellence of one person anymore we're talking about the quality of the team and the team is only as good as its weakest link we have moved in other words in that domain and in the case of Boeing in the 737 from playing basketball to playing football I had a conversation recently with uh with these two Executives with an executive uh uh from IBM and he was talking about um Edge Computing and 5G and he was talking about it in the context of firefighting this fascinating conversation and he said in the old model you know when you were fighting fires you had a command post with an experienced commander in that post who gave directions to a team of people out in the field right who gave orders to Firefighters to follow a certain strategy based on information that was brought back to him and they said that is no longer the model that is being used to fight fires but you know those huge forest fires in places like California now what you do is you have 25 SUVs and you put a bunch of servers in the back and you deploy a crew to the scene of the fire and they put sensors down throughout the forest floor and they collect and analyze that data in real time they send out drones to gather even more information and they formulate a strategy on the spot for fighting the forest fire in the old Paradigm you needed one great commander and everyone else was just following orders in the new paradigm every one of those teams has to be good enough to coordinate and make Intelligent Decisions about fighting that fire in their given area we've gone from needing to have one great person to having to be having to have many good people right that is a move from uh from basketball to football now what does this mean well it means we have to approach the future with a very different mindset we've been operating in a strong link world for Generations now for centuries now and all of a sudden the stakes have changed the way in which we solve problems and build teams has got to change are we living up to that task right have we recognized this transformation I worry that we haven't I worry that in the way we approach a lot of problems in our world we're still playing by the old rules to give you an example from the world of of American higher education you know there's been a real Trend in recent years for billionaires in America to give very large gifts to American universities which is a wonderful thing right we're talking about gifts of 100 million 200 million 300 million dollars um we all want we think it's great if when rich people give away their money right that's nothing to if he has dispersions about but when you look at where they're giving their money what do you find you find that they are almost entirely giving their money to the elite universities to universities that already have a lot of money why do they do that because they think that the world of higher education is basketball and the way you get better is by making your best universities even better but that's not the right strategy in a world that's playing football if you look at the top eight most elite schools in the United States uh they collectively educate a hundred thousand students and they have between them an endowment of a hundred and forty billion dollars that is 1.4 million dollars per student if you look at everybody else in America every other student hundreds of thousands millions of other students they have uh their endowment comes out to sixteen thousand dollars per student so we have group number one is 1.4 million dollars per student group number two is sixteen thousand dollars per student and where does all the money go to group one to the group that has already has all the money that in a world that is moving in the direction of football and not basketball that's insane right that makes no sense whatsoever if the best way to solve our problems is to strengthen our weakest links why are we giving all of our resources to Elite universities that educate a tiny fraction of the population a couple years ago the billionaire John Paulson uh decided he wanted to give 400 million dollars to build a School of Engineering and he gave his money to Harvard University which has 50 billion dollars in the bank and I was this just drove me so nuts that I went on this crazy Twitter uh rant and because you're all trapped here I thought I would read you some of my tweets if billionaires Don't Step Up Harvard will soon be down to its last 30 billion apparently 200 million is earmarked for a satellite campus on Saint Barts and then this is my favorite it's going to be called the John Paulson School of financial engineering um I could go on I won't bore you with more I did like 10 of these but my point is this is crazy this is an example of someone who fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the world that we're living in and misunderstands of the the nature of the future that we're headed towards and if the world that we're building for all of you in this room is going to be an improvement on the world that we're living in now we have to understand that the rules have changed right you know it's even hard for if you look at the oligarchs who buy premier league teams what's the first thing they do they don't go and strengthen their weakest links they go and they spend 40 million euro on a you know some brilliant uh uh Striker from Croatia right they don't get it these are people who have every Opera every resource in the world access to the most Brilliant Minds the people who understand football and they buy us they spend millions and millions of pounds on a team and you're on a team and they've completely misunderstand the nature of the sport that they're buying into that guy David Sally I told you about who wrote that book he does consult he for a while did Consulting with Premier League's teams and finally he just stopped he's like it's pointless like they don't understand the nature of the game they're spending why are they spending 40 million euro one player when they should be spending uh 10 million euro on four good players right now why am I telling you all this because I suspected many of you in this room are strong links that you're the product of stronglink Institutions you when you have really good educations you're very bright and poised and motivated you're the kinds of people who are the who will be the winners in whatever field that you enter but it's really important for you to understand the nature of the change in the world and economy in which you're operating you will be part of teams over the course of your your career but the success of those teams does not depend on strong links like yourself it's going to depend on how good you're leaving right and your challenge as you go out into the future is to understand that we're not playing basketball anymore we're playing football thanks so much welcome thank you very much I it seems to me like you're doing a Manifesto anti-elites that the big scene of the next of the last 200 years more or less has been basically to give too much importance to the elites and now maybe we should focus on the middle class which is basically also like the the real column of our successful Western societies is my intuition wrong or right no I think that's right I mean I I think that the kind of over um emphasis on on Elite Excellence is a very hard habit to break we got into this habit particularly in I believe in the kind of post-war era where a number of Western countries became fixated correctly I think in that era on the notion that the surest way to uh to economic success and social success was in building up the quality of those lead institutions and it's very very hard once you have placed all of your cards on that strategy to switch gears and to understand that something fundamental has changed you know if you it's funny I as I when I started thinking about this idea I would I would have conversations I've had conversations with corporate leaders on this very question and it's fascinating how often that they immediately see once you point this out to them the logic of this they'll say yes in my institution the problem is not the quality of my Chief Financial Officer or my Chief Operating Officer or my chief marketing officer it's that what's holding me back is the person in the middle of the distribution I can't find quality people at that level that's that's the modern world right that's the firefighter problem if the best way to fire fight fires is at the point of the fire that must that has to change everything you do about the hiring and development of talents and fighting fires and you mentioned like the more like the financialities and for example well I read a bit about you I heard to a couple of your podcasts they're all very chronoclastic and at some point in one of your your books you say that too much information can kill your intuition your discernment your way of judging and you know I couldn't help linking what you just said on stage to the current movement of workism in those Elite Super Rich universities where sometimes we have the impression that we have social theories stemming from allegedly the most important Minds in the world which are basically a nonsense an absolute nonsense and I thought if you know that was not like the hyper sign of the of the the end of this elitist cycle yeah yeah well I mean what you're describing is um uh is a kind of uh what's the what's the the best word decline is one word but it's it's more than that it's a kind of decadence intellectual decadence that when you put all the resources in the hands of a very small number of people um and you essentially communicate to those people that there's a their future is secure that they are insulated from pressure or responsibility to anyone else what you get is this kind of decadence this kind of focus on things that are not Central or not important that are disconnected with the the broader issues that a society is facing and I do think that's what we're seeing right now in um in many Western countries is um is a kind of uh it seems irrelevant a lot of their um intellectual it runs the agenda it rains totally our political agenda in the west yeah yeah no that's uh it's interesting once you leave the United States you um it's always refreshing to see how clear-eyed people from other countries are about the problems in the United States we have the same problem in Western Europe Malcolm but and also following on your comparison between the basketball Society or a football Society first I understood that maybe it's not so good idea to make a country great again and second I let me plead now the case more of the basketball type of society because the way you describe the football is also like a very interlinked system of perfection where everyone is controlled where everyone has a specific function and must deliver everyone there's no weak link basically it reminded me like of a very heavy bureaucracy and I was thinking I mean where is the place for the free electrons in this football type of society that you just described yeah well I mean it's interesting let's pursue this metaphor a little bit more when you look at I'm guessing many of you are football fans so when you look at the evolution of football over the last 25 years um you know post the kind of Dutch revolution of the 70s um and what you've seen is this move towards a much more interactive um you know possession-based kind of uh football the kind of football that's that I was describing this kind of weak link football whether the Spanish school for me but yeah Spanish yes it's also the Spanish uh now so your question is do we see in that style of modern football less or more creativity than we would see in the traditional football of the 1960s the kind of football the English were playing until quite recently right I would argue there's more creativity and more improvisation and more excitement in modern Spanish style football than there is in the old you know kick the ball in and chase after it so even within the idea that we're Distributing responsibility among all the players somehow in that what seems like something that should diminish creativity the opposite is happening what we're doing is creating a structure that allows for real true genius to flourish I mean a Lionel Messi for example flourishes in that kind of system in a way that he would may not have at all flourished in the 1960s right I think there's uh that there is a kind of beauty and greatness in this kind of uh interdependent teamwork that was not present in the sort of top heavy systems of the past you see and that also brings me to another topic on which I have been publishing recently and maybe uh against the mainstream is you're not a big fan of teleworking and it seems that in your football model the interaction between people is very very important and especially I mean you're somebody who is intuitive your man of nuances your man of discernment and you seem to believe correctly if I'm wrong in this interpersonal relationships are we heading in the right direction by just claiming that it's better for everyone including for the planet that we stay home and work only from our laptops well it depends what you're doing so I think it's a mistake to say that all work is more efficiently conducted in the office and a mistake to say all work is more efficiently conducted at home I think what we need to do a better job of doing is identifying the kind of work that requires interpersonal interaction that requires physical presence so my company for example our work is creative and collaborative everything is done in teams everything we stand or fall on the quality of our ideas and our creativity what we found during covid when we were all at home was that kind of work became really hard to do which shouldn't come as a surprise right I think that you know after several hundred thousand years of human of human evolution there is a reason why we evolved in groups because there's a certain quality that of interaction that's important for learning for motivation for inspiration for all those kinds of things at the same time there's clearly a large body of work that doesn't require that that where solitary work is fine you know where when I'm right when I'm in writing mode I don't need to be in an office with a group of people it's fine for me to be in a cafe by myself or at home or it doesn't you know I'm when I move to other stages in the creative process then I rejoin the group so I think the the challenge is for us to begin become a lot smarter in differentiating between what different kinds of work require the second point I'm sorry the second one I would make is it also depends where you are in your career so if someone has had the benefit of 30 years of experience in interpersonal settings I'm a lot less concerned if they want to work by themselves than I am about someone at the start of their career learning there's a stage the learning process in complex learning uh uh confess professions takes a lot longer than I think we care to admit and thousand hours ten thousand hours and I don't I think accumulating your ten thousand hours in preparation for expertise it's very difficult when you're by yourself you know I just think it is I think that's um it's just a kind of fundamental fact of how we operate even Beyond The Working place I'm personally worried about the atomization of societies I have an impression that now we live in the world where everyone has his favorite app his favorite movies his favorite series ezeko chamber you know that according to the feed he gets there's actually little we have in common look look at the United States I mean it now in wave you have race Wars you have sex War sexual orientation Wars of any kind and I had the impression maybe I was very naive that at least the best place to socialize even to find your your future wife or husband was work these things are not happening anymore with telework I just have the impression that well we are heading to a society that could be the dream of Jeff Bezos yeah um yeah so I you know the the most interesting observation that I've seen recently about um where we are right now and where we're ahead is the society was for the last 50 years or so uh the Gallup organization the famous polling organization has asked a cross-sample of people in the West about how satisfied how happy they are with their life so on a scale of one to ten zero would be you're profoundly unhappy ten would be you couldn't be happier and historically when you look at those uh results of that polling you see a bell curve small number of people are zero small number of people are 10 most people are right in the middle reasonably satisfied 6 5 6 7 scores on that test we observed that pattern for a generation since we began polling then the internet age happened and we began to see slowly a change in the curve and now what we've seen is it no longer looks like this it looks like this the number of people who report uh who give a zero to their life satisfaction has quadrupled in the last 10 years the number of people who report 10 out of 10 has doubled in the last 10 years so there's a group of people who are clearly are winners in the digital age who are doing better who are thriving who could not be more pleased with the way things have turned out at the same time there are a group of people who are very clearly losers who are deeply unhappy for whom the world of the last 15 years has steered them in a direction that they never intended to go so it's that division it's sort of a version of what you're describing it is understanding why what is it about the people on this end that makes their life so happy can we duplicate that and what is it about the group on this end that makes them so unhappy and can we help them prevent that that's the challenge that looks like the perfect example of a basketball Society no it's a basketball Society yeah that is a basketball Society at a time when the basketball uh Paradigm is no longer the correct one now I fully see your points yeah speak a bit if you don't mind about adversity we are this this uh this event this turning point was specifically meant at the what we call the Generation Z I don't like too much this uh this denomination but sometimes speaking also about stereotypes we we tend to think that this generation is emotionally weak that they are not precisely faced to adversity because they live a very virtual life what is your stance on that do you think it's true or not and what advice would you give them yeah I don't believe it's true that there is emotional uh weakness I think that's absurd and I think all what we're seeing is something else which is if you look in previous generations if you looked at a cross-section of a thousand people of a thousand people born in 1960. you would see you know some portion of them a hundred of those went to college had professional careers some portion of those didn't and some portion of those maybe the bottom 500 very quietly went away and had unfulfilling unchallenging lives on the bottom fringes of society we basically forgot about those people what we're doing now is we're saying that's not acceptable we would like to take as many of that thousand people and give them a chance at a fulfilling and meaningful life so we've raised the bar right and whenever you raise the bar you're going to be much more aware of your of those instances where you have fallen short right you're making we've we've also at the same time increased dramatically the the scope of work the demands of work the complexity of work so it's much harder to be a successful professional today than it was 50 years ago do you have any idea how easy work was for someone born in 1950 when they were 35 years old they worked a fraction of the hours that people today were and it was much easier they were I mean I even I'm old enough to remember what it was like being a journalist in the 1980s when you left your workplace at six o'clock nobody could reach you you were done I never took work home what was the point all of my work stuff was at work right I you have no idea how easy it was it is so much harder now so when we observe higher rates of unhappiness of dysfunction of whatever in the current generation it's because they have a lot more on their plate than previous generations did it is not evidence of any structural inferiority among the current generation I see but they may need actually extra resilience to resist it to resist those trends no oh I think that's absolutely uh the case I mean you can see to give an example a good example of this is Athletics if you look at what if you compare the training of a football player or a runner today versus the training of one 50 years ago there's no comparison right but what does that mean that means the likelihood of injury or burnout or whatever in a contemporary athlete is far higher than it was in someone from 50 years ago 50 years ago people in the locker rooms of of of Premier League football teams for chain smoking cigarettes I mean it's absurd right Mr wants some of them were even the best players like George best yes George best was like getting and then getting going home and getting drunk every night and then he was still the best the idea that the best player in the game could be someone who'd chain smoke cigarettes and got drunk every night is an absurdity today I mean absurdity yeah so we have we have indeed a much more demanding world yeah it seems and let's speak if you don't mind also about the place of faith in this hyper complex World very technical world where the world where all of us have a little as probably a function where everything needs to be hyper professionalized what's the place of faith and our spiritual life yeah this in this Society well historically the role of spirituality in our lives has been to give us a source a source of strength um an alternate source of sustenance a world outside and larger than the world that we can have it right these are all things that give us a kind of armor against the world um the world that we're involved is much needed today much needed so at precisely the time that we need Spiritual armor where the world has gotten a lot more demanding and dangerous and all those kinds of things we have removed spirituality from our lives to a large extent right we're much less and I think that is a tragedy and we're all suffering a little bit more as a result um I think that's extraordinarily unfortunate that we have become less devoted to our faith um in the current age which is an age that where our faith would is more useful than than it ever been in the past thank you very much Malcolm we're going now to turn to the audience we have time once in a lifetime occasion to ask the questions to welcome Gladwell and there's no council culture in this room so they can ask you whatever they like you can answer whatever you like and if someone is offended it's too bad for them it's not for the speaker to be sorry so we have already quite a few questions I like your football allegory very much I think it's very useful I will use it in my life thank you and I think it's also true of uh countries on this planet that or the fate of humanity may depend on not the strongest thing but the weakest link and how can we educate these countries and how can we we try to isolate them but I think it is limited and how can we educate the the countries that are not in a good shape I mean I think there's a number of different it's a really good question a number of different sort of answers to that one is simply by setting an example um that if the the rules of the Modern Age are different then um it's up to the most prosperous and highly developed countries to set an example for the rest of the world for example let me give you the following thought experiment if I gave you a an infinite amount of money a relatively infinite amount of money and said you could solve one problem in the world what problem would you solve um there is a weekly answer to that question and there's a strong link answer to that question uh a hundred years ago I might say I would like to build Elite universities to educate a class of people who can bring forward a series of scientific revolutions that will believe today I would say I probably would like to have a really effective vaccine against malaria uh in other words I think more could be accomplished from liberating large areas of the developing World from the extraordinary burden that malaria places on uh the people in the lowest third of the population in you know for example sub-Saharan Africa that would be a huge win that would do more to push that region forward and bring a new level of prosperity to an enormous portion of the world now if I ask that question of people in the most Pro five most prosperous countries of the world right the United States Germany uh Australia whatever they are if I ask that question at the pipe how many what percentage of the population would give you the answer that the best thing we could do for the world is to come up with a malaria vaccine I suspect a very small number I suspect most of them would come up with some kind of strong link answer that question um so it's that kind of I think it's incumbent on you know when when Bill Gates goes around saying I think the most important thing we use in malaria vaccine people need to listen to him he's actually right you know there's a there's a strong a guy who grew up in a strong link world who has made a complete turnaround and devoted his life and Fortune to to coming up with weakling Solutions thank you thank you next questions on my rights so you said that we are living in a basketball Society while we should be living in a football Society already because the change is happening around us it's us who are not changing with it right so what do you think what is holding back the change from happening because I feel like in a lot of areas we already have knowledge since 10 20 30 years or even since longer times and people or the systems they're just not acting on it somehow it's not not happening yeah why can it be well let me give you a tech story that I think will help illuminate that I had a conversation once with the the the CEO of a an elite Hospital in the United States a big hospital system world-class hospital system and he had taken over the hospital 10 years previously when it was a relatively mediocre place and he had built it into a world-class Institution spent raised huge amounts of money hired top physicians in every discipline three or four of the Departments of this Hospital were among the best in America if not the world he'd really achieve this extraordinary success but he had this problem which was that every time they did surveys they asked their patients to rate their level of satisfaction with the hospital they were getting low scores and he said this dispatchled him he was like this is one of the greatest hospitals in the United States but we're getting scores from our patients which suggests that we are some mediocre place that no one should ever go for care and he couldn't figure out this puzzle and he kept trying to upgrade the hospital you know the level of quality and the talent and the scores still kept getting lower and lower and lower and finally he realized that when patients uh evaluate a hospital they're not evaluating their experience based on the quality of the surgeon or the cardiologist or the neurosurgeon or whatever they're evaluating it based on their interactions with the nurse who comes to him tonight the the person who answers the phone when they call to make an appointment the person who greets them when they walk in the front door the orderly who comes in and uh and cleans their room and changes their bed clothes all of their their they're evaluating it based on the people at their level who they interact with on a daily basis and he was thinking entirely in strong terms when patients were thinking entirely in Weak link terms now why did it take him so long to understand that he said it took him 10 years to understand that because he was someone who was entirely a function product of strong lick environment he himself was a former top surgeon at every step in his life he had been rewarded for being the best and the brightest and everywhere he went he saw systems that rewarded the best and the brightest and he thought and when he entered medicine that's what medicine was and because he was so isolated from this transformation and because the transformation had happened so quickly he was completely left unaware I mean remember we're talking about a move here from from basketball to football that has taken place in less than a generation so I think it's just it's that it's just our leaders grew up in a different era and this change is happening too quickly for them thank you welcome the gentlemen on the back with the red t-shirts Mr Gladwell or maybe Malcolm if you may so my comment and some of that question goes to one statement donors give money for those institutions already have money as a professor at the small College obviously I'm also thinking what to tell this wonderful gen Z yeah you know so what you're saying is that in order to alter these uh patterns of behavior that are um you know I use the example of rich people giving money to Rich universities in greater and greater numbers we have to alter the kind of social reinforcement that's given to people who are engaged in this behavior and right now if you are a rich person and you give 500 million dollars to Harvard University you are applauded for your decision in a way you would not be if you gave 500 million dollars to a small liberal arts college in Michigan right no one's interested The Prestige is all associated with giving to the prestigious institution and that is you know profoundly counter productive but it is a function of a society that is overly invested in the um in the fortunes of elite institutions like if you the the extraordinary fact about the eight that I mentioned of the eight most elite institutions in America colleges in America is among between them they only educate a hundred thousand students I mean that's in a country of 380 million people that is an absurdly small number but if you were to read about American universities and you know at any time you would think that those were the only eight schools that existed everything is about Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT and you know Princeton and yeah you know and it's a crazy system and I think you're right there has to be some way of altering the kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop that where rich people give money to Rich institutions because other rich people have given money to Rich institutions and everyone sees that as a path to social Prestige what do you think about the general description of the Generation Z in Media or in books I mean the generation is lazy but open mind and some kind of stereotypes and and so on General descriptions of uh of generations are useful only up to a point so we'd like to pretend that every single generation has a profoundly different character and I think that's ridiculous I think you see a general just you know a general um uh distribution of characteristics in every generation what changes is what characteristics in a given generation we choose to focus on right and what gen what also changes is on a very kind of broad conceptual level the organize the ways in which Generations organize the world so if you grew up in the depression you did really organize your world around the idea of scarcity you it's really hard to if you grew up with nothing and grew up in a generation whereas growing up as a teenager or a child you saw resources being taken away from you and then you went through a trauma of War that's going to shape the way you see the world ever since similarly I think that it is useful to talk about the generation that comes post the internet as being one that's very focused on the organizing principle of the network as opposed to the hierarchy right it's a not it's an your generation to the extent that you most people in this room are quite young you're you're anti-hierarchical and you can see that in a lot of the ways in which you make sense of the world and I didn't I think that's that is a useful generalization to make about young people beyond that I'm I'm a little bit dubious of I think a lot of the of the stereotypes that are used to describe the digital generation are being are simply fictions that are made up by people of my generation who want to look down their noses on young people and it's just not useful Behavior especially journalists especially journalists yes um gentlemen there I would like to ask what's your advice for us so now that we know that tweaking systems are better how should we convince diverse leaders Angel Investors and the politicians to support these systems how should we force them to action uh that's a really good question do I know how to convince politicians to to create a football Society yeah I mean I think the logical place to start is at the kind of policy level and hope these this kind of uh that our leaders can articulate a notion a vision of what the future looks like that will trickle down to other people um that's one uh uh approach the other approach I think is much more kind of Grassroots is in um in changing the kinds of people who we give our attention to um so here's a really simple thing is um what kind of social status do you Accord a teacher it's a really good that's a really good question to ask of a society our teachers at the bottom of the rung in the middle are at the top because teachers are are really the kind of they are the engines of soccer they are the week they are the people who strengthen weak links that's their job right and a a teacher if a teacher is doing his or her job correctly they are spending their most time with the students who are struggling the most right they're raising the bottom the top students are fine they don't really shouldn't need we shouldn't be spending all of our time administering to the top students they're if you are a top student you're capable of taking care of yourself that's what it means to be a top student right um so if you see a system where the top students are sucking up most of the attention you know something's wrong and if you see a system where the teachers who are doing that kind of weak link work are not being recognized and valued for that you know something is wrong so that's another useful thing is just to ask yourself on a very kind of personal basis who am I uh valuing who am I complimenting who am I rewarding in this Society I know in America there are easy answers to that questions there are many um American states where teachers are the lowest paid professionals you can't make any progress in the modern world by your teachers when your teachers of the lowest paid professionals you just can't that's just utter foolishness and that's not a theoretical problem I'm afraid also in Europe definitely uh the gentlemen in the far back this morning at moment which I had the fortune to visit your talk then too you were talking about innovators like very strong characters like Steve Jobs and Dr freyrick um and you said that the main characteristics of these kind of people are that they are Urgent and that they're disagreeable and how does that match with um team playing and and the weakling sport like football in the society well uh because I think these are complementary things it goes back to the question that was asked earlier about do do teams um stifle uh creativity or enhance it and um what I was talking about were innovators who were struggling to make their ideas real in a world that was very very strong link and I would argue that uh someone I was talking this morning about this a man who I think ought to be one of the most famous hungarians of uh man named Emma farak the father of modern chemotherapy it's important to figure in modern medicine as anyone had he been in an environment that was a lot more collaborative and interactive it would have been a lot easier for him to make the I believe to make the or they put another way the number of people who could have been a permitted to pursue revolutionary ideas would have been greater in a uh weak link environment a team focused environment than in the strong link world that he was a part of I I think that I think it enhances those kinds of of innovators thank you lady there so um during your presentation what came to my mind is that I think your allegory of football versus basketball Society is very much in parallel with John Ross's philosophy of uh veil of ignorance in terms of we should maximize the position of the least privileged in the society so along the lines of this Theory do you think truly that in a society which is economically and politically relied on capitalism which very much is about consumerism appearances representation and basically the redefine the redefinition of necessities uh can we truly achieve a football Society you know I don't think of capitalism as being necessarily incompatible with a football Society I realized that uh left to its own devices what you see in capitalism is the construction of these kinds of hierarchies and the uh the consolidation of a lot of resources at the top but I do think it is possible to correct for that um I don't think it's a inevitable consequence um I think some Western Nations have struggled with that corrective process and that's sort of what we're going through for example the United States right now where income inequality is sort out of control what we did was we let down our guard and we forgot that capitalism requires a kind of complementary effort to redistribute power and resources towards the middle right um but I think you can do that without compromising what's good about capitalism which is that idea that people need to be to have freedom to innovate and pursue what they uh think is best if we're going to have productivity and growth and all the things that make for a better future so I'm not a pessimist when it comes to that I do think though that there are moments when we need to kind of recognize that we've got to step in and kind of right the ship I'm hopeful that will happen in a lot of Western countries in the Next Generation what do you think um what are the characteristics and competencies of a future leader I would say and I'm not judging the question I would say that we should recognize in the future that that is an unanswerable question and it's unanswerable because I think we need to prepare for a world where there are an uh an extraordinarily diverse group of characteristics of leaders as I think the failure one of the great failures of the previous world was that had a very narrow definition of what a leader was a leader was a a tall strong-willed white male right that's what it was who is sure of himself and who gave orders to others um we now recognize that's an incredibly foolish way to define leadership because you basically you know what do tall white men represent what portion of the population I don't know 15 why would you limit your leadership pool to 15 of the population so if you're going to say okay we're going to draw we're going to draw leaders from a pool of everyone then you also have to say look at different times in different places in different organizations we may need fundamentally different kinds of leaders there are times when we want leaders who are you know leading from the from the back or letting others take that there are times when we need really really strong decisive leadership but we have to recognize that that when that era ends boom we don't need that anymore we need somebody else we need to sort of have a kind of extraordinarily diverse palliative and I don't think any of us in this room can com can properly Define all the different forms the future leader will take we have no idea right we need to be completely open to trying different styles and models in the coming years because we're going to come up with challenges that we've never seen before again to finish maybe two three bullet points tips that's the so-called Generations that you can take back home and sleep over tonight yeah I mean I just would do one which is I think you should be optimistic uh I know it's hard sometimes but I think the world I think the next 20 years is going to be a lot better than the last 20 years and if you think of human history as a kind of arms race between every year that passes our problems get harder but every year that passes our capacity to meet and solve those problems also grows it's an arms race right so the question everyone always says well the problems are getting harder and that's a cause for great concern and pessimism but they neglect the other side is our capacity to solve those problems out racing the other side and I think right now it's reasonable to assume that our capacity for solving problems is increasing faster than the problems um why do I say that because we are the number of people who are being pulled into uh positions of authority and Society is greater than ever before we're unlocking the talents of Africa we're unlocking the talents of we've pulled you know in the last generation extraordinary numbers of women into the workforce we've essentially doubled the the the the the number of IQ points in the workforce in the last 30 years how can the world not be a better place if you do that right in America up until 1970 they wouldn't Ascend they essentially said that no black person could ever meaningfully participate in any cognitively complex decision that has been fundamentally changed in the in the course of one generation how can you not be smarter when you take 15 of your population that have been outside the decision-making process and place them inside the decision-making process so that means I think when you look at that around the world you have got to be optimistic Malcolm genuine Frank brilliant insightful and on top of that optimistic thank you very much thank you [Music]

Channel: Brain Bar

Views: 298,792

Keywords: Brain Bar, future

Id: 2AaQn3FOrfY

Length: 62min 17sec (3737 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022