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The Tipping Point

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What is the Tipping Point?

That magic moment when

an idea, trend or social

behaviour crosses, tips

and spreads like wildfire.

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Three Agents of Change

1. The Law of the Few

2. The Stickiness Factor

3. The Power of Context

These provide a direction for how to go about reaching a tipping point.

Understanding the Tipping Point

When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we are trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect.

We are trying to infect them, sweep them in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance.

This can be done through the influence of special kind of people, people of extraordinary personal connection (Law of Few).

Understanding the Tipping Point -2

It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to act (Stickiness).

Small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though the fact appears to violate some of our deeply held assumptions of human nature. (Power of Context)

There is a whole lot of difference between being inclined for action and actually taking action.

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The Law of the Few

Success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts:

Connectors - People with a special gift of bringing the world together – SOCIAL GLUE – SPREAD MESSAGE

Mavens - They accumulate knowledge and have the social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics – DATA BANKS – PROVIDE THE MESSAGE

Salesmen - They persuade us

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Connectors Proximity overpowers similarity We associate with people who occupy the

same physical spaces that we do 6 Degrees of Separation – a very small No of

people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Qualities: Instinct that helps them relate to people. Occupy different worlds Masters of weak ties Gregarious and intensely social

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Connectors - 2 The closer an idea/product comes to a

connector, the more power and opportunity it has

Acquaintances represent a source of social power

Word-of-mouth epidemics are work of connectors

Termed as ‘People Specialists’

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Maven

Information Specialist Accumulates Knowledge He is not a persuader He is a Data Bank - provides the message Makes his case so emphatically that he

convinces others to buy his idea

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Salesmen

With skills to persuade when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing

Look at the subtle, unspoken and the hidden What makes them effective:

Small things matter as much as big things Non verbal cues are as important as verbal cues Persuasion works in subtle ways

If we think about emotions as outside-in, not inside out, we can understand how some people have an enormous influence over others

Charismatic people infect other people with their emotions

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The Stickiness Factor

How to make messages more contagious; how to reach as many people as possible with the idea/service/product

The hard part – how to ensure the message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other

There are specific ways of making messages memorable – relatively simple changes in the presentation and re-structuring of information

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The Stickiness Factor - 2

The key to getting people to change their behaviour, in other words, to care about their neighbour in distress, sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate situation

In making small but critical adjustments in how ideas are presented, they could overcome some inherent weaknesses and make what they had to say ‘memorable’

If you can hold their attention, you can educate them

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The Stickiness Factor - 3

A mechanism to identify the fittest and decide what should survive ( Darwin’s terms)

If you pay careful attention to the structure and format of you material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness

Why did it fail the first time? Because the content had a wordplay that the target audience did not understand.

There is a simple way to package information that under the right circumstances can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it

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The Power of Context

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur – the Context

We are exquisitely sensitive to change in context

The contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we ordinarily might suspect (e.g. Broken Windows theory)

Our inner state is the result of outer circumstances

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The Power of Context - 2

Little things matter Behaviour is the function of the social

context Tipping point can be reached by tinkering

with the smallest detail of the environment Convictions of your heart and actual

contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of behaviour

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The Power of Context - 3

Once we are part of a group, we are all susceptible to peer pressure, social norms and influences that can play a role in sweeping us up in the beginnings of an epidemic

If you want to bring about a fundamental change in people’s behaviour, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you need to create a community around them, where their beliefs can be practiced, expressed and nurtured

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The Power of Context - 4

If we want groups to be incubators for contagious messages, we have to keep them below the 150 tipping point. Above that, there are structural impediments to the ability of the group to agree and act with one voice

Anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals, needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness

In order to create one contagious movement, you have to create many small movements first

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Changes Innovators

adventurous Early adopters

opinion leaders Early majority

big companies

Late majority

Laggards

stragglers

4 characters

from ‘Who

moved my Cheese Sniff Scurry Haw Hem

Visionaries,

Risk Takers

Manage Risks,

Safety nets

Avoid Risks,

Deliberate

Skeptical

No urgent reason to change

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Understanding How Changes Happen

Attitudes of Early Adopters and Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible. Innovations don’t slide effortlessly from one group to the next. There is a chasm between them

Many ideas fail, never making it beyond the Early Adopters, because those who create them can’t find a way to transform it into making perfect sense to the Early Majority

Distort the facts : Level the story Sharpen the story Assimilate – to make more sense

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Understanding How Changes Happen

There is a tendency for an idea to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant to his own culture, and above all, to what had special emotional significance for him

The subjects tend to derive a simpler, more significant configuration

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Connectors, Mavens, & Salesmen

They are the translators They take ideas from innovators and get

them understood and accepted by the masses

To make an idea contagious, they level it, dropping extra details and exaggerating other details to give more meaning to the message

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Contagiousness vs. Stickiness

Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger

Stickiness is primarily a property of the message, p. 234

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Lessons of the Tipping Point

1. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources in a few key areas.

Concentrate resources on connectors, mavens, and salesmen (Law of the Few)

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Lessons of the Tipping Point - 2

2. The world does not accord with our intuition. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right – they deliberately test their intuitions

To make sense of social epidemics, we must first

understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counter-intuitive rules

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Lessons of the Tipping Point - 2

3. What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock of belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behaviour/beliefs in the face of the right impetus.

We are influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us.

With the slightest push in just the right place, the world can be tipped.

THANK YOU