Genius: 2012

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, talks about individual and collaborative genius in problem-solving, the importance of stubbornness and the "ten-thousand hours to mastery" rule. Presented at the 2007 New Yorker Conference, “2012: Stories from the Near Future” . If you are at all familiar with Gladwell then you might like to skip the introduction by David Remnick.

Gladwell asserts that, "the modern problems that we face aren't two-page problems, they are two-hundred page problems". An assumption worth delving into.

No doubt that the 21st century offers us an increasing list of two-hundred page problems; energy production/storage/transport/sustainability, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, gene therapy and neurotechnology, to name but a few. However, it seems that many of our really critical problems, the problems we have struggled with for centuries, do not need two-hundred page solutions. War and peace, international law and sovereignty, human rights and social welfare, can each be framed by a dozen volumes of debate, but no solution of such size will be applicable.

To mobilize large scale action, to maintain clarity of direction, to engage diverse interests in common benefit, requires two-page solutions. Or rather, they demand the ability to transcend the cacophony of spin and bias to describe succinct solutions accessible by the broadest base possible. Gladwell displays much of this skill himself- he has a rare ability to describe the simplicity behind a complex system, to turn two hundred page problems accessible only by specialists into two page problems available on any metro or plane ride.

Of course, we need all these types; the Ventrises to make the great leaps forward, fuelling and fuelled by teams of Wileses, and communicated to the rest of us by the Gladwells.

"A Very English Genius", a BBC documentary on Michael Ventris and his "Everest of Greek archaeology".

(Thanks, Tom W!)