Concept
Coupling
Coupling is Malcolm Gladwell's name for the idea that certain behaviours are tied to particular places and conditions, so that a person's actions cannot be understood without the context in which they happen.
Gladwell takes the term from criminology. He describes policing research showing that crime is not spread evenly across a city but clusters in a small number of street corners and hours: the same people behave differently on another block or at another time, which suggests the behaviour is coupled to a place and a moment, not only to a person. The lesson for reading people is about where you look. We tend to explain strangers by their character: he is aggressive, she is careless. Coupling asks what the situation is doing. A colleague who is short with you every Monday at nine may be coupled to the weekly report, not hostile to you. A client who seems evasive on the phone may be sitting in an open-plan office. Before you decide who someone is, ask what conditions their behaviour appears in, and whether changing the conditions would change the behaviour.
A real-life example
In Kayseri, Fatma, a hospital ward supervisor, keeps clashing with Okan, a nurse who is irritable at every shift handover. She has decided he is difficult. Then she notices the clashes happen only at the 7 a.m. handover, when he has come off nights and the paperwork is still incomplete. She moves the paperwork earlier in the shift. The handovers become calm.
How to use it
- 1Pick one person whose behaviour bothers you and note when and where it happens.
- 2Look for the conditions present each time: time, place, workload, other people.
- 3Change one condition before you change your opinion of the person.