LAS VEGAS – The man who wrote about decision-making made in the blink of an eye is advocating a slow and steady approach to healthcare reform.

Malcolm Gladwell spoke of healthcare reform and healthcare IT at America’s Health Insurance Plans’ Institute 2007 last month in Las Vegas.

Gladwell, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, noted that healthcare’s position at the top of the American agenda is a “positive thing.” However, he suggested the country might benefit from more patience when it comes to transformation.

“I worry that the national conversation is taking the wrong way,” he said.

Gladwell used examples from art to discuss approaches to change. “Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso revolutionized the world of art, but they represent two distinctly different ideas on how to innovate,” he said.

He described Picasso as a conceptual innovator who revolutionized art with his transformative ideas. “He had big, bold, grand ideas,” Gladwell said, which the artist then executed fairly quickly. Cezanne, on the other hand, was an experimental painter who used a trial-and-error approach and went about his work slowly. Gladwell said the two approaches of imposing genius in the world, which are profoundly dissimilar in nature, could be applied to any business or reform.

“We are in danger of approaching the healthcare problem like it’s a Picasso problem and not a Cezanne problem,” Gladwell said.

Gladwell advocated for the abandonment of the notion of the grand, transformative idea, of being able to describe the plan of action and then attacking it. “With really complex problems, you can’t start with a grand idea,” he said. “You need a trial-and-error method.”

He also bemoaned the bias for quick results. “We want solutions that come quickly,” he said. “We want return on investment. There are certain classes of problems that can’t be solved that way.”

The solution filmmaker Michael Moore presents in his film, Sicko, is a Picasso approach to the healthcare industry, Gladwell said. The problem can be solved if we did these three things, he went on to say. “That kind of language is incredibly powerful. It fits in with the larger cultural pattern in this country,” he said.

There are too many stakeholders in the healthcare industry to take on a simple approach, Gladwell said. “Any plan to resolve this problem is necessarily complex,” he said.

"I’m waiting for a politician to stand up and say, 'we don’t need a Picasso to solve our healthcare problem. We need a Cezanne,’” he said.

The reform process needs to begin with experiments that will then guide us and help us decide what works. Gladwell called on Congress to “try a couple of ideas and test them out.”

He advocated for giving states waivers to conduct experiments. “All states need to experiment simultaneously,” he said. “We need to give states more freedom.”