Tweak the Environment

SHAPE THE PATH

8

1.

When some guy cuts you off in traffic, you probably think, instinctively: What a jerk. (Or perhaps your inner voice is more vulgar.) What you almost certainly don’t think to yourself is, Gosh, I wonder what’s wrong that he is in such a hurry.

It’s not hard to see why we don’t think that—it seems kind of naive, as if we’re making an excuse for a bad person. But think about your own behavior. Think of a time when you were driving so crazily that others would have been justified to curse you. Was your crazy driving on that day a manifestation of your true character (i.e., you’re a jerk to the core)? Or was it sparked by the situation you were in?

In the very first story in Chapter 1—about moviegoers who ate more popcorn when given bigger buckets—we saw how easy it can be to jump to conclusions about people. If we hadn’t known about the effect of bucket size, it would have been easy to

conclude that the big-bucket people were Popcorn-Gorging Gluttons. But of course the surprising part of the study is that, when you give people a giant bucket, they become Popcorn-Gorging Gluttons. And when someone behind the wheel of a car is twenty minutes late for a crucial appointment, that person becomes a terrible driver. What looks like a person problem is often a situation problem.

The same phenomenon holds true in the business world. W. Edwards Deming, the chief instigator of the Total Quality Management movement that revolutionized manufacturing, told a story about a company that used a variety of flammable products in its production process. Unsurprisingly, fires frequently broke out in its plants. But the president of the company didn’t think he had a situation problem; he thought he had a person problem. He sent a letter to every one of the company’s 10,500 employees, pleading with them to set fewer fires. Ahem. (What looks like a pyromania problem is often a flammable chemical problem.)

We are frequently blind to the power of situations. In a famous article, Stanford psychologist Lee Ross surveyed dozens of studies in psychology and noted that people have a systematic tendency to ignore the situational forces that shape other people’s behavior. He called this deep-rooted tendency the “Fundamental Attribution Error.” The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.

The Fundamental Attribution Error complicates human relationships. Marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis said, “Most people attribute their marital problems to some deeply engrained personality characteristics of their spouse.” A wife might say, “My husband is a stubborn person.” But Weiner-Davis might respond: “You’ve got to admit that your husband isn’t always stubborn. He

doesn’t resist when his coworkers suggest a new client approach at work. And he doesn’t drag his feet when you propose new ways to handle the family’s finances. The stubbornness emerges mainly when you suggest a new approach with the kids at home—and when you do that, he is stubborn almost every time. It’s the situation, not an immutable stubbornness built into his character, that produces the behavior.” (This doesn’t excuse his stubbornness, of course, but it should provide hope for a solution, since situations should be easier to tweak than people’s core character.)

The Fundamental Attribution Error is the reason why we love TV shows like The Dog Whisperer or Supernanny, in which seemingly irredeemable dogs and kids are tamed by outsiders who come in with a new system of discipline. At the beginning of the episodes, we’re presented with a dog that bites everything in sight, or a child who won’t obey the simplest of commands, and we simply can’t avoid jumping to conclusions about their character: That dog is vicious. That boy is a terror. And when they’re reformed, in the course of a short intervention, it blows our minds.

If we could cure ourselves of the Fundamental Attribution Error, these shows would seem obvious to the point of absurdity. (It would be like watching a show whose premise was that if you take scalding-hot liquids—dangerous and slippery—and stick them in the freezer for a long time, they renounce their fiery former selves and turn to ice!)

Now you can see why the third element of our framework, the Path, is so critical. If you want people to change, you can provide clear direction (Rider) or boost their motivation and determination (Elephant). Alternatively, you can simply make the journey easier. Create a steep downhill slope and give them a push. Remove some friction from the trail. Scatter around lots of signs to tell them they’re getting close.

In short, you can shape the Path.

To see how a smoother Path can change behavior, consider some research that studied why college students did (or didn’t) donate food to a canned-food drive for charity. The researchers knew some students would be more charitable and generous than others and would be more inclined to donate food. The researchers wondered: Can we alter the situation so that jerks give, too?

First, to distinguish “saints” from “jerks,” they polled all the students in a particular dorm, asking them to assess which of their dorm-mates (out of roughly one hundred) were most likely and least likely to make a donation. Once they compiled those rankings, they had a pretty good idea of which students were charitable or uncharitable types.

Then they altered the Path. Some students received a basic letter announcing the launch of a food drive the following week and asking them to bring canned food to a booth on Tressider Plaza (a well-known spot on campus). Other students received a more detailed letter, which included a map to the precise spot, a request for a can of beans, and a suggestion that they think about a time when they’d ordinarily be near Tressider Plaza so they wouldn’t have to go out of their way to get there.

The two letters were randomly sent to the saints and the jerks. A week later, after the food drive was over, the researchers had a precise list of who had given food and who hadn’t.

Students who received the basic letter were not very generous. Only 8 percent of the saints donated and not a single one of the jerks. So far, the jerks were living up to their reputation (but the saints weren’t exactly outperforming).

Then came the shock. Students who received the more detailed letter were substantially more charitable: 42 percent of the saints donated, and so did 25 percent of the jerks! This is an

inspiring result. These researchers got 25 percent of the worst individuals in the dorm to donate simply by smoothing the Path a bit. (Bottom line: If you’re hungry and need a can of food, you’re three times better-off relying on a jerk with a map than on a budding young saint without one.)

What’s more, the Path wasn’t changed in any dramatic way—the letter just gave moderately more concrete instructions. Imagine what would have happened with a more aggressive intervention: What if volunteers had gone door-to-door collecting the canned food?

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. And no matter what your role is, you’ve got some control over the situation.

3.

Today, as you go through your day, notice how many times people have tweaked the environment to shape your behavior. Traffic engineers wanted you to drive in a predictable, orderly way, so they painted lane markers on the roads and installed stoplights and road signs. Grocery store managers wanted you to spend more time in their store, so they positioned the milk coolers all the way at the back. Your boss’s boss wanted to encourage more collaboration among employees, so she approved an “open floor plan” layout with no cubicles or dividers. The bank was tired of your leaving your ATM card in the machine, so now the machine forces you to remove it before you can claim your cash.

Tweaking the environment is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. It’s that simple. As an inspiration, think about Amazon’s 1-Click ordering. With one-tenth the effort of dialing a phone number, you can buy a new book or DVD. Talk about instant gratification.

Amazon’s site designers have simply made a desired behavior—you spending money on their site—a little bit easier. They’ve lowered the bar to a purchase as far as humanly possible (at least until they launch “1-Blink Ordering”). By doing this, they’ve generated untold millions of dollars in incremental revenue.

The opportunities are endless for simple, 1-Click-style tweaks. A few years ago, a consultant named Peter Bregman was asked to help a management consulting firm with an administrative problem. Employees weren’t submitting their time sheets on time, which slowed the firm’s billing because charges to clients were based on hours worked. Traditionally, the consultants had submitted their time sheets on paper, and they’d done so pretty reliably. Then the firm developed an online time-sheet tool. Consultants weren’t using it. The executives held education classes to explain the new tool, but people kept on submitting their time sheets on paper.

Frustrated, the executives tried using fiat power, announcing that the new online tool was mandatory. “That worked for about half of the employees,” said Bregman. “The rest simply ignored it.” The executives were ready to escalate the battle: They prepared a memo saying that people wouldn’t get their paychecks unless they used the online tool. (Side note: In our experience, people who are trying to change things often reach instinctively for carrots and sticks. But this strategy indicates a pretty crude view of human behavior—that people act only in response to bribes and punishments. And it quickly becomes absurd. Are you going to break out the “no paycheck” stick for every change you want to make in your workplace?)

Bregman put the brakes on. “Wait,” he said. “Do we know why people aren’t doing the online time sheet?” The executives assumed that the consultants were Luddites or simply obstinate—classic

labels inspired by the Fundamental Attribution Error. Bregman persuaded the executives to do a bit more investigation.

The employees who turned in paper time sheets were asked why they weren’t using the online tool. Paper was easier, they said. Skeptical, the interviewers asked if they could observe the employees while they filled out the online time sheet. The results were telling.

Lots of employees started grousing as soon as they encountered the “wizard” that was built into the online tool. Ironically, the wizard was intended to help people fill out the form. Think of the annoying paper clip guy in Microsoft Office who wants to help you write a letter. Now imagine that you have no choice but to accept his “help.” When the executives killed the wizard, allowing people to skip directly to the form itself, compliance rates rose immediately, and within a few weeks everyone was using the online tool.

“People weren’t being defiant,” said Bregman. They were just proceeding on the easiest Path.

What’s sadly typical about this story is that the executives didn’t initially look for a Path solution. Instead, they wanted to spook the Elephant by threatening to withhold a paycheck. Bregman says they were mentally stuck: “‘Well, I already asked them to do it. I taught them how to do it. I told them they had to do it. I don’t know what else to do!’” At that point, the executives felt they’d tried every tool in their toolbox, so they jumped to punishments.

“We’re taught to focus on incentives by our business background,” says Bregman. “Or even our parents: ‘Do this or you won’t get your allowance!’” But executives—and parents—often have more tools than they think they have. If you change the path, you’ll change the behavior.

—————————— CLINIC ——————————

Can You Get Problem Students to Come to Class on Time?

SITUATION Bart Millar, an American history teacher at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, is frustrated by a few of his students, like Robby and Kent, who frequently arrive late and then sit in the back of the room, talking to each other and laughing and disrupting the class. Millar has tried getting tough with them—being strict and even sending them to the principal a few times. Nothing seems to work. What can he do to get these students under control? [Bart Millar and the situation are real, but the kids’ names are disguised.]

WHAT’S THE SWITCH AND WHAT’S HOLDING IT BACK? If Millar tries to get Robby and Kent to “act like model students,” he’ll be doomed to fail. Let’s focus on the critical move: Millar wants Robby and Kent to be in their seats before the class starts. If he manages to succeed with that (no small feat), he can keep snowballing the change.

What’s holding back the switch? Let’s face it, this probably isn’t a Rider problem. Robby and Kent know exactly when they’re supposed to be in their seats, so we won’t even think about the Rider. It’s an Elephant problem. The kids aren’t enthused about showing up on time, especially if doing so means less time hanging out with their friends in the hallways. The Path might also play a role: Are there aspects of the environment or culture that make it easier for the kids to get away with their tardiness?

HOW DO WE MAKE THE SWITCH?

• Direct the Rider. N/A. The teens know what is expected of them.

• Motivate the Elephant. 1. Find the feeling. Maybe the kids see Millar as an abstract authority figure rather than as a human being. Imagine a one-on-one conversation with each kid in which Millar says, “I feel stressed out because

I’m expected to cover so much material in so little time. And that’s how I’m judged. And I know you don’t think it’s a big deal when you’re a few minutes late, but it makes my chances of doing a good job harder and harder. Can you do me a favor and just get here a second or two early?” Depending on the kids’ empathy level, this might work. Or, more likely, fail utterly.

• Shape the Path. 1. Tweak the environment. Lock the door when the bell rings so latecomers are stuck in the hallway. 2. Build habits. Start having a daily quiz with one or two quick questions at the beginning of every class. If Robby and Kent aren’t present to take the quiz, they’ll fail. 3. Rally the herd. Post a class “on-time” record on the wall. Maybe when Robby and Kent see that they’re the only students violating the social norm to be on time, they’ll change their ways. 4. Build habits. Set a policy that the last student in his or her seat every day will be asked to answer the first question. 5. Rally the herd. Find a way to let Robby and Kent know that the other students dislike what they’re doing (as they almost certainly do). Often troublemakers have the illusion that their defiant behavior makes them folk heroes. They can be deflated quickly by frank peer feedback. 6. Tweak the environment. Do what Bart Millar actually did: He bought a used couch and put it right at the front of the classroom. It was immediately obvious that this couch was the cool place to sit—students could slouch and relax instead of sitting at a dorky desk. Suddenly Robby and Kent started getting to class early every day so they could “get a good seat.” They were volunteering to sit at the front of the classroom. Genius.

4.

Becky Richards worked at Kaiser South San Francisco Hospital, where nurses administer about eight hundred medications a day. “Medication administration” is what happens between the time a doctor prescribes a certain medication (such as 100 mg of ibuprofen) and the patient receives it. Nurses take the doctor’s

chicken-scratch prescription, transcribe it so it’s legible, then fax the order to the pharmacy. When the medication arrives from the pharmacy, they deliver it in the right dosage by the right method (IV drip, injection, orally) to the right patient at the right time.

Nurses have an impressive accuracy record: On average, they commit approximately 1 error per 1,000 medications administered. Still, given the huge volume of medications delivered at Kaiser South, that error rate led to about 250 errors annually, and a single error can be harmful or even deadly. For instance, if a patient receives too much heparin, a blood thinner, the patient’s blood will no longer clot and the patient could hemorrhage. If a patient gets too little heparin, the patient could develop a blood clot that could lead to a stroke.

Richards, who was director of adult clinical services at Kaiser South, and her nursing staff wanted to drive down medication errors. Richards believed that most errors happened when nurses were distracted. It was easy to become distracted, because in most traditional hospitals, the medication administration areas are right in the middle of the nursing units, which tend to be the noisiest places on the floor. From memory, Richards quoted Tess Pape, a professor at the University of Texas who has studied medication errors, saying, “Today we admire people for multitasking, we celebrate people who can accomplish many things at once. But when you’re giving out medications it is the last time you should be multitasking.”

Put yourself in Richards’s shoes for a moment. Your goal is clear: Change your nurses’ behavior so they can focus better, so they’re less likely to get distracted. How can you accomplish that? First, you need to identify the core problem.

The nurses understand what’s expected of them—the critical moves are clear—so this isn’t a Rider problem. Nor do the nurses

have any emotional resistance to better focus. In fact, it annoys them when they’re distracted by others, which means that, in this case, we have the luxury of a supportive Elephant. The problem, it seems, is the distractions themselves. No one thinks twice before calling out to a nurse who’s walking the halls delivering medication. Worse, nurses feel an obligation to respond when others distract them. No one wants to tell a surgeon, “Sorry, bub, can’t help right now. I’m dealing with medication.” Yet that’s exactly what needs to happen if errors are to be reduced.

What Richards needed to do was make other people aware that they were interrupting the nurses. She needed to make the bad behavior visible. Ideally, when the nurses were administering medication, they would work inside a soundproof bubble, like the “Cone of Silence” from Get Smart. With that solution being architecturally infeasible, Richards came up with the idea of using a visual symbol, something that could be worn by nurses, that would signal to other people, Hey, don’t bother me right now. I’m passing out medication.

After considering armbands and aprons, Richards settled on vests and decided to call them “medication vests.” Where do you buy a medication vest? Richards had to make do with what she could find: “The first vest we ordered was off the internet. It was really cheesy. Cheap plastic. Bright orange. Be careful what you order off the internet.”

Later, with vests in hand, Richards unveiled the idea to her staff: When you’re administering medication, you’ll put on a medication vest. It’s bright enough that people can see it from down the hall. And all of us, including the doctors, will know that when someone is wearing one of these vests, we should leave that person alone.

She selected two units at Kaiser South for a six-month pilot study of the medication vests, and in July 2006 it began.

Richards quickly encountered a problem. The nurses hated

the vests. So did the doctors. “Nurses thought the vest was demeaning, and they couldn’t find it when they needed it,” said Richards. “They didn’t like the color. They’d ask, ‘How do you clean it?’ And physicians hated not being able to talk to their nurses when they passed them in the hall.”

The nurses’ written feedback was scathing: “Oh, so you want to draw attention to the fact we can make a mistake.” “You want people to think I have a dunce cap on, that I’m so stupid I can’t think on my feet.” “Give me a hard hat and a cone and I can go work for Caltrans [the state highway department].”

“They were pretty brutal,” said Richards. The reception was so universally poor that Richards was ready to write off the idea and try something else.

Then the data came back.

During the six-month trial period, errors dropped 47 percent from the six months prior to the study. “It took our breath away,” said Richards.

Once the data were in, the hatred faded. Impressed by the results, the entire hospital adopted the medication vests, except for one unit that insisted they weren’t needed. Errors dropped by 20 percent in the first month of the hospitalwide adoption, except in one unit, which actually saw an increase in errors. (Guess which one.)

You know you’ve got a smart solution when everyone hates it and it still works—and in fact works so well that people’s hate turns to enthusiasm. Becky Richards had found a way to change the Path.

5.

The airline industry has long used a consistent practice. Because most aircraft accidents happen during takeoffs and landings—the

most hectic and coordination-intensive parts of any flight—the industry adopted the “sterile cockpit” rule. Anytime a plane is below 10,000 feet—whether on the way up or the way down—no conversation is permitted in the cockpit, except what’s directly relevant for flying. At 11,000 feet, members of the cockpit crew can talk about football, their kids, or the loathsome passengers. But not at 9,500 feet.

One IT group adopted the “sterile cockpit” concept to advance an important software project. The group had embraced a substantial goal—to reduce new-product development time from three years to nine months. In previous projects with tight deadlines, the work environment had become increasingly stressful. When workers fell behind schedule, they tended to interrupt their colleagues for quick help, and their managers would wander by regularly and ask to be “statused” on the project. As a result, the software engineers were interrupted more and more, and workweeks expanded to sixty and seventy hours as people started showing up on weekends, hoping to get some work done without interruption.

The leaders of the IT group decided to try an experiment. They established “quiet hours” on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings before noon. The goal was to give coders a sterile cockpit, allowing them to concentrate on complex bits of coding without being derailed by periodic interruptions. Even the socially insensitive responded well to this change in the Path. One engineer, previously among the worst interrupters, said, “I always used to worry about my own quiet time and how to get more of it, but this experiment made me think about how I’m impacting others.”

In the end, the group managed to meet its stringent nine-month development goal. The division vice president attributed this accomplishment to the sterile cockpit quiet hours: “I do not

think we could’ve made the deadline without it,” he said. “This is a new benchmark.”

In these disparate environments—airplane cockpits and hospitals and IT work groups—the right behaviors did not evolve naturally. Nurses weren’t “naturally” given enough space to work without distraction, and programmers weren’t “naturally” left alone to focus on coding. Instead, leaders had to reshape the Path consciously. With some simple tweaks to the environment, suddenly the right behaviors emerged. It wasn’t the people who changed; it was the situation. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

6.

We’ve seen lots of environment tweaking in organizations—offices and airlines and hospitals—but, make no mistake, we can turn these tools on ourselves, too. Many people have discovered that, when it comes to changing their own behavior, environmental tweaks beat self-control every time.

For instance, Brian Wansink, the author of the popcorn-bucket study described in Chapter 1, has a devoted following of dieters who swear by his prime directive: Shrink your dinnerware. Use smaller plates, bowls, and cups.

Wansink knows that if we use big plates, we feel obligated to cover them with food—a half-full plate feels morally wrong somehow. And because we’re wired to finish what’s on our plate, that’s a big problem. Big plates = big portions = overeating. To achieve eating control, according to Wansink, you must start with plate control. Store your dinner plates in a box in your closet, and start eating dinner every night off your salad plates. Use small wineglasses, not huge goblets. Never, ever eat snack food directly out of the bag or box; instead, pour a reasonable portion onto a

small appetizer plate. These very simple environmental tweaks—swapping out the plates and bowls and glasses in your cabinet—have huge effects on eating behavior.

We all play these games with ourselves, trying to nudge ourselves to do the right thing. We know a guy who religiously lays out his jogging clothes and shoes before he goes to sleep. That way, when he wakes up, it’s just a tiny bit easier to get going. Another friend never goes to bed without setting the coffeepot to auto-brew at wake-up time. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee helps to fight the oversleeping urge. And there’s a woman who actually freezes her credit card in a block of ice, so that when she feels the urge to spend, she forces herself to have a cooling-off (or, rather, a warming-up) period.

Self-manipulation works. Amanda Tucker used these same environment-tweaking principles to improve her management style at work. Tucker was the country manager for Nike in Vietnam. She traveled frequently to visit factories in outlying regions, and while she was out of the office, work piled up. When she returned home, she was often overwhelmed. “I had more plates spinning than I felt I could handle,” she said. It was tempting to shut her office door and plow through the accumulated work, but she knew it was important to stay accessible to her team. In fact, she established an open-door policy, allowing the individuals who reported to her directly to see her at any time she was in town.

Nine months into the job, Tucker solicited feedback from her team members about her performance as a manager. She was astonished when they complained that she didn’t seem to have time to talk to them. “Some of them were offended that when they walked into my office, I would often continue to look at my computer screen and type while they were talking. This of course gave them the strong signal that what I was doing was more important to me than they were,” Tucker said.

She knew they were right. It was a bad habit. And she also knew that the layout of her office was encouraging the habit. When people came to see her, they sat in chairs across from her desk. When she faced them, she still had the computer monitor in her field of view. So it was easy—too easy—for Tucker to glance back and forth from their faces to the screen.

Tucker simply rearranged her office. She moved the desk so it no longer separated her from her guests, and she added a meeting area with two small couches and a table. Now, when she was facing the people who came to see her, the computer was completely out of sight. No more temptation.

“Just by rearranging the furniture, I was able to connect much better with people who came to see me,” she said. Six months later, she solicited more feedback and was pleased that her communication scores had soared.

If you’d seen Tucker’s initial performance appraisals, you might have concluded that, despite her stated open-door policy, she was one of those insensitive managers who never listen to their subordinates. And you would have been committing the Fundamental Attribution Error. Simply by rearranging the furniture in her office, Tucker made herself into a different “kind of person.” That’s the power of shaping the Path.

7.

There is something satisfying about outsmarting ourselves. (By now, you realize what “outsmarting ourselves” means—that our Riders are outsmarting our Elephants.) Tucker’s solution was appealing in its elegance—a seemingly messy management problem solved by an afternoon office makeover. Tucker shaped her environment to disallow her own bad behavior.

This is a topic that hits home for the two of us (your co-authors).

While we were writing this book, we got annoyed by our tendency to get distracted by e-mail. We were aware of the irony of our giving advice to readers about reining in their Elephants while our own Elephants habitually prompted us to check Outlook. So we decided to take some of our own medicine.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, you know that when you get new e-mail, an alert sound plays through your computer’s speakers. That sound is like digital catnip. How can you not check your mail when you hear it? What if a rich Nigerian politician went down in a plane crash and you had a limited time to capture part of his fortune?

Chip decided to tweak his environment: He rummaged through the control panel until he found the place that allowed him to delete the e-mail sound at the system level. Later, he noticed that new e-mail also triggered an alert icon on the taskbar—more irresistible bait for the Elephant. He covered it with a Post-it note blackened with one of his daughter’s felt-tip markers. Now it can’t torment him. Ignorance is bliss.

Meanwhile, Dan went nuclear. He bought an old laptop, deleted all its browsers, and, for good measure, deleted its wireless network drivers. Now when he needs to focus, he takes the “way-back machine” with him to a coffee shop or library. There’s no hope of getting online. He’s been liberated by this restriction.

Our struggles with e-mail are a bit pathetic, but the larger topic is worth considering: Is it possible to design an environment in which undesired behaviors—whether yours or your colleagues’—are made not only harder but impossible? As it turns out, lots of people actually make their living contemplating how to wipe out the wrong kinds of behaviors.

Consider industrial safety. Many factories use dangerous machines that have a bad habit of lopping off fingers or hands that are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suppose you’re a factory

foreman and one of your workers loses an index finger in an industrial accident. You want to make sure this never happens again. How might you accomplish that?

You could give your workers’ Riders clear direction by means of clear signage—KEEP HANDS CLEAR OF THE MACHINE or DANGER: RISK OF INJURY—accompanied by an illustration identifying the machine’s trouble spot.

You could appeal to your workers’ Elephants, using fear. Here we can take inspiration from driver’s-education courses in which teenagers watch films full of bloody, gruesome car crashes, so that when they finish driver’s ed they will avoid driving like teenagers. In homage to these films, you could call together your workers and show them a video of the guy who lost his finger. Show them what the gory wound looked like. Have him urge his colleagues to take safety seriously. “I wish I’d paid more attention,” he’d say.

Or you could focus on the Path, in which case you would disregard hearts and minds entirely. In fact, suppose you stipulated outright that your workers are hopeless, that they’re irredeemable daredevils who are determined to waggle their fingers in the machine’s danger zone for the sheer sport of it. Could you still keep them from dismembering themselves?

Absolutely. Many factories have done exactly that. For instance, one machine is designed so that it can be activated only if two buttons are pressed at the same time. The buttons are positioned so that to press both of them you must place your arms high and wide (like the “Y” in the “YMCA” dance). The beauty of this arrangement is that, if your hands are pressing those buttons, they are (by design) nowhere near the danger zone. And if they’re not pressing the buttons, the machine is off. Either way, your fingers win.

Poof—you have made a dangerous behavior impossible.

With that example in mind, think about all the innovations that have made “bad behavior” impossible or nearly impossible: childproof caps on medicine bottles, cars that won’t shift out of park unless the brake pedal is pressed, anything that’s fireproof. Notice that these are product-design innovations created to prevent injuries. “Injury prevention” is, in fact, a thriving field. Every state government has a few people on staff—usually heinously under-funded—whose job is to think about how to reduce injuries or deaths caused by small children falling into swimming pools, the elderly falling in their homes, car crashes, and other misfortunes. Rarely can such incidents be made impossible, but injuries resulting from them can be reduced.

In trying to minimize the risk of bad outcomes, injury-prevention experts often turn to the Haddon Matrix, a simple framework that provides a way to think systematically about accidents by highlighting three key periods of time: pre-event, event, and post-event.

Let’s say our goal is to reduce serious injuries from car wrecks. Pre-event interventions would include anything that would tend to prevent wrecks from happening: installing bright lighting on highways, painting clear lane markers on the roads, popularizing antilock brakes, launching advertising campaigns against drunk driving.

With event interventions, we accept that crashes will happen and ask ourselves how we can reduce the chances of injury. Seat belts and air bags are classic event interventions, but also think about breakaway light poles and those big orange barrels that line exit ramps (which are intended to soften collisions).

With post-event interventions, we acknowledge both that crashes will occur and that people will be injured. The goal of post-event interventions is to minimize the severity of the injuries

and optimize the health outcomes. A speedy, effective emergency medical team will be important.

The Haddon Matrix is also useful for thinking about matters that aren’t so life-and-death. Let’s say you are the IT person in a small business and one of your many duties is to prevent the loss of important data that occurs frequently when computers crash. Some IT support people in this situation embrace not the Haddon Matrix but the “Hectoring Manifesto” and berate their colleagues for not backing up their work (all the while committing the Fundamental Attribution Error: My colleagues are reckless and lazy people!). But if you think in Haddon Matrix terms, you begin to see a more holistic picture.

Think about pre-event interventions: If computers don’t crash, then you can’t lose data. So maybe you schedule monthly computer check-ups, buy extra-padded laptop bags for everyone, and budget for complete replacements every three years.

Event interventions would call for ways of preventing a crash from leading to data loss. For instance, some computers have an extra hard drive where all data are mirrored in real time. A crash would be less likely to take out both drives.

Post-event interventions would accept the reality of data loss but focus on ways to minimize the damage. The most obvious strategy here would be to create an automated nightly network backup, so that if a crash happens and data are lost, you can restore the previous night’s data. Another post-event strategy would be to find ways to prevent mission-critical data from ever ending up on a laptop. For instance, you might use an online application such as SalesForce.com to host customer contact information, so that precious data would never depend on the health of a local hard drive.

Note that we’ve managed to create a robust plan against data loss without worrying about what our employees were thinking or

feeling. We didn’t mention their Elephants or their Riders. We simply tweaked the environment to make bad behavior impossible.

9.

In 1999, some bad behavior was abruptly made impossible at a company called Rackspace. At one particular moment, company employees stopped doing one thing and starting doing another thing, and that behavior shift became the most important inflection point in the company’s history. But before we get to that moment, a bit of backstory is necessary.

Rackspace is a company that hosts internet sites for other companies. It prides itself on customer service, as suggested by its slogan, “Fanatical Support.” The firm’s focus on customer service has paid off. Over the years, Rackspace has won an armload of trade awards for its service, and its “Net Promoter” score—a commonly used benchmark of customer word-of-mouth—has consistently been the envy of the industry.

But Rackspace wasn’t always so customer-friendly. In 1999, Rackspace didn’t think much about customer service. Company founder Graham Weston said that in the early days, Rackspace had a “denial of service” business model. Customer-service interactions were viewed as costs to be minimized—the more roadblocks that could be erected to keep the phone from ringing, the better the profits would be. (Notice the uncomfortable echoes of the Haddon Matrix: If you view customer calls as bad behavior to be prevented, you will do all you can to deter them. Recall that for many years, Amazon.com’s policy was not to publish a customer-service phone number.)

Then in the fall of 1999, Rackspace received The Call. It started normally enough. A customer tried to call for support. He pressed 5 to get help, but instead he got voice mail, which in

effect said, “Feel free to leave a voice mail here, but we don’t check it very often, so you’re better-off sending us an e-mail.” The customer grudgingly sent an e-mail message to the suggested address. And the team at Rackspace never answered it.

After a few more of these irritating cycles, the customer was furious, and with a bit of legwork he managed to track down Graham Weston at the office of a real estate business he owned. Surprised, Weston asked the customer to forward the e-mails he’d sent and promised to look into the matter.

Weston reviewed the long chain of e-mails, which had become increasingly angry as past inquiries were ignored. “Something hit me about what the customer was asking for,” said Weston. “It was something that we could do very easily that he couldn’t do. So the question in my mind was, why are we not serving the customer happily?”

Weston knew that his team couldn’t sustain a business based on dodging its customers. “We made a 180-degree turn,” he said.

Weston hired David Bryce to be the head of customer support. At his first meeting with the team, Bryce announced that Rackspace was going to transform itself from a company that dreaded customer support to a company that was passionate about support. He posted an aspirational banner on the wall: RACKSPACE GIVES FANATICAL SUPPORT . The phrase stuck immediately.

This was just talk, of course, but there was action to back it up. Weston started by overhauling the company’s business model. Providing great service would cost more, and if Rackspace offered both premium service and cutting-edge technological expertise, it would be forced to set its prices so high that no one would buy. So, remarkably, Weston began pushing for the company to become technologically dull: “We don’t want to be on the bleeding

edge of technology. We believe in standardization. We want a narrow focus—these are the things we do, and these are things we don’t do. If you’re E*Trade or Amazon, you should host your own site, we can’t help,” he said. (Notice that this is clear direction for the Rider.)

Perhaps the most dramatic change made by Weston and Bryce was also the simplest. Rackspace, like all hosting companies, had a call-queuing system. (“Your call is important to us. Please press 1 for recorded tips that don’t address your problem. Press 5 to leave us a message we won’t return. Press 8 to repeat these options.”) The call queue is perhaps the most basic tool of customer support.

Weston threw it out.

“When a customer calls, that means they need our help, and we’ve got to answer the telephone,” he said. Without the queuing system, there was no safety net. The phone would keep ringing until somebody picked it up. To Weston, this was a critical symbol of the service ethic. “When a customer has a problem, we shouldn’t deal with it when it’s convenient for us. We should deal with it when it’s convenient for the customer.” When Weston threw out the queuing system, it became impossible to dodge the customer. By 2007, the company was talking to an average customer three times per week.

Subsequently, the company launched the “Straightjacket Awards,” including actual Rackspace-branded straightjackets as trophies, which were presented to employees who’d been so fanatical about service that they’d become downright insane. (That’s an identity appeal for the Elephant: We are zealots—that’s what makes us special.) Not coincidentally, in 2008, Rackspace was one of the companies in Fortune’s list of Best Places to Work.

The focus on service paid off. In 2001, Rackspace was the

first internet hosting firm to turn a profit, and over the next six years, it averaged 58 percent annual growth. By 2008, Rackspace had passed AT&T as the highest-grossing firm in the industry.

10.

What transformed the character of Rackspace’s customer-service people? Nothing. They had the same core character before and after the change. They were just people operating in a new environment. The old behavior (ignoring customers) had become harder, and the new behavior (serving customers) had become easier.

In this chapter, we’ve seen that what looks like a “character problem” is often correctible when you change the environment. The transformations are stunning. Take a bunch of customer-service slackers and rip out their call-queuing system, and they start helping customers. Take a boss whose employees say she “won’t listen” and rejigger her furniture, and suddenly the employees’ frustrations fade. Take the biggest jerks in the Stanford dorms and give them a page of instructions, and they’ll donate more food to the needy than the saints.

Simple tweaks of the Path can lead to dramatic changes in behavior.

9
Build Habits ===========================================

1.

Mike Romano was born in 1950 and raised in Milwaukee, the youngest of four brothers. His dad was a handyman who fixed plumbing and heating fixtures. His mom had a commercial art degree; she stayed at home to raise the boys, taking jobs from time to time to pay the bills.

Romano had a temper. In high school, when he was 18, he got into a fight and threw a guy through a window. Afraid of what would happen in court, he enlisted in the army. He figured he was going to be drafted anyway. The court let him go.

Romano eventually ended up being assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, an elite and well-respected unit of paratroopers. The soldiers of the 173rd had an open secret, however: rampant drug use. Others nicknamed them “jumping junkies.” Coming into the military, Romano had no real drug experience. He tried to keep his nose clean with the jumping junkies.

A few months after he arrived in Vietnam, a Claymore land mine detonated near him, and he was struck in his right hand, forearm, and foot. He was taken to a hospital in Camron Bay for recovery. That was where he first tried opium.

He quickly became hooked, like so many others around him. Even when he transferred to other hospitals, his supply wasn’t interrupted. He mostly smoked opium-laced joints, but it was also easy to find liquid opium and even opium chewing gum (not to mention other drugs, such as LSD and marijuana). His addiction continued to torment him throughout his thirteen-month tour of duty.

Romano’s fall into drug use was a typical story during the Vietnam War. The White House was so troubled by reports of drug use among soldiers that it commissioned a study to investigate the scope of the problem. The results were disturbing. Before the war, the typical soldier had only casual experience with hard drugs, and less than 1 percent had ever been addicted to narcotics. But once in Vietnam, almost half of the soldiers tried narcotics, and 20 percent became addicted. Demographics did not predict who would become drug users in Vietnam—race and class were irrelevant.

The drug use started early. Twenty percent of all users started in their first week in Vietnam, 60 percent within the first three months. Oddly, drug use did not seem to be triggered by trauma. The researchers found no statistical relationship between drug use and the difficulty of soldiers’ assignments, or the danger they faced, or the death of friends. Unlike most soldiers, Romano started using opium because he was injured. For most soldiers in Vietnam, drugs were simply a fact of life, a part of the culture.

Government officials were terrified by what would happen when thousands of drug addicts began to return to America. Military and civilian leaders worried that the country’s

drug-treatment programs would be flooded, stretched far beyond capacity. They worried that vets might not be able to hold down jobs, that they might turn to crime.

Mike Romano was one of the people the officials were worried about. When he finally boarded his flight back to the United States in 1969, headed home to Milwaukee, he smuggled back with him a stash of opium-laced joints.

Then his life began to change. A week or two after his return home, he was driving with friends in town when he saw a girl he’d known in grade school. “Stop the car!” he said. He chased her down. She was working as a countergirl at a nearby drugstore. “I thought she was very beautiful,” said Romano.

The two started dating. She caught on fairly quickly that Romano was an addict, and she put pressure on him to stop. He tried to quit a few times, but each time he started to feel sick as withdrawal pains kicked in, and then he’d begin using again. Meanwhile, he started work—construction and house painting and other temporary jobs—and he started taking art classes at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He got a job there designing promotional posters for bands who played at the student union.

After a few quit-and-relapse cycles, he began to wean himself off opium, and within about a month he was clean. He hasn’t touched opium since. What we see in Mike Romano’s life seems like an almost impossible change story: an opium addict who recovered. Mike Romano was one of the lucky ones.

2.

Or was he? White House researchers continued to investigate the drug problem among returning soldiers, and a puzzle started to emerge. Following up with the troops who returned home, the

investigators called them eight to twelve months after their return to ask about their ongoing drug use. During the war, 50 percent of soldiers had been casual users, and 20 percent had become seriously addicted, meaning that they used drugs more than once a week for an extended period of time and experienced withdrawal symptoms (chills, cramps, pain) if they tried to stop. But when the investigators conducted the follow-up, what they found blew their minds. Only 1 percent of the vets were still addicted to drugs. That was essentially the same rate as existed before the war. The feared, drug-fueled social catastrophe had not occurred. What had happened?

3.

People are incredibly sensitive to the environment and the culture—to the norms and expectations of the communities they are in. We all want to wear the right clothes, to say the right things, to frequent the right places. Because we instinctively try to fit in with our peer group, behavior is contagious, sometimes in surprising ways.

Imagine that your job was to design an environment that would extinguish drug addiction. You could take drug-addicted U.S. soldiers, drop them into this environment, and feel confident that the forces within it would act powerfully to help them beat their habits. Think of this environment as an antidrug theme park, and assume that you can spend as much as you want to construct it. What would your theme park look like?

It might look a whole lot like Romano’s neighborhood in Milwaukee.

You’d want to surround the former soldiers with people who love them and care about them—and who treat them as the drug-free persons they once were. You’d give them interesting work to

do—perhaps designing posters for rock bands—so that their minds would be distracted from the joys of opium. You’d create well-publicized sanctions against drug use. You’d keep the drug economy underground, making the former soldiers sneak around to obtain and use drugs. You’d make sure their girlfriends gave them a hard time about their drug use. You’d set up social taboos so that the soldiers would feel derelict, even pathetic, if they kept using. You’d remove the contagious drug-using behavior from the environment—no more addicted soldiers around—and replace it with contagious drug-free behavior. And you would provide rich environmental cues—sights, songs, food, clothes, and homes—that remind the former soldiers of their prewar, drug-free identities.

The Milwaukee Theme Park: That’s exactly why Mike Romano became a former addict. When Romano relocated to Milwaukee, his environment changed, and the new environment changed him.

4.

As the Romano story shows, one of the subtle ways in which our environment acts on us is by reinforcing (or deterring) our habits.

When we think about habits, most of the time we’re thinking about bad ones: biting our fingernails, procrastinating, eating sweets when we’re anxious, and so on. But of course we also have plenty of good habits: jogging, praying, brushing our teeth. Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot. They allow lots of good behaviors to happen without the Rider taking charge. Remember that the Rider’s self-control is exhaustible, so it’s a huge plus if some positive things can happen “free” on autopilot.

To change yourself or other people, you’ve got to change

habits, and what we see with Romano is that his habits shifted when his environment shifted. This makes sense—our habits are essentially stitched into our environment. Research bears this out. According to one study of people making changes in their lives, 36 percent of the successful changes were associated with a move to a new location, and only 13 percent of unsuccessful changes involved a move.

Many smokers, for example, find it easier to quit when they’re on vacation, because at home, every part of their environment is loaded with smoking associations. It’s like trying to quit smoking inside a Camel advertisement—everywhere you look are reminders of the habit. There’s that drawer in the kitchen where the lighters are stashed, the clay pot on the porch that’s become an archive of ashes, the ever-present scent of smoke in the car and the closet. When a smoker goes on vacation, the environment recedes toward neutrality. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to quit, but it’s easier.

It’s unrealistic, however, to think that most of us can shift our environment so dramatically. If you’re trying to change your team’s habits at work, then yes, relocating your office would be a big help. Good luck selling that idea. What are some more practical ways to create a habit?

The first thing to realize is that even small environmental tweaks can make a difference—that’s what we saw in Chapter 8. Remember how Amanda Tucker rearranged her office to make it easier for her to listen to her employees? That was the first step in establishing a new habit. (Environmental tweaks can even force a habit, as we saw in the Rackspace example. When the call-queuing system was thrown out, the customer-service staffers quickly developed the habit of answering the phone.)

But forming a habit isn’t all environmental—it’s also mental. It would be very difficult, for instance, to tweak the environment

in a way that would compel you to learn how to play the piano. So how do you lay the mental groundwork for a new habit?

5.

Say that you’ve been putting off going to the gym. So you resolve to yourself: Tomorrow morning, right after I drop off Anna at school, I’ll head straight to the gym. Let’s call this mental plan an “action trigger.” You’ve made the decision to execute a certain action (working out) when you encounter a certain situational trigger (the school circle, tomorrow morning).

Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist at New York University, is the pioneer of work in this area. He and colleague Veronika Brand-statter found that action triggers are quite effective in motivating action. In one study, they tracked college students who had the option to earn extra credit in a class by writing a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. But there was a catch: To earn the credit, they had to submit the paper by December 26. Most students had good intentions of writing the paper, but only 33 percent of them got around to writing and submitting it. Other students in the study were required to set action triggers—to note, in advance, exactly when and where they intended to write the report (for example, “I’ll write this report in my dad’s office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up”). A whopping 75 percent of those students wrote the report.

That’s a pretty astonishing result for such a small mental investment.

Does this mean that simply by imagining a time and place where you’ll do something, you increase the likelihood that you’ll actually do it? Yes and no. Action triggers won’t get you (or anyone else) to do something you truly don’t want to do. An action trigger never would have convinced college students to participate

in an online calculus camp on Christmas Day. But, as the extra-credit study demonstrates, action triggers can have a profound power to motivate people to do the things they know they need to do.

Peter Gollwitzer argues that the value of action triggers resides in the fact that we are preloading a decision. Dropping off Anna at school triggers the next action, going to the gym. There’s no cycle of conscious deliberation. By preloading the decision, we conserve the Rider’s self-control.

The concept of preloading is easier to see with an example. Imagine that you are one of the college students in Gollwitzer’s study. It’s Christmastime, and you’re at home. Your parents are doting on you, and your siblings are having an interesting conversation. The TV is on, the Christmas tree is lit up, and your elderly Chihuahua Fredo is staring at you adoringly. Let’s not forget the food—turkey and dressing, pecan pie, chocolate truffles—and Guitar Hero, and naps, and the calls you’re getting from old high school friends. Distractions are everywhere. So if you walk into this buffet line of stimuli and you haven’t preloaded a decision about your extra-credit report—if you haven’t told yourself, “I’ll do this report in my dad’s office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up”—you are sunk.

That’s why action triggers have unexpected value. Gollwitzer says that when people predecide, they “pass the control of their behavior on to the environment.” Gollwitzer says that action triggers “protect goals from tempting distractions, bad habits, or competing goals.”

There are countless ways to use action triggers at work. If your salespeople are more motivated to close new business than to cultivate existing relationships, give them a “coffee and call” trigger. Tell them that whenever they pour their first cup of coffee, they are to place a check-in call to one of their most important

customers. Or think about your employees who will be attending an industry conference. By the time they get back to the office, their e-mail will be so backed up that they won’t be in the mood to share their learnings. So give them an action trigger—suggest that during the flight home, whenever the “OK to use electronics” announcement is made, they type up some reflections for everyone on the team. Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness. A trigger to “praise your employees when they do something great” is too vague to be useful.

Gollwitzer has shown that action triggers are most useful in the most difficult situations—the ones that are most draining to the Rider’s self-control. One study analyzed people’s success in accomplishing “easy” goals or “hard” goals. With easy goals, the use of action triggers increased success only slightly, from 78 to 84 percent. But with hard goals, action triggers almost tripled the chance of success—goal completion skyrocketed from 22 to 62 percent.

To see how action triggers can aid people in difficult times, consider a study of patients recovering from hip-or knee-replacement surgery. On average, the patients were 68 years old, and they had been in pain for about a year and a half before the surgery. The surgeries initially make things even worse; they take such a toll on the body that the patients require assistance with the basic tasks of daily life, such as bathing, getting into bed, and even standing up. The road to recovery can be long and painful.

All patients aspired to get back on their feet as soon as possible, of course. But patients in one group were asked to set action triggers—for instance, “If you are going to go for a walk this week, please write down when and where you plan to walk.”

The results of the study were dramatic. On average, action

trigger patients were bathing themselves without assistance in 3 weeks. Other patients took 7 weeks. Action-trigger patients were standing up in 3.5 weeks. The others took 7.7 weeks. In just over 1 month, the action-trigger patients were getting in and out of a car on their own. The others took 2.5 months.

Gollwitzer says that, in essence, what action triggers do is create an “instant habit.” Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s exactly what action triggers are setting up. Here’s the proof of the “instant habit” concept: One study showed that the single biggest predictor of whether women gave themselves a monthly breast examination was if they had a habit of doing so. When another group of women who didn’t have such a habit were asked to set action triggers, they ended up doing just as well as the women with longtime habits. By preloading a decision, they created an instant habit.

Action triggers are not foolproof, of course. Teens with a serious smoking habit, for example, did not reap any benefit from setting action triggers to quit smoking. Their nicotine-enhanced habit was simply too strong.

But even though action triggers aren’t perfect, it’s hard to imagine an easier way to make an immediate change more likely. A recent meta-study that analyzed 8,155 participants across 85 studies found that the typical person who set an action trigger did better than 74 percent of people on the same task who didn’t set one.

Instant habits. This is a rare point of intersection between the aspirations of self-help and the reality of science. And you can’t get much more practical. The next time your team resolves to act in a new way, challenge team members to take it further. Have them specify when and where they’re going to put the plan in motion. Get them to set an action trigger. (Then set another one for yourself.)

—————————— CLINIC ——————————

How Can You Get Workers to Respect a New Safety Policy?

SITUATION Patti Poppe is a department manager in the General Motors automotive plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and she is struggling with how to roll out a new safety policy. Her department, composed of 950 people, is responsible for welding big pieces of metal onto the skeletal car frames. The work can be dangerous. The edges of the metal are sharp when they come off the presses. If a worker puts his hand on an edge and leans against it, the metal will slice his hand. For that reason, gloves and protective clothing are essential. Also, welders wear goggles, but they are sometimes hurt when sparks fly into their eyes from the side. So the new policy prescribes goggles with protective side shields. The old safety policy was complex and filled with exceptions—for instance, a worker driving a forklift didn’t have to wear safety equipment. Poppe says, “Everyone thinks they fall under the ‘this doesn’t apply to me’ clause.” She is determined to get everyone to take the new policy seriously. (This was a real situation.)

WHAT’S THE SWITCH AND WHAT’S HOLDING IT BACK? Poppe wants the workers to protect themselves from lacerations and sparks. There are three potential barriers. First, the complexity of the old policy may have deterred some workers from embracing it. Remember that what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. Poppe needs to script the critical moves. Second, in any safety situation, a “macho” vibe often comes into play. That’s an identity problem. If it seems manlier to ditch the goggles than to wear them, then the Elephant will resist. Third, social pressure is working against safety, because of the “this doesn’t apply to me” sentiment. Poppe needs to flip that social norm. Also, might there be ways to use the environment to cue the right behaviors?

HOW DO WE MAKE THE SWITCH?

• Direct the Rider. 1. Script the critical moves. Poppe threw out the old complicated policy and boiled down the new safety policy to two specific behaviors:

1. Everyone is required to wear hard side shields and safety glasses. (2) No one can expose any bare skin (no shorts or short-sleeve shirts). That’s it. Then Poppe found a way to make these rules very concrete. At an all-hands meeting, she hosted a safety “game show.” A worker was called onstage to be the contestant; he was asked to assess whether a series of models was in compliance with the new safety rules. Some of the models violated the code in subtle ways, such as wearing safety glasses with one eyepiece missing. She invited audience members to help the contestant, and they shouted out answers, thereby rehearsing and absorbing the new behaviors expected of them. 2. Point to the destination. Poppe worried about rationalization, the excuse that “this doesn’t apply to me.” So she created a B&W goal to eliminate the wiggle room. If you were in the plant, you were required to follow the two rules, regardless of what you were doing. The rules applied to everyone at all times.

• Motivate the Elephant. 1. Grow your people. Macho men don’t like to wear dorky safety glasses. Maybe Poppe could find glasses that look more like Bono’s and less like a junior-high-school shop teacher’s. That might make the change less of an identity threat.

• Shape the Path. 1. Rally the herd. By requiring everyone in the plant to wear the safety gear at all times, Poppe is flipping the social norm in favor of compliance. When you look around and everyone is wearing safety glasses, you are more likely to wear them yourself. 2. Build habits. Poppe added one final, inspired touch: She painted a large blue line around the plant and made the new safety policy effective anywhere inside the line. Also, at the entry points, she posted blue wooden men who are wearing the appropriate gear. By installing the blue line and the blue men, Poppe was basically introducing an action trigger. She was training the workers to think, When I cross this line, that’s my cue to put on my gear. The action trigger helped make the behavior habitual.

[What happened: As a result of Poppe’s innovations, injuries at the plant dropped 21 percent from previous levels (which were already among the best of manufacturers doing similar work).]

Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s why they’re such a critical tool for leaders. Leaders who can instill habits that reinforce their teams’ goals are essentially making progress for free. They’ve changed behavior in a way that doesn’t draw down the Rider’s reserves of self-control.

Habits will form inevitably, whether they’re formed intentionally or not. You’ve probably created lots of team habits unwittingly. If your staff meetings always start out with genial small talk, then you’ve created a habit. You’ve designed your meeting autopilot to yield a few minutes of warm-up small talk. The hard question for a leader is not how to form habits but which habits to encourage.

General William “Gus” Pagonis led the logistics operation for the Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush. Pagonis was responsible for moving 550,000 troops halfway around the world, along with all of their equipment. His team made the arrangements to serve 122 million meals, pump 1.3 billion gallons of fuel, and deliver 32,000 tons of mail. Even a Wal-Mart executive would get spooked thinking about this.

Needless to say, clear and efficient communication was essential. Every morning, General Pagonis held a meeting that started at 8 a.m. and ended at 8:30. No great innovation there, but Pagonis made two changes to the routine. First, he allowed anyone to attend (and he required that at least one representative from each functional group be present). That way, he could ensure a free and open exchange of information across the organization. Second, he required everyone to stand up during the whole meeting.

Here’s Pagonis on the benefits of the stand-up meeting:

Early on, I discovered that making people stand up keeps the ball moving at a quicker pace. People speak their piece and then quickly yield the floor to the next

person. On the rare occasion that someone starts to get long-winded or wax philosophic, an unmistakable kind of body language begins to sweep through the crowd. People shift from foot to foot, fidget, look at their watches—and pretty quickly, the conversation comes back into focus…. I can’t recall the last time I had to crack the whip. The peer group has great power.

Pagonis was consciously creating a habit. Any meeting format he chose would have quickly become habitual. It would have been just as easy for him to enshrine a two-hour, seated blabfest. What’s exciting here is not the existence of the habit, but rather the insight that the habit should serve the mission. When you’ve got 550,000 troops to relocate, you need focus and clarity and efficiency. A stand-up meeting won’t guarantee any of that, but it will help, and it’s “free”—it’s not any harder to create than the blabfest would have been. (Similar stand-up meetings are used in Agile programming projects in Silicon Valley, which place a premium on quick collaboration.)

How can you create a habit that supports the change you’re trying to make? There are only two things to think about: (1) The habit needs to advance the mission, as did Pagonis’s stand-up meetings. (2) The habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace. If it’s too hard, then it creates its own independent change problem. For instance, if you’re trying to exercise more and you decide to “create a habit” of going to the gym, you’re really only renaming the core problem. It might be more productive to try to start by building an easier habit, like laying out your gym clothes before you go to bed or asking a friend who already works out to pick you up on his way to the gym.

Consider a one-year study of dieters conducted at Penn State University. A baseline diet condition led to weight loss of

17.8 pounds over the course of the year. That’s an impressive result, but the drawback of many diet programs is that once the program ends, the dieters’ old habits start to reemerge and their weight begins to creep up again. In this study, one warning flag was that only 36 percent of the people in the baseline condition rated themselves as “very full” or “extremely full” on the diet. How sustainable is a diet that doesn’t make you really full?

Other dieters in the same study were asked to eat two cups of soup each day, in addition to their regularly scheduled meals. The two cups of soup were bonus food. These dieters lost 15.4 pounds over the year, and 55 percent of them rated themselves as “very full” or “extremely full.” They didn’t lose quite as much weight, but their odds of feeling full went up substantially. Eating two cups of soup is a classic supporting habit. It was an easy habit to implement—the researchers were simply asking the dieters to eat more. And it helped the broader mission—it helped the dieters feel full, which made it easier for them to control their portions at mealtime.

7.

This focus on creating habits was used masterfully, in a totally different context, by Natalie Elder, an elementary school principal in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When Elder was first considering the job as principal of Hardy Elementary School, she asked to see a copy of the school’s results on statewide tests. As it turned out, she didn’t get to see the data until after she’d already accepted the job. Looking back, she joked that the school board tricked her into taking the job first.

When Elder finally saw the scores, she could not believe what she was reading. Hardy Elementary didn’t just have low test

scores; it had the lowest scores in the state of Tennessee. She wondered, “What have I gotten myself into?”

It was a brutal beginning, but things got even worse. On the first day of school, she had to expel a student. Every week, it seemed, Elder encountered a new form of bad behavior. In the classrooms, students were cussing at their teachers. (Remember, we’re talking about 6-to-8-year-old kids.) Parents sometimes barged into classrooms in the middle of a lesson to talk to their kids. One parent was escorted out of the building in handcuffs after he verbally abused the cafeteria manager.

Elder’s attempts to restore discipline in the school were met with resistance. “Parents were coming in and cussing at me, hollering at me. One parent tried to run me over with a car,” she said. Elder wasn’t facing a teaching problem or a learning problem. She was facing something much more fundamental. She said, “I knew I had to get control of the building before I could teach.”

She forbade parents from entering the building during school hours without permission from her office. She suspended the chronic misbehavers in the classroom. She got the police involved, when necessary, to enforce the new rules.

But those actions were just a way of eliminating the really egregious behavior. Her real goal was to transform chaos into calm. In her judgment, the trouble began the moment students arrived at school. If students were rowdy by 8:30 a.m., Elder reasoned, there wasn’t much hope for the rest of the day. She resolved to conquer the morning by creating a series of consistent routines that would settle the students and prepare them to learn.

The problems began in the driveway where parents dropped off their kids each day. Elder said that often “the mom would already be yelling at the child, and sometimes the music was going BOOM-ta-ta-BOOM, and by the time the kid comes into the

building, they’re already upset or angry.” So Elder and her staff did something amazing: They turned themselves into valets.

They resolved to greet every student before he or she entered the school building. They waited at the curb outside, opened car doors for the kids, smiled and said good morning to the parents, and then walked each child inside to the cafeteria. Their valet service helped smooth the transition to the school day from what for many kids was a raucous home environment.

Once the kids were gathered inside the cafeteria, Elder started every day with a disciplined group assembly. “Continuity is good for any child,” she said. “What these kids don’t get in their lives is stability. They have to know that here they’ll get structure and order.”

At the assembly, Elder began with announcements and a brief call-and-response with the kids. “We’re a school of what?” a teacher would call out. The kids would respond by shouting, “Excellence!” At 7:50, Elder taught a brief lesson in character education, typically focusing on a single word, such as perseverance. She’d have volunteers spell the word and define it. At 7:55, everyone stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance, then sang a patriotic song (for instance, the Whitney Houston version of “America”). Sometimes kids read aloud, or Elder gave them a quick spelling or math quiz. (Often the prize was a coveted “out of uniform” pass for Friday, allowing them to wear what they wanted.)

At 8:00, the kids stood and silently walked to class with “traveling arms,” meaning that the kids’ arms were folded behind them, reducing the nearly irresistible urge to mess with their friends. By the time the kids sat down at their desks, they were ready to learn.

Elder shows us how new habits can clear the Path. She inherited chaos at Hardy Elementary School, and she asked herself, “Which parts of this chaos can I tame? What kind of morning

routine can I set up that will improve the chances that the kids are ready to learn?”

She had to fight the forces that stirred up kids before they’d even set foot in the classroom: the tense drop-offs, the cafeteria pandemonium, the erratic transition to the classroom. By bringing order and continuity to the environment, she was able to create forward movement for a group of children who’d grown used to a destructive cycle of behavior.

Notice, too, that because of the calm environment that Elder managed to create, “bad” kids started acting like good kids. A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”

8.

So far, as we’ve discussed how to shape the Path, we’ve encountered two strategies: (1) tweaking the environment and (2) building habits. There’s a tool that perfectly combines these two strategies. It’s something that can be added to the environment in order to make behavior more consistent and habitual.

That tool is the humble checklist. We discuss it with some trepidation, because we know the associations buzzing in most readers’ heads: mundane, routine, bureaucratic. “Use a checklist,” we admit, sounds like advice a dad would give a college student, along with some tips on tire-pressure gauges and not charging beer to his Exxon card.

But bear with us, because your perceptions are about to change. What if we asserted that checklists can be game-changing, that checklists can save lives?

The Holy Grail of checklists may be one reported by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker. Patients in intensive care units

(ICUs) often have intravenous lines put in to deliver medication. If those lines become infected, nasty health complications can result. Frustrated by these “line infections,” which are preventable, Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins compiled a five-part checklist.

The checklist contained straightforward advice: Doctors should wash their hands before inserting a line, a patient’s skin should be cleaned with antiseptic at the point of insertion, and so on. There was no new science in the checklist, nothing controversial. Only the results were surprising: When the checklist was put into practice by Michigan ICUs over a period of eighteen months, it nearly eliminated line infections, saving the hospitals an estimated $175 million because they no longer had to treat the associated complications. It also saved about fifteen hundred lives.

How can something so simple be so powerful? Checklists educate people about what’s best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something. (That means that checklists are effective at directing the Rider.) As Dr. Pronovost said, his five steps were black and white, backed by solid medical research. You could ignore the checklist, but you couldn’t dispute it.

Even when there is no ironclad right way to do things, checklists can help people avoid blind spots in a complex environment. Has your business ever made a big mistake because it failed to consider all the right information? A checklist might have helped. Cisco Systems, one of the largest internet hardware companies, uses a checklist to analyze potential acquisitions: Will the company’s key engineers be willing to relocate? Will we be able to sell additional services to its customer base? What’s the plan for continuing to support the company’s existing customers? As a smart business development person, you’d probably remember to investigate 80 percent of these critical issues before any deal is

struck. But it would be inadvisable to recall the other 20 percent after the close of a $100 million acquisition. (Whoops! Those hotshot engineers refuse to leave the snow in Boulder.) Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence.

And overconfidence is worth insuring against because we all have a knack for it. In one classic study, people were asked to come up with solutions for their university’s chronic parking problem. Ideas ranged from raising parking fees to creating more “Compact Only” parking spaces. After the ideas were collected, a panel of experts assessed them—eliminating wacky or impractical options—and identified a set of “best solutions.”

The average individual brainstormer came up with 30 percent of the best solutions, which is pretty good for a solo effort. Here’s what’s not so good: The brainstormers confidently predicted that they’d identified 75 percent of the best ideas. (We all know people who believe that the world’s accumulated wisdom only adds an incremental 25 percent to their own contribution. You may have married one of them.)

A checklist could have helped these people. Imagine if you’d provided them with a list of “solution categories” to guide their thinking, reminding them to think about “solutions that raise the cost of parking” and “solutions that help more cars park in the same amount of space” and so on. That list would have served the same role as Cisco’s acquisition categories; it would have sparked their thinking and kept them from forgetting key areas of consideration.

People fear checklists because they see them as dehumanizing—maybe because they associate them with the exhaustive checklists that allow inexperienced teenagers to operate fast-food chains successfully. They think if something is simple enough to be put in a checklist, a monkey can do it. Well, if that’s true, grab a pilot’s checklist and try your luck with a 747.

Checklists simply make big screwups less likely. As Dr. Pronovost said, “We wanted people to standardize on the mission-critical elements—the areas where we have the strongest evidence. And these things that are mission-critical, we’ve got to do them every time.”

What does your organization need to do in every product cycle? What do you need to check for in every contract or negotiation? What does your family need to do to prepare for each new school year? Put these things in a checklist. You may not save a life, but you’ll sure avoid a painful blind spot.

You’ll also avoid making the Fundamental Attribution Error. Dr. Pronovost’s research showed that line infections—life-threatening problems that are preventable—were rampant. Yet he didn’t conclude, “We’ve got a health care system full of sloppy, negligent doctors.” Instead, he asked himself, “How can I change these doctors’ situations so that they’re more likely to avoid line infections?” (So before you conclude that your husband is hopelessly absentminded, always forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning and the milk, maybe you should try shaping his Path. How about taping a checklist to his steering wheel?)

As you try to make a switch, the hardest struggle will be to maintain your motivation, to keep your Elephant on the road. This puts a huge burden on your Rider, who has to rein in the Elephant when it strays. In this chapter, and the last one, we’ve been searching for ways to use the environment to relieve the Rider’s burden. We started with the story of Mike Romano, the soldier who came back from Vietnam with an addiction to opium. If Romano’s fate had hinged solely on the one-on-one battle between his Rider and his Elephant, he couldn’t have kicked his addiction. It was the environment that tipped the forces in his favor. When Romano came back to his hometown of Milwaukee, he found it a lot easier to change.

How can you create an environment that would make it easier for you, or your team, to change? We’ve seen that supportive habits—like holding stand-up meetings or eating two daily bowls of soup—can help, and so can action triggers that allow you to preload difficult decisions. Even a simple checklist can make a difference. In the next chapter, we’ll get the final piece of the puzzle: the influence of other people. It’s easier to persevere on a long journey when you’re traveling with a herd.

10
Rally the Herd ============================================

1.

Think of the last time you were in a situation where you weren’t totally sure how to behave. Maybe it was your first time in a new church, or your first time in another country, or maybe it was a dinner party where you didn’t know many of the guests. What did you do to try to fit in?

You watched other people, of course.

In ambiguous situations, we all look to others for cues about how to behave. Maybe you’ve had the experience of scanning the table frantically at a fancy dinner, trying to figure out which fork is for dessert. (If you haven’t had that experience, we hope you know your forks, because the rest of us copied you.) When the environment is unfamiliar, we sprout social antennae that are exquisitely sensitive.

In the fancy dinner situation, our antennae work great, because someone at the table knows what to do, and we can just copy

that person. But sometimes in times of change, nobody knows how to behave, and that can lead to problems. For instance, if you ever find yourself in an emergency situation, we pray that there’s only one person in the vicinity who can help you, rather than a crowd. To see why, consider some research conducted by Bibb Latané and John M. Darley.

Columbia University students, having volunteered for a research study, were asked to sit in a room and fill out a survey. Some were left alone; others were put in rooms with two other students. As they filled out their surveys, a “crisis” emerged. Smoke began to pour into the room through a wall vent. The smoke continued to flow, in irregular puffs, until eventually the room was filled with haze. Of the students sitting in a room by themselves, 75 percent got up and found someone to alert about the smoke. But when three students were placed in the room at the same time, only 38 percent of the groups of three ever reported the smoke. They just sat there, inhaling the smoke, each individual’s inaction signaling to the other two people in the room that this smoke cloud isn’t such a big deal.

In a similar study, individuals or pairs who were completing a survey heard what sounded like a woman falling down loudly on the other side of a room divider. Of the lone bystanders, 70 percent went to help her, but only 40 percent of the pairs helped. Even when the pairs helped, they acted more slowly than the individuals.

Why do groups fail to respond as well as individuals?

In ambiguous situations—smoke pouring into a room, the apparent sound of a fall—people look to others for cues about how to interpret the event. If you see a man suddenly collapse at the mall, your brain races through possible interpretations: It’s a heart attack! Or, wait, maybe he tripped and fell down. Or what if he’s playing a gag on someone? You’re reluctant to rush over

immediately, because if he simply tripped, your alarm-bell behavior will leave you both embarrassed.

If you’re the only person around to react, you’ll probably make your best guess—heart attack—and rush over. But if there’s a crowd, you’ve got two stimuli to process: the collapse itself and the crowd’s reaction to the collapse. You might pause briefly to study the crowd. Are other people acting like he’s had a heart attack? You stand there, idling, ready to spring into action at the first sign of crisis. But as you wait, other people are looking back at you, and when they see you idling, your behavior becomes data for their theory that it’s not an emergency. And that’s why three people can sit in a room filling with smoke and not make a peep.

We all talk about the power of peer pressure, but “pressure” may be overstating the case. Peer perception is plenty. In this entire book, you might not find a single statement that is so rigorously supported by empirical research as this one: You are doing things because you see your peers do them. It’s not only your body-pierced teen who follows the crowd. It’s you, too. Behavior is contagious. Let’s take a quick epidemiological tour of behavior.

We start with a mind-blowing finding: Obesity is contagious. A groundbreaking study led by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School, which followed 12,067 people for thirty-two years, found that when someone became obese, the odds of that person’s close mutual friends becoming obese tripled! Remarkably, proximity didn’t seem to matter. Obesity seemed to “spread” between friends even when they were in different parts of the country. In explaining these findings, Dr. Christakis said, “You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you.”

Drinking is contagious. A study showed that when college males were paired with a dormitory roommate who drank frequently in high school, they saw their GPAs go down by a quarter

point on average. There’s an endless list of other behaviors that are contagious, as well: marriage; shaking hands to greet someone; wearing fashionably fluffy boots; and investing in Google. And you might want to avoid hanging around with baseball players, lest you start compulsively spitting.

It’s clear that we imitate the behaviors of others, whether consciously or not. We are especially keen to see what they’re doing when the situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous. And change situations are, by definition, unfamiliar! So if you want to change things, you have to pay close attention to social signals, because they can either guarantee a change effort or doom it.

When you’re leading an Elephant on an unfamiliar path, chances are it’s going to follow the herd. So how do you create a herd?

2.

The Elephant constantly looks to the herd for cues about how to behave. This is why baristas and bartenders seed their tip jars—they’re trying to send signals about the “norm” of the herd. It’s a time-honored tactic. In fact, opera companies used to plant stooges in the audience to laugh and applaud at the appropriate times. (If that seems quaint, remember that the “stooges” are alive and well on the laugh tracks of your favorite sitcom.)

But sometimes social cues are hidden. For instance, hotel bathrooms often display little cards asking guests to use their towels more than once, usually appealing to a pro-environmental objective such as the conservation of water. (Also conserved, coincidentally, are labor costs in the hotel laundry room.) So should you reuse your towel? It’s not a clear-cut situation. At home, you probably use your towel more than once, but in a hotel, you might expect a bit more pampering, including a

clean towel every time you need one. There’s no obvious social norm to consult, because you can’t peek into the other guests’ bathrooms.

Well aware of the power of contagious behavior, a group of social psychologists persuaded a hotel manager to test out a new sign in the hotel bathrooms. The sign didn’t mention the environment at all; it simply said that the “the majority of guests at the hotel” reuse their towels at least once during their stay. It worked—guests who got this sign were 26 percent more likely to reuse their towels. They took cues from the herd.

Note the downside, though. If the sign had said, “About 8% of our guests decide to reuse their towels,” new guests would have been less likely to reuse theirs. (The same effect explains why you don’t tip the person who bags your groceries, even though that person is doing as much valuable work as your barista. The herd told you not to.) In situations where your herd has embraced the right behavior, publicize it. For instance, if 80 percent of your team submits time sheets on time, make sure the other 20 percent knows the group norm. Those individuals almost certainly will correct themselves. But if only 10 percent of your team submits time sheets on time, publicizing those results will hurt, not help.

When the norms are against you, what can you do to rally the herd? That, in essence, was the problem facing Gerard Cachon, a Wharton School operations professor. In 2006, Cachon became the editor of the journal Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM). Here are the titles of some of the articles featured in MSOM:

• “Requirements Planning with Substitutions: Exploiting Bill-of-Materials Flexibility in Production Planning”
• “A General Framework for the Study of Decentralized Distribution Systems”

“Stock Positioning and Performance Estimation in Serial Productions-Transportation Systems” - “Contract Assembly: Dealing with Combined Supply Lead Time and Demand Quantity Uncertainty”

If you just felt your pulse quicken, you are definitely an operations person.

Needless to say, MSOM isn’t the kind of mass-appeal periodical that will be shelved between Maxim and People at the local newsstand. Its role is to showcase the latest thinking in the field of operations. Professors compete strenuously to get their articles published in journals like MSOM, because in order to get promoted within their university departments, they need a solid track record of publication. (You’ve probably heard the expression “Publish or perish.”)

Getting articles published is a long process. First, you do a lot of research—often several years’ worth. Then you write an article describing the research and submit it to a journal. The journal editor farms out your article to “peer reviewers”—other professors who agree to critique your piece (anonymously). The editor then summarizes the opinions of these reviews and delivers a verdict—yes, no, or revise and resubmit. If you get the R&R verdict, you’ll often have to launch some new research to plug the holes in your work, and if you do that, you can eventually resubmit your paper for a new cycle of reviews. It’s an exhausting process—it routinely takes years to get a paper published.

A key bottleneck is the peer review stage. If it takes a long time for other professors to read the article and give feedback, the whole process grinds to a halt. The standard review times for many academic journals range from three to six months. A frontline scientific journal like Science or Nature might get reviews done in a few weeks.

When Gerard Cachon took over MSOM, most peer reviews were taking from seven to eight months, and many were taking over a year. Early in his tenure, Cachon got e-mails from professors who were hesitantly checking in with him about a paper. A typical note might say, “I submitted this paper two years ago and I just wanted to check into progress.” In several cases, when Cachon checked on the paper in question, he learned that the journal had no record of its ever being submitted. Imagine writing that e-mail response. (And take a second to contemplate an environment in which professors feel bad about checking in after two years! Talk about learned helplessness.)

Ironically, operations people are supposed to be the folks who make the trains run on time—they deal with logistics and bottlenecks and supply chains and cycle times. For a psychology journal to outperform an operations journal—that’s as disgraceful as Michael Phelps being trounced in the 100m freestyle by Dr. Phil.

Cachon’s goal was obvious—make things move faster. But what could he do? He had no power over any of the reviewers. They didn’t report to him. Reviewers are volunteer labor who perform a difficult task for free. How would you like to verify the logic of someone’s mathematical derivations in a paper on optimal serial transport systems?

Cachon’s game plan provides a great review of the Switch framework. First, he spoke to his constituents’ Riders by pointing to the destination. “I knew there was a collective goal that I could appeal to,” he said. “Every author wants fast cycle time and is willing to provide it if everyone else does. But no one wants to be the one sucker who provides the fast lead time, and then when they submit their papers it takes forever.” Cachon announced that MSOM would review papers within sixty-five days—that was 72 percent faster than its previous average!

Second, he appealed to identity. We’re operations people, for

Pete’s sake. We should be leading the way on efficiency and turnaround time! Third, he defined a clear behavior: Every reviewer had to submit feedback within five weeks. Cachon got the reviewers to commit up front that they could meet the deadline.

Finally, Cachon found a way to rally the herd. Every Friday, he posted an Excel spreadsheet on the internet that showed the status of every paper submitted to the journal. Every reviewer could see what the other reviewers had done (and when). If they violated their five-week commitment, the tracking sheet created powerful pressure, especially when Cachon called them and said, “Look, other people are doing this on time, and, by the way, here’s the data.” When people saw the data, they realized, Whoops, I’m the bottleneck.

With the online tracking sheet, Cachon was using the hotel-towel strategy. He was publicizing the group norm. Other people are getting their work done on time. Why won’t you?

Cachon set out to make good behavior contagious, and he succeeded. As a result of Cachon’s brilliant plan, MSOM now has the fastest turnaround time of any journal in the field of management science. And, because of his work, Cachon was asked to take over the flagship journal of the whole field, Management Science.

Cachon said, “Now, when people get their reviews in fifty days, they come back and say, ‘Wow! I can still remember the paper!’”

3.

We’ve seen that behavior is contagious at the individual level (obesity and tip jars) and at the group level (Cachon’s on-time reviewers). It probably will not surprise you that behavior also is contagious at the societal level (see bell-bottoms and organic food and the phrase “at the end of the day”). But what may interest you

is that there’s a particular behavior, now ubiquitous in America, that we can trace back to its origin. What follows is the story of a guy who, at the end of the day, changed the way a society behaved.

In the 1980s, Jay Winsten, a public health professor at Harvard, got interested in the idea of a “designated driver.” He’d picked up this concept from Scandinavian countries, where it was already a norm. At the time, the concept did not exist in the United States. No one here knew what a “designated driver” was.

Winsten and his team at Harvard made it their goal to create a social norm in the United States: If you were going out drinking, you would pick a designated driver who would commit not to drink for the evening. How do you create a social norm out of thin air? Winsten’s inspiration was that you could make the behavior contagious by repeatedly exposing people to it, in many different contexts, even if those contexts were fictional.

Winsten and his team collaborated with producers, writers, and actors from more than 160 prime-time TV programs, sprinkling designateddriver moments naturally into the plots. Segments featuring designated drivers appeared on Hunter, The Cosby Show, Mr. Belvedere, and Who’s the Boss? On an episode of the smash-hit 1980s legal drama L.A. Law, the heartthrob lawyer played by Harry Hamlin asked a bartender to call his designated driver. A designated-driver poster appeared in the bar on Cheers.

“Jay’s crusade was one that we could do something about fairly easily, unlike a lot of other worthwhile causes,” said Grant Tinker, then a vice president of NBC, who introduced Winsten to dozens of writers at all the major networks. Winsten always requested just “five seconds” of dialogue featuring the designateddriver idea, not a whole episode or even a whole scene. “Considering the simplicity of it all,” said Tinker, “it was very hard for us to feel our independence was being challenged.”

Notice how smart Winsten was: He used the power of the Path to change the public’s behavior, but he used the power of the Rider and the Elephant to change the network executives’ behavior. With his five-second requests, he was directing the Rider by describing a simple action that could help on a complex problem, and he was motivating the Elephant by shrinking the change.

In 1991, three years after the campaign launched, nine out of ten people were familiar with the term designated driver. And they were behaving differently as a result. Thirty-seven percent of all Americans reported having acted as designated drivers, and 54 percent of frequent drinkers had been driven home by one. The behavior change saved lives. Alcohol-related traffic fatalities declined from 23,626 in 1988 to 17,858 in 1992.

Winsten used the power of television to simulate a social norm. But you don’t need Hollywood to create a herd. When Steven Kelman, whom we discussed in the “Shrink the Change” chapter, took over the government’s procurement reform efforts, he realized that one of his best strategies was to “unleash” change. By that, he meant that he needed to send signals to the people who already supported procurement reform. Kelman knew he needed to tell the supporters, “It’s safe to get vocal now.” In the beginning, he didn’t need to create new believers so much as he needed to unleash the believers he already had.

In the fall of 2007, a group of public-health and AIDS experts had a chance to get involved in a situation where change needed to be unleashed. The setting was Tanzania, and the subject was sugar daddies.

4.

In Tanzania, “sugar-daddy” relationships are common. You know the drill: An older man pursues a younger woman; they start

having sex; and as part of the “deal,” the young woman receives gifts or favors—a cell phone, money for school tuition, clothes, and so on. This is hardly a unique feature of Tanzanian culture, as evidenced by Hugh Hefner and his sextuplet blond housemates.

But the sugar-daddy relationships in Tanzania are more troubling. First, the women are often underage girls—15, 16, 17 years old. Second, the power dynamics in the Tanzanian sugar-daddy relationships often lead women to engage in unsafe sex. (It’s not easy to insist that your partner put on a condom when he’s your elder and your benefactor.) This power dynamic is universal, of course. American teens who date men who are six or more years older are almost four times more likely to get pregnant than teens who date within two years of their own age.

The reality is that when older men want unsafe sex, they tend to get their way. In America, that means the girls get pregnant. In Tanzania, it means they get AIDS and die. And that’s why sugar daddies in Tanzania are a serious public-health problem.

Health experts call these sugar-daddy relationships “cross-generational.” In the age group 15 to 24, women in sub-Saharan Africa are three times more likely to be HIV-positive than men in the same age range. It’s the relationships that these younger women have with older men that explain the disparity. The cross-generational relationship opens up a bridge for HIV to travel between populations that ordinarily wouldn’t intersect.

The other thing that’s different about sugar-daddy relationships in Tanzania is that, despite the health risks, there’s no strong social taboo against the behavior. In the United States, 50-year-old lechers who chase college girls are punished for it socially. Can’t you just hear the man’s sister telling him, “You’re pathetic”? Can’t you just see the eyes rolling at his office? But there’s no real equivalent of this social stigma in Tanzania. It’s accepted that high-status men will display their status in this way.

Yet the great majority of Tanzanians—89 percent in one poll—believe that cross-generational relationships are wrong. Unfortunately, their opposition tends to be quiet and private; it’s an uncomfortable issue to discuss.

In August 2007, Pamela White and Mike Gehron of USAID, a relief organization that’s part of the U.S. State Department, called together a diverse team of experts (including the two of us) in a hotel in Dar es Salaam. The mission: to develop a campaign to fight cross-generational sex. Leading the team was a group from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Others included AIDS experts and about a dozen local artists and creatives (producers, actors, writers, and at least one Tanzanian soap-opera star, who was interrupted at one point for an autograph).

The discussions were difficult. The issue was complicated, and it wasn’t even clear where to start. For example, no one believed that scolding the sugar daddies would be effective in stopping their behavior. And the public-health experts thought that we were unlikely to convince young women to refuse the advances of these men, because the social and financial pressures on them were too intense to be countered by a campaign. So we started thinking: If we can’t change the main characters in this story, can we change their environment?

Recall from Chapter 8 that Rackspace changed individuals by changing their environment, their culture. But that was one company. Was it possible to change the social atmosphere in an entire country? The team knew that Tanzanians objected to cross-generational relationships but, for whatever reason, remained quiet about them. Could the team give a voice to that resentment?

We needed to find a way to make Tanzanians feel comfortable discussing something uncomfortable, a way to disarm the

conversation. And someone blurted out: “We need people to be able to laugh at this! We need humor!”

Inspired, the team hatched the idea for a villain. He’d be a villain people would love to hate, like J.R. Ewing, the eternally scheming oilman of the old TV show Dallas. As the group kicked around the idea, a portrait of the villain began to emerge: He’d be an older man who encapsulated the sugar daddy—someone who hit on young girls constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly. He’d approach them anywhere he could find them, and he’d offer favors—free meals, free drinks, clothes, or time on his cell phone.

Someone suggested that the villain be called “Fataki,” and everyone’s eyes lit up. Fataki is a Swahili word that translates loosely as “explosion” or “fireworks”—something dangerous and a bit unstable. In other words, Fataki is someone you want to stay away from.

The plan was to start telling Fataki’s story in radio commercials, because radio comes closest to being a universal medium in Tanzania. The team started dreaming up dozens of situations to put Fataki in, and across these situations there would be a common element: Despite his status and wealth advantages, and despite his smooth talk, Fataki never succeeds. He fails again and again because an outsider intervenes to disrupt his seductive efforts. Like Wile E. Coyote stalking the Road Runner, Fataki chases and chases and chases but never gets his prey. He’s pathetic. He’s someone you can laugh at.

Here’s the translation of a Fataki spot called “Chicken and Chips”:

(Noisy sounds of a restaurant)

GIRL: Oh so many choices …

FATAKI: Please pick one …

GIRL: Ah, waitress, is this chicken or …?

WAITRESS: I would recommend this one …

FATAKI: That’s too expensive! Listen. Give her chicken and chips with some sauce. That’s good, right, my love?

GIRL: Hmmmm … OK.

(Waitress acknowledges their order and walks away.)

FATAKI (to Girl): Oh, please go and tell her it is a take-away!

GIRL: Okay …

(Background voices of waiters ordering food)

WAITRESS (whispering): I’m glad that I have a chance to talk to you alone. Don’t you feel ashamed to have a relationship with such an old man? Here, take your chips and leave quickly through this back door …

(Sound of door opening)

FATAKI: Waiter, what is going on there?

WAITRESS: Sir, the girl just went away. Would you like something?

FATAKI: What?! I came with her. She went through which door?

WAITRESS: But you have not paid for the chips, sir …

FATAKI: Ehhh???

WAITRESS: Sir, this kid is not your age …

FATAKI: Ah, take the money and leave me alone!!

WAITRESS: Hee hee hee! Got him!

ANNOUNCER: Protect your loved ones from a Fataki!

Radio spots like that one became part of a unified campaign that was piloted in a rural region called Morogoro. The campaign consisted of 10 different radio spots that were played on 3 stations,

and 170 banners that were hung on stores and public buildings. The typical person heard about one radio spot a day. The campaign had two goals. The first was to create a mocking label for sugar-daddy behavior. The creative team’s objective was to someday walk into a Tanzanian nightclub and overhear one patron telling another, “That guy is such a Fataki.” By making it OK to mock the Fatakis, the team would help to counteract the natural status advantages of older and wealthier men. The second goal of the campaign was to encourage “interventions” by outsiders—friends, relatives, teachers, even waitresses—by modeling the behavior in the radio spots. The message was: “It’s your responsibility to look out for these young women. Protect your loved ones from a Fataki!”

The results from the pilot campaign were unexpectedly strong. By the end of the four-month campaign, 44 percent of people who were asked “What would you call a 50-year-old man who is always trying to seduce younger women?” spontaneously replied “Fataki.” Seventy-five percent of Morogorans reported discussing Fataki with others. And the percentage of people who said “I can do something about cross-generational sex” increased from 64 percent before the pilot to 88 percent afterward.

Having succeeded in Morogoro, the campaign was rolled out nationally in Tanzania, and the word began to spread nationwide. A health care worker setting up HIV clinics in the outer reaches of Tanzania reported that even in remote villages, Fataki had managed to bring a conversation out of the closet. Within weeks of the national launch of the campaign, the banner front-page headline of a Tanzanian tabloid accused Kanumba, a popular actor, of being a Fataki. (He’d been spotted checking into the Lambada Hotel with a young girl.) The Tanzanian public had taken ownership of a name and a character who symbolized the bad behavior they’d resented, quietly, all along.

—————————— CLINIC ——————————

How Can You Stop John’s BlackBerry Addiction?

SITUATION John has a BlackBerry addiction. His body twitches every time his BlackBerry goes off. He can’t stop himself from checking every message that comes in. It’s become a serious distraction. In meetings at work, he finds himself sneaking the device under the table to read messages covertly. (It annoys John’s colleagues that he thinks he’s fooling them.) John’s wife becomes increasingly irritated that he can’t focus on their dinner conversation, and one day he almost has a fender-bender because he is trying to e-mail someone while driving. John knows that he needs to cut it out, but every time he resolves to stop, the BlackBerry buzzes. [John is fictitious, but we all know a John.]

WHAT’S THE SWITCH AND WHAT’S HOLDING IT BACK? This is the last Clinic in the book, and by now, we hope you’ll make easy work of this situation. The behavior change is clear enough: John needs to stop using his BlackBerry all the time (and especially while driving). What’s holding him back? His Elephant, of course. In any addiction situation, the Elephant is the culprit. To rein in John’s Elephant, we’ll use all three parts of the framework. Take a moment to generate an action plan for John, and then compare your notes with ours.

HOW DO WE MAKE THE SWITCH?

• Direct the Rider. 1. Find the bright spots. Are there times when John doesn’t feel the BlackBerry compulsion? What’s different about those times, and can we find a way to replicate those conditions? 2. Point to the destination. John needs a B&W goal, like BP’s “No dry holes.” Recall that B&W goals are particularly useful in situations where people are prone to rationalize. (John is constantly telling himself, “I just need to check and see if this one specific e-mail has come in.”) John could experiment with different B&W goals: No BlackBerry during dinner, or No BlackBerry after 6 p.m., or The BlackBerry comes out only when I’m traveling. He needs to eliminate his own wiggle room.

• Motivate the Elephant. 1. Find the feeling. Have John’s wife force him to read aloud the last ten e-mails that he received and then ask whether any of them is really worth getting twitchy over. A little embarrassment might do him good. 2. Find the feeling. Car accidents are happening more and more because of people like John. Confronting John with a particularly sobering news story—for example, “Cute Puppy Run Over by E-Mailing Driver”—might be a good idea. 3. Build identity. John’s wife (or his colleagues) could highlight how his BlackBerry habit doesn’t fit with his character: “John, you’re usually such an ‘in control’ guy. It’s weird to see you so flaky.” 4. Build the growth mindset. Some smokers quit successfully on the seventeenth try. If John truly wants to curb his habit, his friends shouldn’t let him give up if he “relapses” a few times.

• Shape the Path. 1. Break the environment. John’s wife can simply smash his BlackBerry with a hammer. Problem solved. 1a. Tweak the environment. If smashing it isn’t possible, John could lock his BlackBerry in the trunk of his car every time he drives. That way, he wouldn’t have to fight the Elephant when it buzzes. 2. Tweak the environment. The siren song of the BlackBerry is its buzz (or ring or flashing red light). Can you turn off the sound? Cover up the light? (Paint over the light with Wite-Out if necessary.) 3. Rally the herd. John’s colleagues should make sure he knows he’s not fooling anybody in meetings. They should make a pact that, each time John sneaks a look at his BlackBerry under the table, they will all stare at him until he meets their (disapproving) eyes.

5.

The Fataki case study may have felt foreign to you. It probably doesn’t bear many superficial similarities to the changes you’re contemplating. But look at the underlying dynamics: You want certain people to act differently, but they are resistant to the change. So you rally the support of others who in turn could influence those you hope to sway. In essence, it’s an attempt to change the culture, and culture often is the linchpin of successful organizational

change. As former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner said, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.” But organizational culture is a slippery, abstract concept. How do you change it? Where do you start?

In 1984, Libby Zion, an 18-year-old freshman at Bennington College, at home visiting her parents in Manhattan, died in a New York teaching hospital. She’d been given the wrong medication by a medical resident who’d been working for over 19 hours. Her death sparked an outcry over the excessive hours worked by medical interns. (Interns are first-year residents. They’ve completed three years of medical school and are beginning full-time work in hospitals.) Traditionally, interns have worked an astonishing 120 hours per week.

The story of Libby Zion became the centerpiece of a campaign to limit the workweeks of medical residents. Almost two decades later, in 2003, Congress finally seemed ready to move. Then the American Council for Graduate Medical Education—which accredits medical schools—made an effort to preempt congressional legislation by requiring 80-hour workweeks for residents starting in July 2003. That might seem to be the end of the story. A switch happened in medical schools because someone with fiat power mandated the change.

In this case, though, fiat power failed. A subsequent study by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that only a third of general surgery residency programs complied with the new workweek limits. Why would hospitals fail to change their ways in spite of the fact they were putting patients at risk (as well as their own accreditation)?

Katherine Kellogg, an ethnographer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, wanted to understand why some organizations complied with such regulations and others didn’t. She decided to study two northeastern teaching hospitals, nicknamed Alpha and

Beta, that were well matched in size, sector, structure, and other factors. She was given full access to the staffers of the two hospitals, and she observed the two hospitals for an average of twenty hours a week, each, for fifteen months. Kellogg was the perfect eyewitness to a real-world cultural change effort.

6.

In the quest to reform, the fiercest battle would be fought over a surprisingly mundane practice called the “daily signout.” The daily signout is the point, usually about 9 or 10 p.m., when surgical interns hand off their patients to the on-call night resident. During the signout, the intern briefs the resident on each patient’s status, so that the resident is prepared to take care of any emergencies that happen overnight.

But interns weren’t really handing off their work, and that’s one reason why they were working 120 hours a week. On every third night, there was no handoff at all—the interns were on duty all through the night. And on the other nights, they stayed late to finish the paperwork they should have handed off. Worse, night residents usually refused to do any paperwork overnight, so the interns had to show up early the next morning—at, say, 4 a.m.—to complete it before beginning their normally scheduled rounds at 6 a.m.

To enforce an 80-hour workweek, the hospitals needed to start taking the daily signouts seriously, but that wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Emotional resistance to reform was entrenched in both Alpha and Beta and, indeed, in most hospitals across the country. Signing out conflicted with long-standing cultural practices. For instance, one opponent said, “You learn by being here. There is a huge amount of information passed on in an ad hoc fashion at 2 o’clock in the morning when the senior resident and

you are trying to get a patient’s blood pressure up or an IV in. You need to be the one managing it, doing it, in order to learn.” (In other words, interns would be putting their medical education at risk by, er, sleeping.)

Other opponents stressed the importance of “continuity of care”—minimizing the number of times that patients were passed among doctors. As one resident said, “The problem with handoffs is that things fall through the cracks and things get missed.” A final objection, in essence, was that if the interns didn’t pay their dues, it would be unfair to everyone who’d already put in time as the paperwork lackeys: “These guys have been there and done that…. You can see how it would be tough as a fourth-year resident to be told to do the intern job all over again.”

Fortunately, at both Alpha and Beta, there was substantial support for signout change among the interns’ superiors, such as senior residents and chief residents. At Alpha, 13 out of 31 superiors were “reformers” who supported the change; at Beta, 12 out of 18 were reformers. Because of this support, circumstances looked ripe for real change. All signs were “Go.” At long last, the 120-hour workweek would be abolished.

There was just one problem: The interns wouldn’t sign out. As one intern said, “Being considered a good intern has nothing to do with what you know or how well you manage your patients. It is totally based on working hard and not handing stuff off. It’s your attitude, not your ability…. This is where I live. I only go home to sleep. It sounds sick, but these people are like my family. The worst thing would be not to be respected by these guys.”

For the interns, social status was at stake. The interns felt they wouldn’t be respected if they embraced the signout. Change was coming into conflict with culture, and let’s face it, a new rule is no match for a culture.

Could the hospitals change their culture? Here’s where their

paths diverge: Fifteen months into Katherine Kellogg’s research, Alpha had managed to win the culture battle, and Beta had lost it. Anyone who wants to create organizational change needs to understand why.

7.

Kellogg discovered that the change hinged on the smallest work teams at the hospital, which met each day for “afternoon rounds.” Each team was composed of three or four residents (both interns and more senior people), and during afternoon rounds, they discussed the patients under their care and other important issues. The afternoon rounds at the two hospitals differed a great deal:

• At Alpha, the rounds were lengthy (around an hour) and had a high attendance rate. The teams tended to meet in quiet corners, moving from patient to patient around the hospital floor.
• At Beta, the rounds were more casual. They were shorter (twenty or thirty minutes), and team members often called in or sent a message instead of showing up in person. The teams at Beta didn’t meet at patients’ bedsides; they met in the computer lounge, where all the residents hung out between shifts. (Take a moment to contemplate the different behaviors that might be encouraged by the differing formats of these rounds.)

Teams were shuffled about once a month, and every so often, by the luck of the draw, all the people on a team would be reformers who supported the shorter workweeks. At Alpha, the reform-minded teams found great strength in their rounds. They

were spending an hour in private discussions with a group of their fellow believers. But at Beta, the format of the afternoon rounds blocked any momentum for reform. The teams met for only a short time, and members often were missing. Worse, teams were meeting in the computer lounge, where lots of people who opposed reform could overhear their conversation, which led reform-minded members to self-censor.

Bottom line: At Beta, the afternoon rounds were irrelevant to the change. At Alpha, they became the spark, and the rounds became, in essence, underground resistance meetings.

8.

Researchers who study social movements call situations like these “free spaces”—small-scale meetings where reformers can gather and ready themselves for collective action without being observed by members of the dominant group. Free spaces often play a critical role in facilitating social change. Civil rights leaders, for instance, were able to use southern black churches as free spaces to prepare themselves for action.

Kellogg was present, every day, at Alpha and Beta as one reform movement blossomed and the other wilted. She attended thirty-one free-space meetings at Alpha and twenty-two meetings at Beta. The meetings at Beta had a comparable number of reformers but weren’t conducted in a free space.

At Alpha, 77 percent of the meetings included discussion about the legitimacy of the signout process, and 81 percent of the meetings drew boundaries between “us” and “them”—reformers versus resisters. At Beta, none of the meetings featured either kind of discussion.

During the Alpha free-space meetings, the reformers began to develop a language for talking about the advantages of the

reform. For instance, during one meeting, the chief resident deconstructed the “continuity of care” argument made by change resisters:

It is important to take personal responsibility. But I think you can preserve this personal commitment without having one person there all the time. Some people are old school and say, “I’m going to do it myself.” For me, it is the team that is going to take care of everything. Each of us takes personal responsibility to make sure that patient care is the best it can be, but that doesn’t mean doing it all yourself as long as all of the pieces fit together. [emphasis added]

This resident was developing what Kellogg calls an “oppositional identity.” Every culture, whether national or organizational, is shaped powerfully by its language. Across the reform-minded Alpha teams, a new language was being incubated that reflected a new set of values. Old school versus new school. Trusting your team versus doing it all yourself. Being efficient versus living in the hospital.

At Alpha, the reformers had the space and the language needed to brew a new identity. At Beta, they didn’t. The lessons are clear. If you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together. They need a free space. They need time to coordinate outside the gaze of the resisters.

Counterintuitively, you’ve got to let your organization have an identity conflict. For a time, at least, you’ve got to permit an “us versus them” struggle to take place. We know this violates our “we’re all on the same team,” Kumbaya-ish instincts. It’s not desirable, but it’s necessary. Think of it as organizational molting.

To encourage this molting in your culture, think of all the tools

we’ve built up in the Path section. First, you need to tweak the environment to provide a free space for discussion. At Alpha, the rotational teams had a private place to meet, and that created a free space where the new identity could grow. Do your own “reformers” have a private place where they can meet and coordinate?

Second, you should build good habits. Recall the idea of action triggers—visualizing when and where you are going to do something important. The interns at Alpha were essentially setting action triggers. They thought about what they would say, and how they would act, when 9 p.m. came and the signout process was triggered. They mentally rehearsed how they would respond if an argument flared up with the night resident. Have members of your team rehearsed how they’ll react when they meet resistance from your organization’s “old guard”?

Finally, you should rally the herd. At Alpha, the leaders helped the reformers find one another, and the reformers began to create a language—as we saw in the examples of the designated driver and Fataki—that allowed them to talk about their values with others. As a leader, you can help prod them to create this language, to find ways to articulate what is different and better about the change you seek.

9.

We started the Path section by discussing the Fundamental Attribution Error—the tendency to attribute behavior to people’s character rather than to their environments. Look again at the teaching-hospital example. At Alpha, 42 percent of superiors supported the change; at Beta, 66 percent supported it. Almost all of us would have put our money on Beta. Not many of us, when confronted with that data, would have immediately thought, Yes, but what about the situational forces?

At the two hospitals, individual character competed with situational forces, and situational forces won. This brings us back full circle to the food drive study, where a jerk with clear instructions was more charitable than a saint with generic instructions. The line between saints and jerks wasn’t as clear as we might have thought. Neither was the line between supporters and re-sisters of hospital reform.

If the right Path can turn a jerk into a saint, then the right Path can also turn a change enemy into an ally.

11
Keep the Switch Going ============================================

1.

“A long journey starts with a single step.” As clichés go, that’s pretty wise.

But you know what else starts with a single step? An ill-conceived amble that you abandon after a few minutes.

So, yes, a long journey starts with a single step, but a single step doesn’t guarantee the long journey. How do you keep those steps coming?

The first thing to do is recognize and celebrate that first step. Something you’ve done has worked. You’ve directed the Rider, you’ve motivated the Elephant, you’ve shaped the Path—and now your team is moving, or you’re moving. When you spot movement, you’ve got to reinforce it. On this front, we can take inspiration from a rather unlikely source: trainers of exotic animals.

The writer Amy Sutherland studied animal trainers who teach dolphins to jump through hoops and monkeys to ride skate

boards. These are very, very long journeys indeed. What do you do, in the first hour of the first day, to teach a monkey how to ride a skateboard?

The answer doesn’t involve punishment. Animal trainers rarely use punishment these days. You can punish an elephant only so many times before you wind up as a splinter. Instead, trainers set a behavioral destination and then use “approximations,” meaning that they reward each tiny step toward the destination. For example, in the first hour of the first day of training, the future skateboarding monkey gets a chunk of mango for not freaking out when the trainer puts the board in his cage. Later, he gets mango for touching the board, then for sitting on it, then for letting the trainer push him back and forth on it. Mango, mango, mango. Hundreds of sessions later, you’ve got a mango-bloated monkey ready to skate a half-pipe.

As Amy Sutherland studied the exotic-animal trainers, she had an epiphany: She wondered what would happen if she used these techniques on that “stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.” Inspired by the idea, she wrote a hilarious New York Times article on her attempts to train her husband. The article, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” became the most e-mailed article on the Times website in 2006, and it led to a book on the same topic.

Frustrated by her husband’s various pecadilloes, Sutherland began to use approximations with him: “You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for

anything.” And Scott, basking in the appreciation, began to change.

This approach contrasts with much of the thinking on improving relationships at work. For instance, you probably have been asked to take a personality test or a “work style” test for a job. The idea is that if you understand your colleagues’ “types,” you’ll all get along better. And some people may find the knowledge of types useful. But notice that this sounds like Fundamental Attribution Error thinking. To develop better relationships, you don’t need to know whether your colleague is a Navigator or a Pleaser or a Passive-Aggressive Chieftain. You just need to notice and reinforce your colleague’s positive behaviors—as Sutherland did with her husband—and trust that your colleague will do the same with you. After all, advice about aligning styles and expectations can’t be the answer to everything. A trainer in California taught six elephants to stand in a line and urinate on command, and they hadn’t even completed a Myers-Briggs.

Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on to the second, third, and hundredth steps. And that’s a problem, because most of us are terrible rein-forcers. We are quicker to grouse than to praise. At work, we love to bond with our colleagues through communal complaining. (Sutherland calls this behavior “verbal grooming.”) But this is all wrong: We need to be looking for bright spots—however tiny!—and rewarding them. If you want your boss or your team to change, you better get a little less stingy with the mango.

Learning to spot and celebrate approximations requires us to scan the environment constantly, looking for little rays of sunshine, and it isn’t easy. Our Riders, by nature, focus on the negative. Problems are easy to spot; progress, much harder. But the progress is precious. Shamu didn’t learn to jump through a hoop because her trainer was bitching at her. She learned because she

had a trainer who was patient and focused and reinforced every step of the journey.

Psychologist Alan Kazdin prescribes an almost identical set of techniques for parents. Kazdin urges parents to “catch their children being good.” He said, “If you want your child to do two hours of homework on her own every night, you don’t withhold praise and rewards until she does two hours of homework without being asked to.” Instead, you set small goals and gradually build her up. And when a child doesn’t get something right, Kazdin advised: “Ask yourself, ‘Was there anything about it that’s a component of what I’d like her to do?’ If the answer’s yes, and it almost always is, then jump on that component: It was great that you did X.”

Kazdin points out that in certain situations, parents do this kind of reinforcement instinctively—for instance, when a child first starts trying to walk: “You praised him wildly when he pulled himself up from a crawling to a standing posture. You held his hands and helped him to take a few steps, encouraging him by exclaiming, Look at you! You’re walking! What a big boy! He was not walking, of course … but you were shaping that behavior by reinforcing the stages on the way to it.”

Let’s be clear, we’re not advising that you treat your colleagues or fellow citizens like monkeys or children—Roger, you cut back your expenses last month! What a big boy you are! Reinforcement doesn’t have to be condescending, and it doesn’t have to come with a power dynamic. Think of the way a friend urges you on at the gym (“Good work—now do one more rep!”). But reinforcement does require you to have a clear view of the destination, and it requires you to be savvy enough to reinforce the bright-spot behaviors when they happen.

The most important lesson we can learn from Kazdin and the animal trainers is this: Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. There

is no moment when a monkey learns to skateboard; there’s a process. There is no moment when a child learns to walk; there’s a process. And there won’t be a moment when your community starts to invest more in its school system, or starts recycling more, or starts to beautify its public spaces; there will be a process. To lead a process requires persistence.

A long journey requires lots of mango.

2.

In the Elephant section, we told the story of Steven Kelman, the man who accepted the daunting task of reforming the federal government’s procurement processes. In his book Unleashing Change, he observed an encouraging dynamic in his change efforts: Once the change started, it seemed to feed on itself.

We’ve seen this snowballing effect many times. The citizens of Miner County, eager to revitalize their community, began their efforts by simply digging up tree stumps. Within a few years, they managed to build up the tax base of the entire county. At Rackspace, the customer-service team had the call-queuing system unplugged. It was a simple change, but it didn’t take long before the customer-service ethic took root and led the company to a spectacular period of growth.

Kelman, the procurement guru, attributed the snowballing effect to several phenomena. Psychologists call one of them the mere exposure effect, which means that the more you’re exposed to something, the more you like it. For instance, when the Eiffel Tower was first erected, Parisians hated it. They thought it was a half-finished skeletal blight on their fair city, and they responded with a frenzy of protest. But as time went by, public opinion evolved from hatred to acceptance to adoration. The mere exposure principle assures us that a change effort that initially feels

unwelcome and foreign will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it.

Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things. (Think of Brasilata’s “inventors.”)

Kelman points out that these forces aren’t contingent on change efforts being successful in the early going; these aren’t the reinforcing spoils of achieving “small wins.” Rather, they kick in automatically as time goes by. So, although inertia may be a formidable opponent in the early goings of your switch, at some point inertia will shift from resisting change to supporting it. Small changes can snowball to big changes.

3.

These are encouraging realizations: Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball. But this is not the same as saying that change is easy. If it were, we wouldn’t see around us so many struggling alcoholics and troubled marriages and lagging companies and thwarted social change efforts. Change isn’t always easy and it isn’t always hard. In some ways change is ubiquitous; in others it’s unlikely.

We can say this much with confidence: When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment. In other words, when change works, it’s because the Rider, the Elephant, and the Path are all aligned in support of the switch.

Take becoming a parent. If you think the organizational change you’re contemplating is wrenching, forget about it—it can’t hold a candle to the amount of change required by having kids. Whatever acts of will may be required to execute your new idea at work, no one will be called upon to send the controller to college (or to burp the CFO).

Raising children is an absolutely massive change that works pretty darn well, and it’s no great mystery why. For one thing, it’s a clear and vivid destination. We’ve all been kids, and we’ve all seen parents (our own and others) in action. We’ve received decades of vicarious training in parenting. So the Rider knows what direction to go and what kinds of behaviors lead to success. (Mind you, there’s still a lot of winging it en route to the destination.)

People have kids because of feelings, not knowledge. A rosy-eyed couple looks forward to raising a child. They think about what it’ll be like to have their own little bundle of joy. So the Elephant is excited to begin a long and arduous journey that, in other circumstances, might induce panic. Furthermore, parenthood is an identity that appeals—you start making your decisions based on what’s good for the kids rather than on what’s most comfortable for you. The identity is so powerful, in fact, that your Elephant starts embracing short-term sacrifices for the good of the kids.

Once we become parents, our friends and families find ways to shrink the change, especially in the first few months: Your mom comes to help in the first few weeks; your friends bring you food; your employer gives you leave from work; and your relatives keep tabs on you.

And think of all the other ways that society has shaped the Path for raising kids: from little things, like high chairs at Olive Garden, to big things, like maternity leave and school systems

and neighborhoods built explicitly to be good places for raising children.

Maybe this sounds like common sense to you. But if it’s common sense, then it’s common sense that stays confined to the “parenting area” of our brains. Because if we really did understand why an extreme change like having kids works while minor changes routinely fail—if we really did understand that change rarely happens unless it’s motivated by feeling, or that the environment can act as a powerful brake or accelerant on our behavior—then, let’s face it, the Food Pyramid would not exist, managers would never kick off change initiatives with PowerPoint presentations, and global warming activists would never talk about the number of carbon parts per million in the atmosphere. If it’s common sense, it hasn’t quite made the leap to action.

When change happens, it tends to follow a pattern. We’ve got to stop ignoring that pattern and start embracing it.

4.

When Mike Romano went to Vietnam, surrounded by drugs, he started doing opium, and when he came home, surrounded by friends and family, he stopped. When the employees at Rackspace had a call-queuing system, they didn’t answer customers’ calls, and when the system was thrown out, they started answering. Change follows a pattern.

When the two of us started jury-rigging our computers to fight e-mail distractions, we were fighting the same battle as the people who purchased a Clocky, determined to keep themselves from oversleeping. Change follows a pattern.

When some hotel maids were given an identity of themselves as serious exercisers, they turned up their activity level a notch. When the “inventors” at Brasilata faced an electricity shortage,

they came up with so many energy-saving ideas that the firm ended up with a surplus. Change follows a pattern.

When Jerry Sternin went to Vietnam, the government gave him six months to make a dent in malnutrition. He didn’t speak a word of Vietnamese, but he knew how to look for the bright spots, and soon mothers had learned cooking techniques that foiled malnutrition. When the conservationists at Rare saw how St. Lucians had rallied behind their parrot, they realized they had a bright spot on their hands, and since then, they’ve spread “Pride campaigns” to over fifty countries. Change follows a pattern.

What’s not part of the pattern is the type of person who’s doing the changing. We mentioned a few CEOs in this book, but we mentioned vastly more people who had less impressive titles and who didn’t have much money in their budgets: professors and nurses and middle managers and government bureaucrats and principals and parents. Their quests ranged from eccentric to epic. We saw a professor who shrank moviegoers’ popcorn containers, and two people who reined in Attila the Accountant, and a woman who reformed child abusers, and a man with a staff of 75 who saved 100,000 lives.

Their situations were different, and the scale of their changes was different, but the pattern was the same. They directed the Rider, they motivated the Elephant, and they shaped the Path. And now it’s your pattern.

What will you switch?

HOW TO MAKE A SWITCH

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting
differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team.
Picture that person (or people).

Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side.
You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way
for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things:

→ DIRECT the Rider

FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy]

SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad]

POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. [“You’ll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP]

               → MOTIVATE the Elephant

FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters’s demos at Target]

SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform]

GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. [Brasilata’s “inventors,” junior-high math kids’ turnaround]

                             → SHAPE the Path

TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet]

BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action triggers,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists]

RALLY THE HERD. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread. [“Fataki” in Tanzania, “free spaces” in hospitals, seeding the tip jar]