5 Find the Feeling

1.

In 1992, Target was a $3 billion regional retailer, a pip-squeak compared to its competitors Kmart ($9 billion) and Wal-Mart ($30 billion). But it aspired to be different. Even in those days, the chain’s advertising was hip and fashionable. Unfortunately, the store’s merchandise didn’t deliver on the advertising’s promise. Customers complained: I see all these great ads, but when I come to the store, you’ve got the same boring stuff as Wal-Mart.

You already know how this movie ends. Over the following fifteen years, Target became “Tar-ZHAY,” the $63 billion giant, the Apple of the retailing world, the keeper of the beloved bull’s-eye, the champion of design. The new era started with the iconic Michael Graves teakettle and expanded over the years to Todd Oldham bedding and Isaac Mizrahi shower curtains and Mossimo sweaters and countless other products that combined the holy duo of hip and cheap.

The beginning and end points of the Target tale are pretty well known. But we suspect you don’t know much about the middle, and that’s a shame, because what happened in the middle was the change. It didn’t happen in the boardroom. It happened because of people like Robyn Waters.

Waters had no intention of working for Target. She was a self-described fashion snob, and she’d vowed not to come back to Minnesota, where she was raised, and where winter takes over much of fall and spring. She certainly had no intention of working for a discounter. She had an enviable job at the posh Jordan Marsh department store and was living in high style: “I was going to Italy and attending meetings with Armani and Versace and rubbing shoulders with all the fashionistas, and that was really cool when you’re in your mid-thirties. But then one day we all got laid off. So that’s how I came to be open-minded.”

She joined Target in 1992 as the “ready-to-wear” trend manager, which made her responsible for black stirrup pants, sweats, and Looney Tunes T-shirts. She’d wondered how she’d managed to slip from Versace to Tweety Bird.

The company was at an important inflection point when she joined. Bob Ulrich had just retired as CEO, and he’d become chairman of the board. He had a very clear vision of Target as an “upscale discounter” that would differentiate itself through design. He dreamed that Target’s bull’s-eye would become a “love-mark,” as respected and well loved as Coca-Cola or the Beatles or Lego. He wanted the bull’s-eye to be as ubiquitous as McDonald’s golden arches.

At the time, though, Target was a long way from realizing that vision. The merchants at Target—the people who select the merchandise that will show up for sale in various departments—had traditionally been copycats. Waters said the mind set among the clothing merchants had been to “find the best seller this year, take it to Asia, knock it off, and sell it next year at half the price.” For Target to become a design powerhouse, the company had to stop lagging the trends and start riding the trends. That was Waters’s mandate in the trend department.

The problem was that Waters had almost no power to advance this “trend-right” vision. The merchants didn’t have to deal with her. “I had to win them over. I could never mandate, ‘We have to have purple this year because that’s the trend,’” she recalled.

Waters slowly built up believers. An early convert was the merchant responsible for turtlenecks. She was fed up with using the same tired patterns each year—you know, the cutesy snowflake-and-reindeer prints used by every discount retailer. So, at Waters’s urging, she hired a designer to create some fresh patterns, and as they both predicted, sales improved dramatically.

These early-adopter experiments gave Waters much-needed success stories. Since Target had an analytical, numbers-driven culture, publicizing the early results was critical. Waters could point to “heroes” in the organization who’d taken a risk and succeeded. (“Check out what the turtleneck merchant did.”)

For a time in retail, trendy clothing was neutral in color. Everything was gray, white, khaki, tan, or black. Then, one season, color exploded at the fabric shows and in the retailers in London and Paris. It wasn’t an obscure trend; it was a big wave. So, as the design champion at Target, Waters needed to get her merchants excited about color. But the merchants, being numbers driven, would review the past few years’ sales and see that color hadn’t sold. (In this situation, a Rider appeal couldn’t possibly succeed because the data contradicted Waters’s position.)

Waters had to get creative. She went to the candy store at FAO Schwarz, where you could buy M&Ms in whatever color you wanted, and brought huge bags full of bright-colored M&Ms to her internal meetings. She poured the candy into a glass bowl, creating cascades of turquoise and hot pink and lime green. “People would go ‘Wow,’ and I’d say, ‘See, look at your reaction to color.’”

She brought in samples of Apple’s recently released iMac computers—in lime, strawberry, grape, and tangerine—which had been a sensation. For the first time, consumers were choosing the color of their computers with the same seriousness they used to choose the color of their cars. And she constantly brought in photographs from boutiques around the world. She’d show a merchant the photo of a polo assortment and say, “See how they have three neutrals, and a mild yellow, and then they add the bright blue for a pop.” Then she’d create a mock-up display with actual clothing samples so the merchants could see for themselves, Yup, that blue color pops. And, soon after, that blue polo shirt would show up on the floor of Target, for one clothing line, for one season.

This is how organizational change happens.

When Waters talks about this period, she is emphatic that she’s not the “hero” of the Target story. She says she was one person among many who managed to transform the company. However you assess her contribution, the remarkable thing is that her successes came despite a lack of authority and resources. Waters said, “I had no head count at the time. I was always borrowing people, and my budgets never balanced. But I kept getting support from merchants who would say, ‘Oh, I’ve got an extra head count over here. And you can hire this designer, but she’s only going to work on our stuff.’ And in the next division they’d say, ‘Wow, I want one, too.’”

Not only did Waters lack control over the merchants, she didn’t even speak their language. Indeed, the biggest mystery of Waters’s success might well be this: In the analytical culture of Target, where numbers were the lingua franca, why did a bunch of demonstrations seem to make the difference?

2.

In The Heart of Change, John Kotter and Dan Cohen report on a study they conducted with the help of a team at Deloitte Consulting. The project team interviewed over 400 people across more than 130 companies in the United States, Europe, Australia, and South Africa, in hopes of understanding why change happens in large organizations. Summarizing the data, Kotter and Cohen said that in most change situations, managers initially focus on strategy, structure, culture, or systems, which leads them to miss the most important issue:

In other words, when change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Rider.

Most of us, in Robyn Waters’s shoes, would create a “business case” for the power of design. We’d compile a PowerPoint presentation with charts and graphs and strategically selected quotes from the chairman who’d embraced the design-forward vision. When we finished our presentation, everyone in the room would understand what we meant. They might even agree! But would they change their behavior? Kotter’s research suggests no.

Kotter and Cohen say that most people think change happens in this order: ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE. You analyze, then you think, and then you change. In a normal environment, that might work pretty well. If you need to reduce duplication costs in your print shop by 6 percent, or if you need to shave off 5 minutes from your daily commute, then that process will serve you well. Kotter and Cohen note that analytical tools work best when “parameters are known, assumptions are minimal, and the future is not fuzzy.”

But big change situations don’t look like that. In most change situations, the parameters aren’t well understood, and the future is fuzzy. Because of the uncertainty that change brings, the Elephant is reluctant to move, and analytical arguments will not overcome that reluctance. (If someone is unsure about whether to marry her significant other, you’re not going to tip her by talking up tax advantages and rent savings.)

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You’re presented with evidence that makes you feel something. It might be a disturbing look at the problem, or a hopeful glimpse of the solution, or a sobering reflection of your current habits, but regardless, it’s something that hits you at the emotional level. It’s something that speaks to the Elephant.

In staging demos for her colleagues at Target, Robyn Waters was honoring the SEE-FEEL-CHANGE philosophy. She set up displays that let the merchants see what was possible: See how that blue polo shirt pops? See how it catches your attention and draws your attention? She brought in iMacs and M&Ms and let people ooh and aah over them—“See, look at your reaction to color.” (And, by the way, wouldn’t it be nice to be part of the same movement as Steve Jobs and Apple?)

Waters thought carefully about what her colleagues would see because she knew what she wanted them to feel: energized, hopeful, creative, competitive. They took the bait.

Let’s remember, too, the story about Jon Stegner from Chapter 1, the man who created the Glove Shrine. He knew his colleagues weren’t enthused about his idea for centralized purchasing, so he didn’t bother talking about the numbers. Instead, he showed them something that made them feel something. (We really buy all these different kinds of gloves?) SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Trying to fight inertia and indifference with analytical arguments is like tossing a fire extinguisher to someone who’s drowning. The solution doesn’t match the problem.

It can sometimes be challenging, though, to distinguish why people don’t support your change. Is it because they don’t understand or because they’re not enthused? Do you need an Elephant appeal or a Rider appeal? The answer isn’t always obvious, even to experts.

3.

Pam Omidyar, the founder of HopeLab, knew the struggles of teenagers with cancer. They endured weeks of brutal chemotherapy in the hospital and went home a mess—sapped of energy, their hair falling out, their throats raw and tender, their immune system wrecked. But when they finally walked out of the hospital to return home, there was one silver lining: The worst was likely over. Going forward, their obligations would be relatively simple: They’d need to immediately report any symptoms they developed, such as a fever, and take their medicine faithfully, which might include a regimen of antibiotics and low-dosage chemotherapy pills for two years.

But many teens simply failed to comply, partly because following the medication regimen wasn’t easy. The side effects of chemotherapy, even at low doses, were rough—nausea, skin breakouts, tiredness, irritability. The side effects of the home regimen, though, were nothing compared to the horror of intensive chemotherapy, and by missing their doses, kids were risking a recurrence of their cancer. Steve Cole, the research director for HopeLab, says, “If you skip 20 percent of your doses, you don’t just have a 20 percent higher chance of getting cancer again. Your odds go up 200 percent.”

How could teens take such a terrible risk? Omidyar was convinced that teens simply weren’t getting the message. She sought a new way of influencing their behavior—something unconventional, something that spoke in their language. Her inspiration: We’ll make a video game.

After months of effort, HopeLab developed a game called Re-Mission. In the game, teens became Roxxi, a silver-suited nanobot who charged through the bloodstream zapping tumor cells with electric-green chemo-rays. In between rounds of gameplay, teens watched short “briefing” videos featuring Smitty, a mentor robot, who provided additional information about chemotherapy and recovery.

Re-Mission featured twenty levels of play, each lasting an hour and packed with information. The team at HopeLab was convinced that if it could get kids to play the whole game, any misunderstandings that could lead to noncompliance would be wiped out.

Eventually the team launched the first clinical trial for Re-Mission. In 2008, the results were announced in the medical journal Pediatrics. To the team’s delight, the game had increased kids’ adherence to their medication plans. The amount of chemotherapy drugs circulating in the blood of kids who played the game went up by 20 percent. That may not sound like much, but small differences in adherence make a big difference in health. The odds of surviving cancer double if you can bump up chemotherapy adherence by 20 percent.

But there was a surprise buried in the evidence of success. A lot of the kids didn’t actually play the game all that much, attempting only one or two levels instead of the twenty that had been designed into the game. Yet even those early quitters ended up taking their medications more regularly. In fact, the teens who played only two levels were changing their behavior as much as the kids who played all twenty.

At first glance, that finding seemed as absurd as if you’d discovered that students got comparable scores on their algebra finals whether they took only one week of classes or a whole semester. Research director Cole acknowledged, “Clearly, in one or two levels we’re not teaching them a whole lot, since the bulk of that time is spent flying around the body blowing things up.” Why had the underutilized game been so effective at changing the kids’ behavior?

Cole started asking around, trying to understand the puzzling result. One of his friends, a marketing professor at Stanford, said, “Think about this from a marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don’t do it with information. We do it with identity: ‘If I buy a BMW, I’m going to be this kind of person. If I take that kind of vacation, I’m that kind of eco-friendly person.’”

And it dawned on Cole: When teens didn’t comply with their drug regimen, the problem wasn’t knowledge, it was emotion. He said, “It boils down to an identity thing. After you have gone through intensive chemo, you’ve had your life stolen from you by cancer. So the kids think, ‘I just want to get back to being the original me.’ They don’t want to be ‘the sick kid’ anymore.”

The game was making a gut-level emotional connection. You are Roxxi, the nanobot, boldly defeating cancer. You fuel your ray gun by taking chemotherapy and antibiotics. Medicine means power. And the educational videos that pop up occasionally, with the mentor-robot lecturing you about the importance of compliance, are completely irrelevant to the change that’s going on. The change is not one of understanding but one of feeling. It’s realizing that I can do this. I’m in charge. Chemo isn’t a reminder of the sickness; it’s how you get your life back—how you steal back the real you from cancer. Take the pills, and you can stop being a cancer kid forever.

4.

When people push for change and it doesn’t happen, they often chalk it up to a lack of understanding. A mom grouses, “If my daughter just understood that her driving habits are dangerous, she’d change.” A scientist says, “If we could just get Congress to understand the dangers of global warming, they’d surely take legislative action.”

But when people fail to change, it’s not usually because of an understanding problem. Smokers understand that cigarettes are unhealthy, but they don’t quit. American automakers in the early twenty-first century knew they were too dependent on the sales of SUVs and trucks (and thus on low oil prices), but they didn’t innovate.

At some level, we understand this tension. We know there’s a difference between knowing how to act and being motivated to act. But when it comes time to change the behavior of other people, our first instinct is to teach them something. Smoking is really unhealthy! Your chemotherapy medicine is really important! We speak to the Rider when we should be speaking to the Elephant.

This realization—that we can make an impeccably rational case for change and people still won’t change—is pretty frustrating. Why did Robyn Waters need to go through all the trouble of staging demos for her colleagues at Target? Shouldn’t the logic of design innovation have been compelling enough on its own?

Why can’t we simply think our way into new behavior? The answer is that, in some cases, we really can’t trust our own thinking.

5.

As you watch, a stranger walks into a room and sits down behind a table. He picks up a piece of paper and reads aloud a generic-sounding weather report: “Tomorrow, we’ll see highs in the upper 80s with an overnight low of 53….” He completes his “report” in about 90 seconds and walks out of the room.

Next, you’re asked to guess his IQ.

You’re part of a psychology experiment, and you object to the absurdity of the request. I don’t know anything about that guy. He just came into a room and read a report. It wasn’t even his report—you gave it to him to read! How am I supposed to know his IQ!?

Reluctantly, you make a wild guess. Separately, Fake Weatherman is asked to guess his own IQ. Who made a better guess?

Amazingly, you did, even though you know nothing about Fake Weatherman. Two psychologists, Peter Borkenau and Anette Liebler, from Universität Bielefeld in Germany, conducted this experiment, and they found that the strangers’ IQ predictions were better than the predictions of those whose IQ was being predicted—about 66 percent more accurate.

To be clear, it’s not so much that you’re a brilliant predictor; it’s that he’s a lousy self-evaluator. We’re all lousy self-evaluators. College students do a superior job predicting the longevity of their roommates’ romantic relationships than their own.

Savor, for a moment, the preposterousness of these findings. Fake Weatherman has all the information, and you’ve got none. He’s got decades of data—years’ worth of grades, college entrance exam scores, job evaluations, and more. Fake Weatherman should be the world’s foremost expert on Fake Weatherman!

If self-evaluation hinged on information alone, the findings of these studies would have been impossible. It’d be like discovering that you could beat randomly selected mothers on a trivia question about how many kids they have.

But self-evaluation involves interpretation, and that’s where the Elephant intrudes. The Elephant tends to take the rosiest possible interpretation of the facts. (“My 2.1 GPA is a sign of my intelligence—it shows that my intellect simply isn’t being challenged enough to keep me engaged.”)

We’ve all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive illusion factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above-average work. People think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses such as salmonella. Most deliciously self-deceptive of all, people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments.

Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change. Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings. But positive illusions make it hard for us to orient ourselves—to get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing. How can we dispel people’s positive illusions without raining down negativity on them?

6.

One way of cutting through positive illusions is suggested by an example from Massachusetts in a state agency called the Department of Youth Services. DYS dealt with delinquent kids—it was both a corrections agency and a social service organization. In the late 1970s, Massachusetts led a pioneering effort to overhaul its juvenile justice system, scaling back its youth prisons in favor of a network of nonprofits—halfway houses, group homes, outpatient counseling centers, job centers, and more. The goal of these nonprofits was to rehabilitate young offenders and keep them in their home communities.

As Massachusetts embraced this network model, DYS had to change substantially. The agency started working primarily through vendors—such as halfway houses and counseling centers—rather than delivering services to kids directly. As a result, agency staffers had to adapt the way they worked, and most of them handled the transition well.

Except for the accounting department.

The head of accounting was an authoritarian manager who ruled his department with an iron fist. He was known as a yeller; some colleagues called him Attila the Accountant. Attila was meticulous about following the rules, to a fault. If you submitted an expense report to his team and left off a single detail—a date, a subtotal—the accountants would bounce the report right back at you rather than simply filling in the detail themselves. Because of this perceived pettiness, Attila was “pretty much hated throughout the organization,” recalled Sim Sitkin, who at that time was the director of planning and research for DYS. Attila’s accounting group saw itself more as a watchdog than as an internal service provider.

When DYS shifted to the network model, the focus of the accounting department shifted, too. Now it was outside vendors who were submitting the reimbursement requests, not employees. And we can say one thing for Attila: He was consistent. He treated the new vendors with the same dictatorial style that he had used with his in-house colleagues. If vendors submitted reports that weren’t perfect, he rejected them. This created big problems, though. As Sitkin said, “These nonprofits didn’t have a lot of slack. They were living on a shoestring, and so delays in payments really jeopardized their ability to serve kids.”

Sitkin and Gail Anne Healy, the deputy commissioner of DYS, began to field desperate calls from these nonprofits. In some cases, they couldn’t make payroll unless Attila cut their checks quickly. Sitkin and Healy tried to reason with Attila; they tried to explain why it was important to cut the vendors some slack. But, as we’ve seen repeatedly, the knowledge wasn’t enough to trigger a change. Attila stayed Attila.

Frustrated, Sitkin and Healy asked Attila to join them on a road trip. The three of them drove out to visit several of DYS’s key service providers. Often, these providers were operating from old houses in run-down neighborhoods. Their offices looked dilapidated and chaotic. And in the midst of this environment, the staffers were earnestly trying to work small miracles. “The typical staffer,” said Sitkin, “was like a combination of a beat cop and a social worker. Sometimes they struck you as people who might have once been in the same position as the kids they were trying to reach. They were working hard and obviously not making a lot of money.”

During the visits, Attila saw firsthand how busy they were and how distracting the workplace was. They didn’t have closed-door offices as he did. It was noisy, thanks to the kids who were living in the homes—they were constantly coming and going, or cooking meals, or just hanging around and talking. Social workers were rushing around, trying to keep tabs on the kids, and shuttling them to doctors’ offices or job interviews.

Attila saw and felt the precarious financial situation of these nonprofits. They were hanging by a thread. When he held up one of their checks, it meant that they couldn’t pay for something. They might have to delay payroll, or skimp on food, or postpone a doctor’s visit for a kid who needed it. For the first time, Attila got a gut-check about the harm he was causing with his nitpicking. He came back to the office a transformed man.

Mind you, he was still Attila. He was still authoritarian, and he still yelled. But he changed what he was yelling about. “Before, he’d yell at his staff, ‘Why did you give me this form when it’s got something missing?!’” said Sitkin. “Afterwards, he switched to, ‘Don’t you realize what happens when we don’t get this check out on time?! People have to make payroll!’”

Attila’s transformation represented a victory over positive illusions. Before the field trip, if Attila had been asked to assess his performance as an accountant, he almost certainly would have put himself in the top 10 percent. In his mind, accounting was about paying attention to details, maintaining rigorous standards, and resisting political pressure.

He would have been right to score himself highly on those measures—but also self-serving. One reason we’re able to believe that we’re better-than-average leaders and drivers and spouses and team players is that we’re defining those terms in ways that flatter us. (I am really a good team player. I constantly give my coworkers useful tips on how to improve themselves!) The ambiguity in terms like “leader” or “team player” enables our illusions—that’s why it’s so much harder for us to fancy ourselves better-than-average pole vaulters.

The ambiguity in being a “good accountant” dissolved when Attila met the social service workers. When he saw how hard they were working, and the raucous conditions they were working in, he couldn’t help but empathize with them, and that feeling of empathy gave the lie to his positive illusions. I thought being a good accountant was about rigor, but now I see that it’s also about service. Having been forced to experience the inadequacy of his old approach, he became a zealot for the new one: Team, you better get those paychecks out ASAP—people are waiting on us!

That may not be a heartwarming tale, but it’s a big switch. Attila the Accountant was a hard case. Healy and Sitkin managed to break through his prickly exterior and make him feel something. And once he felt something, he changed. That outcome should give all of us hope that we can reach the Attilas in our own life (Attila the Dad, Attila the Boss, or Attila the Teenager).

7.

It’s emotion that motivates the Elephant. In fighting for change, we’ve got to find the feeling. But which feeling? Anger, hope, dismay, enthusiasm, fear, happiness, surprise?

HopeLab built a video game for teenagers with cancer that gave them a feeling of control and power. Jon Stegner’s Glove Shrine shocked the execs and gave them a determination to fix the matter. The Microsoft usability lab made developers feel empathy for their customers. Will connecting with any old feeling do?

We often hear that people change only when a crisis compels them to, which implies that we need to create a sense of fear or anxiety or doom. Two professors at Harvard Business School, writing about organizational change, say that change is hard because people are reluctant to alter habits that have been successful in the past. “In the absence of a dire threat, employees will keep doing what they’ve always done.” As a result, the professors emphasize the importance of crisis: “Turnaround leaders must convince people that the organization is truly on its deathbed—or, at the very least, that radical changes are required if the organization is to survive and thrive.” In other words, if necessary, we need to create a crisis to convince people they’re facing a catastrophe and have no choice but to move.

Similar beliefs about the importance of crisis once prevailed among therapists, most of whom believed that alcoholics or drug addicts couldn’t be helped until they hit rock bottom. Back in the 1980s, at a professional conference, the therapist Ruth Maxwell gave a presentation suggesting to fellow therapists that the now-familiar technique of family “intervention” could be used to convince addicts to enter a treatment program even if they hadn’t yet hit rock bottom. In her book Breakthrough, Maxwell wrote she was “nearly booed out of the room…. Coming from backgrounds deeply steeped in traditional psychiatric wisdom, they firmly believe that people cannot be treated unless they are motivated for treatment.” And being “motivated” required a rock-bottom crisis.

Speaking of the perceived need for crisis, let’s talk about the “burning platform,” a familiar phrase in the organizational change literature. It refers to a horrific accident that happened in 1988 on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea. A gas leak triggered an explosion that ripped the rig in two. As a reporter wrote, “Those who survived had a nightmarish choice: to jump as far as 150 ft. down into a fiery sea or face certain death on the disintegrating rig.” Andy Mochan, a superintendent on the rig, said, “It was fry or jump, so I jumped.” He was eventually saved by a rescue mission involving NATO and the Royal Air Force.

Out of this human tragedy has emerged a rather ridiculous business cliché. When executives talk about the need for a “burning platform,” they mean, basically, that they need a way to scare their employees into changing. To create a burning platform is to paint such a gloomy picture of the current state of things that employees can’t help but jump into the fiery sea. (And by “jump into the fiery sea,” what we mean is that they change their organizational practices. Which suggests that this use of “burning platform” might well be the dictionary definition of hyperbole.)

In short, the “burning platform” is a great, uplifting tale for your people: “Team, let’s choose a dangerous plunge into the ocean over getting burned to death! Now get back to work!”

Leaving aside the silliness of the burning-platform metaphor, fear can indeed be a powerful motivator. Think of LBJ’s famous “Daisy” campaign ad in 1964, in which a young girl holds a flower while a mushroom cloud rises behind her. If you vote for Goldwater, the ad suggested, you might as well nuke your child. Or consider the sleazy real-estate-sales boss in Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play: “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado…. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

Health educators, too, have gotten in on the act. Remember the ads showing photos of smokers’ black, gnarled lungs, or the famous “This is your brain on drugs” commercial, which analogized drug users’ brains to frying eggs (those visuals, in turn, made pot smokers very hungry).

There’s no question that negative emotions are motivating. No one wants to see a kid nuked. But what, exactly, are these emotions motivating?

“If you have a stone in your shoe, it hurts and you’ll fix the problem,” said Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In a sense, removing the stone from your shoe is what negative emotions are designed to do—to motivate specific actions. When you’re angry, your eyes narrow and your fists clinch and you get ready for a confrontation. When you’re disgusted, your nose wrinkles and you avoid whatever has grossed you out. When you’re afraid, your eyes grow wide and your body tenses up and prepares to flee. On a daily basis, then, negative emotions help us avoid risks and confront problems.

Bottom line: If you need quick and specific action, then negative emotions might help. But most of the time when change is needed, it’s not a stone-in-the-shoe situation. The quest to reduce greenhouse gases is not a stone-in-the-shoe situation, and neither is Target’s mission to become the “upscale retailer,” or someone’s desire to improve his or her marriage. These situations require creativity and flexibility and ingenuity. And, unfortunately, a burning platform won’t get you that.

So what will?

8.

In 1998, after psychologists had spent decades studying negative emotions, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson wrote a provocative paper called “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” The paper became a classic. It eventually would be cited over a hundred times more often than a typical psychology paper, and it helped to fuel the rise of the discipline of positive psychology, which has yielded many popular books on happiness over the past few years. As Fredrickson suggested in her title, positive emotions are a bit of a puzzle. Unlike negative emotions, they don’t seem engineered to produce particular actions, such as punching or fleeing or avoiding. They don’t even have their own signature facial expressions. In fact, the emotions of joy, contentment, pride, love, and interest all tend to produce the same generic “I’m pleased” expression, which is known as the Duchenne smile (lips curled up at the corners along with a crinkling in the muscles around the eyes—or the way your spouse looks when you ask, “Have you lost weight?”). Most of our positive emotions are funneled through this same Duchenne mask, like a symphony pumped through a tuba. Worse, we can’t even distinguish readily between a genuine Duchenne smile and a fake Duchenne smile, as generations of beauty pageant winners have illustrated. (Hint: A genuine Duchenne has the eye-crinkling that is hard to fake.)

Negative emotions tend to have a “narrowing effect” on our thoughts. If your body is tensing up as you walk through a dark alley, your mind isn’t likely to wander over to tomorrow’s to-do lists. Fear and anger and disgust give us sharp focus—which is the same thing as putting on blinders. Police detectives, for instance, frequently are frustrated by the testimony of gun-crime victims, who often can provide a rich description of the gun held by the perpetrator but can’t recall whether the perpetrator had a beard.

Fredrickson argues that, in contrast with the narrowing effects of the negative emotions, positive emotions are designed to “broaden and build” our repertoire of thoughts and actions. Joy, for example, makes us want to play. Play doesn’t have a script, it broadens the kinds of things we consider doing. We become willing to fool around, to explore or invent new activities. And because joy encourages us to play, we are building resources and skills. For instance, kids learn physical skills through rough-and-tumble play; they learn to work with objects by playing with toys and blocks and crayons; they learn to get along with others by pretending to be animals or superheroes.

The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.

Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don’t look like burning-platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.

This brings us back to Robyn Waters, who was a master of positive emotions. She didn’t try to create a burning platform: “Wal-Mart is eating our lunch! Target is on its deathbed! Come with me into the fiery seas!” Instead, she found a way to engage the fresh thinking and enthusiasm of her colleagues. What if we had colors that “popped” like these iMacs? And look at this Paris boutique’s display—what if we could arrange our sweaters like that?

Waters helped shift an entrenched culture, product by product, because she found a way to instill hope and optimism and excitement in her coworkers. She found the feeling.