8 Tweak the Environment

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.

2.

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.

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.

8.

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.