Quiz Chapter 10
Question 1
The concept of diversity is dynamic and always changing.
-True.
-False.
Question 2
Which group was the majority group in the United States in 2014?
-Black/ African American.
-Asian.
-Hispanic, non-white.
-White, non-Hispanic.
Question 3
The term race refers to:
-A sense of solidarity on the part of at least some sections of the eethnie's population.
-Shared historical memories or shared memories of a common past or pasts.
-A link with a homeland, not necessarily its physical occupation by the ethnic, only its
symbolic attachment to the ancestral land.
-The categorization of parts of a population based on physical appearance due to
particular historical social and political forces.
Question 4
Directive 15 is scientific and is anthropological in nature.
-True.
-False.
Question 5
Jessica is a 5th generation Asian-American who has adapted to the culture of the United
States. She [BLANK] into mainstream U.S. society.
-has NOT acculturated.
-has acculturated.
Question 6
Which group is the largest minority group in the United States?
-Black/ African American.
-Asian/ Pacific Islander.
-Hispanic.
-White, non-hispanic.
Question 7
Which group are the largest Hispanic group in the United States?
-Spanish.
-Cubans.
-Puerto Ricans.
-Mexicans.
Question 8
Match the definition to the term:
-Refugee.
-Immigrant.
-Alien.
-Unauthorized immigrant.
-A person born in and owing allegiance to a country other than the one in which he/she
lives.
-Individuals who migrate from on country to another for the purpose of seeking
permanent residence.
-An individual who entered this country without permission.
-A person who flees one area or country to seek shelter or protection from danger in
another.
Question 9
Differences in the incidence, prevalence, mortality, and burden of diseases and other
adverse health conditions that exist among specific population groups in the United States
are called [BLANK TWO WORDS].
Question 10
The World Health Organization has defined [BLANK 2 words] of health as the
circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work, and age, and the systems
put in place to deal with illness as well as life-enhancing resources, such as food supply,
economic and social relationships, transportation, education, and health care.
CHIP HEATH
THE BESTSELLING AUTHORS
$26.00
Why is it so hard to make lasting
changes in our companies, in our
communities, and in our own lives?
The primary obstacle is a conflict that's
built into our brains, say Chip and Dan
Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed
bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have
discovered that our minds are ruled by two
different systems-the rational mind and
the emotional mind-that compete for con
trol. The rational mind wants a great beach
body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo
cookie. The rational mind wants to change
something at
work; the
emotional mind
loves the comfort of the existing routine.
This tension can doom a change effort-but
if it is overcome, change can come quickly.
In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday
people---employees and managers, parents
and nurses-have united both minds and, as
a result, achieved dramatic results:
•
The lowly medical interns who managed
to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical
practice that was endangering patients (see
page 242)
•
The home-organizing guru who developed
a simple technique for overcoming the dread
of housekeeping (see page 130)
•
The manager who transformed a lackadaisi
cal customer-support team into service zealots
by removing a standard tool of customer service
(see page 199)
In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the
Heaths bring together decades of counterin
tuitive research in psychology, sociology, and
other fields to shed new light on how we can
(continul!d on back flap)
(continu.dfromfrontj/Ap)
effect transformative change. Switch shows
that successful changes follow a pattern, a pat
tern you can use to make the changes that mat
ter to you, whether your interest is in changing
the world or changing your waistline.
CHIP HEATH is a professor at the Graduate
School of Business at Stanford University. He
lives in Los Gatos, California. DAN HEATH is
a senior fellow at Duke University's Center
for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneur
ship (CASE). Previously, he was a researcher
and case writer at Harvard Business School,
as well as the cofounder of a college textbook
publishing firm called Thinkwell. Dan lives
in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Heath broth
ers write a monthly column for Fast Company
magazine.
www.heathbrothers.com
Also available as an eBook and on audio
from Random House
Jackel design: w.
G. COOKMAN
Jacket phOiograph: JEFFREY COOLIDGE/GETTY IMAGES
Author phorogrlliph:
AMY SURDACKI
Broadway Books
New York· 2/10
'NWW.broadwaybusinessbooks.com
Printed in the
U.S.A.
SWITCH
H OW
TO
CH ANGE
T H INGS
WHEN
CH ANGE
IS
H ARQ
CHIP HEATH and DAN HEATH
Broadway Books
New York
Copyright © 2010 by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS
and the Broadway Books colophon
are
trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heath, Chip.
Switch: how to change things when change is hard / Chip Heath and Dan
Heath.-lst ed.
l. Change (Psychology) I. Heath, Dan, 1973-11. Title.
BF637.C4H43 201O
303.4-dc22
2009027814
ISBN 978-0-385-52875-7
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
C o ntents
1 . Three Surprises About Change
D I R E C T T H E R I DE R
2. Find the Bright Spots
27
3. Script the Critical Moves
49
4. Point to the Destination
73
M OT I VA T E T H E ELEP H A NT
5. Find the Feeling
1 01
6. Shrink the Change
1 24
7. Grow Your People
1 49
S H APE T H E PA T H
8. Tweak the Environment
9. Build Habits
1 0. Rally the Herd
1 79
203
225
11. Keep the Switch Going
250
1
How to Make a Switch
259
Overcoming Obstacles
261
Next Steps
265
Recommendations for Additional Reading
Notes
269
Acknowledgments
Index
295
293
267
1
Three Surprises About Change
1.
One Saturday in 2000, some unsuspecting moviegoers showed
up at a suburban theater in Chicago to catch a 1 :05 p.m. mati
nee of Mel Gibson's action flick Payback. They were handed a soft
drink and
a
free bucket of popcorn and were asked to stick
around after the movie to answer a few questions about the con
cession stand. These movie fans were unwitting participants in a
study of irrational eating behavior.
There was something unusual about the popcorn they re
ceived. It was wretched. In fact, it had been carefully engineered
to be wretched. It had been popped five days earlier and was so
stale that it squeaked when you ate it. One moviegoer later com
pared it to Styrofoam packing peanuts, and two others, forgetting
that they'd received the popcorn for free, demanded their
money back.
Some of them got their free popcorn in a medium-size bucket,
2
T hr e e S u r p r i s e s A b o u t C h a n g e
and others got a large bucket-the sort of huge tub that looks
like it might once have been an above-ground swimming pool.
Every person got a bucket so there'd be no need to share. The re
searchers responsible for the study were interested in a simple
question: Would the people with bigger buckets eat more?
Both buckets were so big that none of the moviegoers could
finish their individual portions. So the actual research question
was a bit more specific: Would somebody with a larger inex
haustible supply of popcorn eat more than someone with a
smaller inexhaustible supply?
The sneaky researchers weighed the buckets before and after
the movie, so they were able to measure precisely how much pop
corn each person ate. The results were stunning: People with the
large buckets ate 53 percent more popcorn than people with the
medium size. That's the equivalent of 1 73 more calories and ap
proximately 21 extra hand-dips into the bucket.
Brian Wansink, the author of the study, runs the Food and
Brand Lab at Cornell University, and he described the results in
his book Mindless Eating: "We've run other popcorn studies, and
the results were always the same, however we tweaked the details.
It didn't matter if our moviegoers were in Pennsylvania, Illinois,
or Iowa, and it didn't matter what kind of movie was showing; all
of our popcorn studies led to the same conclusion. People eat
more when you give them a bigger container. Period."
No other theory explains the behavior. These people weren't
eating for pleasure. (The popcorn was so stale it squeaked!) They
weren't driven by a desire to finish their portion. (Both buckets
were too big to finish.) It didn't matter whether they were hungry
or full. The equation is unyielding: Bigger container
=
more eating.
Best of all, people refused to believe the results. After the
movie, the researchers told the moviegoers about the two bucket
sizes and the findings of their past research. The researchers asked,
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Do you think you ate more because of the larger size? The ma
jority scoffed at the idea, saying, "Things like that don't trick me,"
or, "I'm pretty good at knowing when I'm full."
W hoops.
2.
Imagine that someone showed you the data from the popcorn
eating study but didn't mention the bucket sizes. On your data
summary, you could quickly scan the results and see how much
popcorn different people ate-some people ate a little, some ate
a lot, and some seemed to be testing the physical limits of the
human stomach. Armed with a data set like that, you would find
it easy to jump to conclusions.
Some people are Reasonable Snack
ers, and others are Big Gluttons.
A public-health expert, studying that data alongside you,
would likely get very worried about the Gluttons. "We need to mo
tivate these people to adopt healthier snacking behaviors! Let's find
ways to show them the health hazards ofeating so much!
But wait a second. If you want people to eat less popcorn, the
solution is pretty simple: Give them smaller buckets. You don't
have to worry about their knowledge or their attitudes.
You can see how easy it would be to turn an easy change prob
lem (shrinking people's buckets) into a hard change problem
(convincing people to think differently) . And that's the first sur
prise about change: What looks like a people problem is often a
situation problem.
3.
This is a book to help you change things. We consider change at
every level-individual, organizational, and societal. Maybe you
4
T h r e e S u r p r i s e s A b o u t C h a n ge
want to help your brother beat his gambling addiction. Maybe
you need your team at work to act more frugally because of mar
ket conditions. Maybe you wish more of your neighbors would
bike to work.
Usually these topics are treated separately-there is "change
management" advice for executives and "self-help" advice for in
dividuals and "change the world" advice for activists. That's a
shame, because all change efforts have something in common:
For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.
Your brother has got to stay out of the casino; your employees
have got to start booking coach fares. Ultimately, all change ef
forts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start
behaving in a new way?
We know what you're thinking-people resist change. But it's
not quite that easy. Babies are born every day to parents who, in
explicably, welcome the change. Think about the sheer magni
tude of that change! Would anyone agree to work for a boss who'd
wake you up twice a night, screaming, for trivial administrative
duties? (And what if, every time you wore a new piece of cloth
ing, the boss spit up on it?) Yet people don't resist this massive
change-they volunteer for it.
In our lives, we embrace lots of big changes-not only ba
bies, but marriages and new homes and new technologies and
new job duties. Meanwhile, other behaviors are maddeningly in
tractable. Smokers keep smoking and kids grow fatter and your
husband can't ever seem to get his dirty shirts into a hamper.
So there are hard changes and easy changes. What distin
guishes one from the other? In this book, we argue that success
ful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader of
the change to do three things at once. We've already mentioned
one of those three things: To change someone's behavior, you've
got to change that person's situation.
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ADOUt
"nange
The situation isn't the whole game, of course. You can send an
alcoholic to rehab, where the new environment will help him go
dry. But what happens when he leaves and loses that influence?
You might see a boost in productivity from your sales reps when
the sales manager shadows them, but what happens afterward
when the situation returns to normal? For individuals' behavior
to change, you've got to influence not only their environment
but their heartS and minds.
The problem is this: Often the heart and mind disagree. Fer
vently.
4.
Consider the Clocky, an alarm clock invented by an MIT stu
dent, Gauri Nanda. It's no ordinary alarm clock-it has wheels.
You set it at night, and in the morning when the alarm goes off,
it rolls off your nightstand and scurries around the room, forcing
you to chase it down. Picture the scene: You're crawling around
the bedroom in your underwear, stalking and cursing a runaway
clock.
Clocky ensures that you won't snooze-button your way to di
saster. And apparently that's a common fear, since about 35,000
units were purchased, at $50 each, in Clocky's first two years on
the market (despite minimal marketing).
The success of this invention reveals a lot about human psy
chology. What it shows, fundamentally, is that we are schizo
phrenic. Part of us-our rational side-wants to get up at 5:45
a.m., allowing ourselves plenty of time for a quick jog before we
leave for the office. The other part of us-the emotional side
wakes up in the darkness of the early morning, snoozing inside
a warm cocoon of sheets and blankets, and wants nothing in the
world so much as a few more minutes of sleep. If, like us, your
6
Three Surprises About Change
emotional side tends to win these internal debates, then you
might be a potential Clocky customer. The beauty of the device
is that it allows your rational side to outsmart your emotional
side. It's simply impossible to stay cuddled up under the covers
when a rogue alarm clock is rolling around your room.
Let's be blunt here: Clocky is not a product for a sane species.
If Spock wants to get up at 5:45 a.m., he'll just get up. No drama
required.
Our built-in schizophrenia is a deeply weird thing, but we
don't think much about it because we're so used to it. When
we kick off a new diet, we toss the Cheetos and Oreos out of the
pantry, because our rational side knows that when our emotional
side gets a craving, there's no hope of self-control. The only op
tion is to remove the temptation altogether. (For the record, some
MIT student will make a fortune designing Cheetos that scurry
away from people when they're on a diet.)
The unavoidable conclusion is this: Your brain isn't of one
mind.
The conventional wisdom in psychology, in fact, is that the
brain has two independent systems at work at all times. First,
there's what we called the emotional side. It's the part of you that
is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure. Second, there's the ra
tional side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It's
the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the
future.
In the past few decades, psychologists have learned a lot about
these two systems, but of course mankind has always been aware
of the tension. Plato said that in our heads we have a rational
charioteer who has to rein in an unruly horse that "barely yields
to horsewhip and goad combined." Freud wrote about the selfish
id and the conscientious superego (and also about the ego, which
T h r e e S u r p r i s e s A b o u t C ha n g e
8
plan, to think beyond the moment (all those things that your pet
can't do).
But what may surprise you is that the Elephant also has enor
mous strengths and that the Rider has crippling weaknesses. The
Elephant isn't always the bad guy. Emotion is the Elephant's
turf-love and compassion and sympathy and loyalty. That fierce
instinct you have to protect your kids against harm-that's the
Elephant. That spine-stiffening you feel when you need to stand
up for yourself-that's the Elephant.
And even more important if you're contemplating a change, the .
Elephant is the one who gets things done. To make progress toward
a goal, whether it's noble or crass, requires the energy and drive of
the Elephant. And this strength is the mirror image of the Rider's
great weakness: spinning his wheels. The Rider tends to overana
lyze and overthink things. Chances are, you know people with Rider
problems: your friend who can agonize for twenty minutes about
what to eat for dinner; your colleague who can brainstorm about
new ideas for hours but can't ever seem to make a decision.
If you want to change things, you've got to appeal to both.
The Rider provides the planning and direction, and the Elephant
provides the energy. So if you reach �he Riders of your team but
not the Elephants, team members will have understanding with
out motivation. If you reach their Elephants but not their Riders,
they'll have passion without direction. In both cases, the flaws
can be paralyzing .
A reluctant Elephant and a wheel-spinning
Rider can both ensure that nothing changes. But when Elephants
and Riders move together, change can come easily.
5.
When Rider and Elephant disagree about which way to move,
you've got a problem. The Rider can get his way temporarily-he
Thr e e S u r p r i s e s A b o u t C h a n g e
9
can tug on the reins hard enough to get the Elephant to submit.
(Anytime you use willpower you're doing exactly that.) But the
Rider can't win a tug-of-war with a huge animal for long. He sim
ply gets exhausted.
To see this point more clearly, consider the behavior of some
college students who participated in a study about "food
perception" (or so they were told). They reported to the lab a bit
hungry; they'd been asked not to eat for at least three hours
beforehand. They were led to a room that smelled amazing
the researchers had just baked chocolate-chip cookies. On a
table in the center of the room were two bowls. One held a
sampling of chocolates, along with the warm, fresh-baked
chocolate-chip cookies they'd smelled. The other bowl held a
bunch of radishes.
The researchers had prepped a cover story: We've selected
chocolates and radishes because they have highly distinctive
tastes. Tomorrow, we'll contact you and ask about your memory
of the taste sensations you experienced while eating them.
Half the participants were asked to eat two or three cookies
and some chocolate candies, but no radishes. The other half were
asked to eat at least two or three radishes, but no cookies. While
they ate, the researchers left the room, intending, rather sadisti
cally, to induce temptation: They wanted those poor radish-eaters
to sit there, alone, nibbling on rabbit food, glancing enviously at
the fresh-baked cookies. (It probably goes without saying that the
cookie-eaters experienced no great struggle in resisting the rad
ishes.) Despite the temptation, all participants ate what they were
asked to eat, and none of the radish-eaters snuck a cookie. That's
willpower at work.
At that point, the "taste study" was officially over, and another
group of researchers entered with a second, supposedly unrelated
study: We're trying to find who's better at solving problems,
Th r e e S u r p r i s e s A b o u t Cha n ge
10
college students or high school students. This framing was in
tended to get the college students to puff out their chests and
take the forthcoming task seriously.
The college students were presented with a series of puzzles that
required them to trace a complicated geometric shape without re
tracing any lines and without lifting their pencils from the paper.
They were given multiple sheets of paper so they could try over
and over. In reality, the puzzles were designed to be unsolvable.
The researchers wanted to see how long the college students would
persist in a difficult, frustrating task before they finally gave up.
The "untempted" students, who had not had to resist eating
the chocolate-chip cookies, spent nineteen minutes on the task,
making thirty-four well-intentioned attempts to solve the prob
lem.
The radish-eaters were less persistent. They gave up after only
eight minutes-less that:I half the time spent by the cookie
eaters-and they managed only nineteen solution attempts. Why
did they quit so easily?
The answer may surprise you: They ran out of self·control. In
studies like this one, psychologists have discovered .that self
control is an exhaustible resource. It's like doing bench presses at
the gym. The first one is easy, when your muscles are fresh. But
with each additional repetition, your muscles get more exhausted,
until you can't lift the bar again. The radish-eaters had drained
their self-control by resisting the cookies. So when their Ele
its
too hard, it's nofun, we're no good at this-their Riders didn't have
phants, inevitably, started complaining about the puzzle task
-
enough strength to yank on the reins for more than eight min
utes. Meanwhile, the cookie-eaters had a fresh, untaxed Rider,
who fought off the Elephant for nineteen minutes.
Self-control is an exhaustible resource. This is a
crucial realiza
tion, because when we talk about "self-control," we don't mean
Thr e e S urp r i s e s A b o u t C h a n g e
11
the narrow sense of the word, as in the willpower needed to fight
vice (smokes, cookies, alcohol) . We're talking about a broader
kind of self-supervision. Think of the way your mind works when
you're giving negative feedback to an employee, or assembling a
new bookshelf, or learning a new dance. You are careful and de
liberate with your words or movements. It feels like there's a su
pervisor on duty. That's self-control, too.
Contrast that with all the situations in which your behavior
doesn't feel "supervised"-for instance, the sensation while you're
driving that you can't remember the last few miles of road, or the
easy, unthinking way you take a shower or make your morning
coffee. Much of our daily behavior, in fact, is more automatic
than supervised, and that's a good thing because the supervised
behavior is the hard stuff. It's draining.
Dozens of studies have demonstrated the exhausting nature of
self-supervision. For instance, people who were asked to make
tricky choices and trade-offs-such as setting up a wedding reg
istry or ordering a new computer-were worse at focusing and
solving problems than others who hadn't made the tough choices.
In one study, some people were asked to restrain their emotions
while watching a sad movie about sick animals. Afterward, they
exhibited less physical endurance than others who'd let the tears
flow freely. The research shows that we burn up self-control in a
wide variety of situations: managing the impression we're making
on others; coping with fears; controlling our spending; trying to
focus on simple instructions such as "Don't think of a white
bear"; and many, many others.
Here's why this matters for change: When people try to
change things, they're usually tinkering with behaviors that have
become automatic, and changing those behaviors requires care
ful supervision by the Rider. The bigger the change you're sug
gesting, the more it will sap people's self-control.
Thr e e S u r p r i s e s A b o u t C h a n g e
12
And when people exhaust their self-control, what they're ex
hausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to
focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frus
tration or failure. In other words, they're exhausting precisely the
mental muscles needed to make a big change.
So when you hear people say that change is hard because peo
ple are lazy or resistant, that's j ust Rat wrong. In fact, the oppo
site is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out.
And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like lazi
ness is often exhaustion.
6.
Jon Stegner believed the company he worked for, a large manu
facturer, was wasting vast sums of money. "I thought we had an
opportunity to drive down purchasing costs not by 2 percent but
by something on the order of $1 billion over the next five years, "
said Stegner, who i s quoted i n John Kotter and Dan Cohen's es
sential book The Heart ofChange.
To reap these savings, a big process shift would be required,
and for that shift to occur, Stegner knew that he'd have to con
vince his bosses. He also knew that they'd never embrace such a
big shift unless they believed in the opportunity, and for the most
part, they didn't.
Seeking a compelling example of the company's poor pur
chasing habits, Stegner assigned a summer student intern to in
vestigate a single item-work gloves, which workers in most of
the company's factories wore. The student embarked on a mission
to identify all the types of gloves used in all the company's facto
ries and then trace back what the company was paying for them.
The intrepid intern soon reported that the factories were
Thr e e S u r p r ises A b o u t Cha n g e
13
purchasing 424 different kinds of gloves! Furthermore, they were
using different glove suppliers, and they were all negotiating their
own prices. The same pair of gloves that cost $5 at one factory
might cost $17 at another.
At Stegner's request, the student collected a specimen of every
one of the 424 different types of gloves and tagged each with the
price paid. Then all the gloves were gathered up, brought to the
boardroom, and piled up on the conference table. Stegner invited
all the division presidents to come visit the Glove Shrine. He re
called the scene:
What they saw was a large expensive table, normally
clean or with a few papers, now stacked high with
gloves. Each of our executives stared at this display for a
minute. Then each said something like, "We really buy
all these different kinds of gloves?" Well, as a matter of
fact, yes we do. "Really?" Yes, really. Then they walked
around the table .. . . They could see the prices. They
looked at two gloves that seemed exactly alike, yet one
was marked $3.22 and the other $10.5 5. It's a rare event
when these people don't have anything to say. But that
day, they just stood with their mouths gaping.
The gloves exhibit soon became a traveling road show, visit
ing dozens of plants. The reaction was visceral: This is crazy. We're
crazy. And we've got to make sure this stops happening. Soon Steg
ner had exactly the mandate for change that he'd sought. The
company changed its purchasing process and saved a great deal of
money. This was exactly the happy ending everyone wanted (ex
cept, of course, for the glove salesmen who'd managed to sell the
$5 gloves for $17).
Th re e 5 u rp ri5e5 About eh a n 9 e
14
7.
Let's be honest: Most of us would not have tried what Stegner
did. It would have been so easy, so natural, to make a presenta
tion that spoke only to the Rider. Think of the possibilities: the
spreadsheets, the savings data, the cost-cutting protocols, the rec
ommendations for supplier consolidation, the exquisite logic for
central purchasing. You could have created a 12-tabbed Microsoft
Excel spreadsheet that would have made a tax accountant weep
with joy. But instead of doing any of that, Stegner dumped a
bunch of gloves on a table and invited his bosses to see them.
If there is such a thing as white-collar courage, surely this was
an instance.
Stegner knew that if things were going to change, he had to
get his colleagues' Elephants on his side. If he had made an ana
lytical appeal, he probably would have gotten some supportive
nods, and the execs might have requested a follow-up meeting
six weeks later (and then rescheduled it). The analytical case was
compelling-by itself, it might have convinced Stegner's col
leagues that overhauling the purchasing system would be an im
portant thing to do . . . next year.
Remember that if you reach your colleagues' Riders but not
their Elephants, they will have direction without motivation.
Maybe their Riders will drag the Elephant down the road for a
while, but as we've seen, that effort can't last long.
Once you break through to feeling, though, things change.
Stegner delivered a jolt to his colleagues. First, they thought to
themselves, were crazy! Then they thought, we canfix this. Every
one could think of a few things to try to fix the glove problem
and by extension the ordering process as a whole. That got their
Elephants fired up to move.
We don't expect potential billion-dollar change stories to come
dressed up like this. The change effort was led by a single employee,
T h r e e S u r p ris es A b out C h a n g e
15
with the able help of a summer intern. I t focused on a single prod
uct. The scope of the presentation didn't correspond in any way to
the scope of the proposal. Yet Stegner's strategy worked.
That's the power of speaking to both the Rider and the
Elephant.
8.
�
It's tru that an unmotivated Elephant can doom a change effort,
but let's not forget that the Rider has his own issues. He's a navel
gazer, an analyzer, a wheel-spinner. If the Rider isn't sure exactly
what direction to go, he tends to lead the Elephant in circles. And
as we'll see, that tendency explains the third and final surprise
about change: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
Two health researchers, Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill
Reger, professors at West Virginia University, were contemplating
ways to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. From past re
search, they knew that people were more likely to change when
the new behavior expected of them was crystal clear, but unfor
tunately, "eating a healthier diet" was anything but.
Where to begin? Which foods should people stop (or start)
eating? Should they change their eating behavior at breakfast,
lunch, or dinner? At home or in restaurants? The number ofways
to "eat healthier" is limitless, especially given the starting place
of the average American diet. This is exactly the kind of situation
in which the Rider will spin his wheels, analyzing and agonizing
and never moving forward.
As the two researchers brainstormed, their thoughts kept
coming back to milk. Most Americans drink milk, and we all
know that milk is a great source of calcium. But milk is also the
single largest source of saturated fat in the typical American's diet.
In fact, calculations showed something remarkable: IfAmericans
Three S urprises About Change
16
switched from whole milk to skim or 1 % milk, the average diet
would immediately attain the USDA recommended levels of sat
urated fat.
How do you get Americans to start drinking low-fat milk?
You make sure it shows up in their refrigerators. And that isn't
an entirely facetious answer. People will drink whatever is around
the house-a family will plow through low-fat milk as fast as
whole milk. So, in essence, the problem was even easier than an
ticipated: You don't need to change
drinking behavior. You need
to change purchasing behavior.
Suddenly the intervention became razor-sharp. What behav
ior do we want to change? We want consumers to buy skim or
1 % milk. When? When they're shopping for groceries. Where?
Duh. What else needs to change? Nothing (for now).
Reger and Booth-Butterfield launched a campaign in two
communities in West Virginia, running spots on the local media
outlets
(Tv; newspaper, radio) for two weeks.
In contrast to the
bland messages of most public-health campaigns, the 1 % milk
campaign was punchy and specific. One ad trumpeted the fact
that one glass of whole milk has the same amount of saturated fat
as five strips of bacon! At a press conference, the researchers
showed local reporters a tube full of fat-the equivalent of the
amount found in a half-gallon of whole milk. (Notice the Ele
phant appeals: They're going for an "Oh, gross!" reaction.)
Reger and Booth-Butterfield monitored milk sales data at all
eight stores in the intervention area. Before the campaign, the
market share of low-fat milk was 1 8 percent. After the campaign,
it was
41 percent.
Six months later, it held at
35 percent.
This brings us to the final part of the pattern that character
izes successful changes: If you want people to change, you must
provide crystal-clear direction.
By now, you can understand the reason this is so important:
T h r e e S u r p ris es A b o u t C h a n g e
17
It's so the Rider doesn't spin his wheels. If you tell people to "act
healthier," think of how many ways they can interpret that
imagine their Riders contemplating the options endlessly. (Do I
eat more grains and less meat? Or vice versa? Do I start taking vi
tamins? Would it be a good trade-off if! exercise more and bribe
myself with ice cream? Should I switch to Diet Coke, or is the ar
tificial sweetener worse than the calories?)
What looks like resistance is often a lack ofclarity. Before this
study, we might have looked at these West Virginians and con
cluded they were the kind of people who don't care about their
health. But if they were indeed "that kind" of people, why was it
so easy to shift their behavior?
If you want people to change, you don't ask them to "act
healthier." You say, "Next time you're in the dairy aisle of the gro
cery store, reach for a jug of 1 % milk instead of whole milk."
9.
Now you've had a glimpse of the basic three-part framework we
will unpack i n this book, one that can guide you in any situation
where you need to change behavior:
•
Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a
lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction. (Think
1 % milk.)
•
Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is
often exhaustion. The Rider can't g�t his way by force for
very long. So it's critical that you engage people's emo
tional side-get their Elephants on the path and cooper
ative. (Think of the cookies and radishes study and the
boardroom conference table full of gloves.)
Three S urprises About Change
18
•
Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is
often a situation problem. We call the situation (includ
ing the surrounding environment) the "Path." When you
shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter
what's happening with the Rider and Elephant. (Think
of the effect of shrinking movie popcorn buckets.)
We created this framework to be useful for people who don't
have scads of authority or resources. Some people can get their
way by fiat. CEOs, for instance, can sell off divisions, hire peo
ple, fire people, change incentive systems, merge teams, and so
on. Politicians can pass laws or impose punishments to change be
havior. The rest of us don't have these tools (though, admittedly,
they would make life easier: "Son, if you don't take out the trash
tonight, you're fired") . In this book, we don't talk a lot about these
structural methods.
As helpful as we hope this framework will be to you, we're well
aware, and you should be, too, that this framework is no panacea.
For one thing, it's incomplete. We've deliberately left out lots of
great thinking on change in the interests of creating a framework
that's simple enough to be practical. For another, there's a good
reason why change can be difficult: The world doesn't always want
what you want. You want to change how others are acting, but
they get a vote. You can cajole, influence, inspire, and motivate
but sometimes an employee would rather lose his job than move
out of his comfortable routines. Sometimes the alcoholic will want
another drink no matter what the consequences.
.
So we don't promise that we're going to make change easy,
but at least we can make it easier. Our goal is to teach you a frame
work, based on decades of scientific research, that is simple
enough to remember and flexible enough to use in many differ
ent situations-family, work, community, and otherwise.
T h ree 5
u
r p rj 5 e 5 A b o u t e h a n 9 e
19
To change behavior, you've got to direct the Rider, motivate
the Elephant, and shape the Path. If you can do all three at once,
dramatic change can happen even if you don't have lots of power
or resources behind you. For proof of that, we don't need to look
beyond Donald Berwick, a man who changed the face of health
care.
1 0.
In 2004, Donald Berwick, a doctor and the CEO of the Institute
for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), had some ideas about how to
save lives-massive numbers of lives. Researchers at the IHI had
analyzed patient care with the kinds of analytical tools used to
assess the quality of cars coming off a production line. They dis
covered that the "defect" rate in health care was as high as 1 in
10-meaning, for example, that 10 percent of patients did not
receive their antibiotics in the specified time. This was a shock
ingly high defect rate-many other industries had managed to
achieve performance at levels of 1 error in 1 ,000 cases (and often
far better). Berwick knew that the high medical defect rate meant
that tens of thousands of patients were dying every year,
unnecessarily.
Berwick's insight was that hospitals could benefit from the
same kinds of rigorous process improvements that had worked
in other industries. Couldn't a transplant operation be "produced"
as consistently and flawlessly as a Toyota Camry?
Berwick's ideas were so well supported by research that they
were essentially indisputable, yet little was happening. He
certainly had no ability to force any changes on the industry.
IHI had only seventy-five employees. But Berwick wasn't
deterred.
On December 14, 2004, he gave a speech to a room full of
20
T h r e e 5 u r p rj 5 e 5 A b o u t e h a n 9 e
hospital administrators at a large industry convention. He said,
"Here is what I think we should do. I think we should save 100,000
lives. And I think we should do that by June 14, 200� 18 months
from today. Some is not a number; soon is not a time. Here's the
number: 100,000. Here's the time: June 14, 200�9 a.m."
The crowd was astonished. The goal was daunting. But
Berwick was quite serious about his intentions. He and his tiny
team set out to do the impossible.
IHI proposed six very specific interventions to save lives. For
instance, one asked hospitals to adopt a set of proven procedures
for managing patients on ventilators, to prevent them from get
ting pneumonia, a common cause of unnecessary death. (One of
the procedures called for a patient's head to be elevated between
30 and 45 degrees, so that oral secretions couldn't get into the
windpipe.)
Of course, all hospital administrators agreed with the goal to
save lives, but the road to that goal was filled with obstacles. For
one thing, for a hospital to reduce its "defect rate," it had to ac
knowledge having a defect rate. In other words, it had to admit
that some patients were dying needless deaths. Hospital lawyers
were not keen to put this admission on record.
Berwick knew he had to address the hospitals' squeamish
ness about admitting error. At his December 14 speech, he was
joined by the mother of a girl who'd been killed by a medical
error. She said, 'Tm a little speechless, and I'm a little sad, be
cause I know that if this campaign had been in place four or five
years ago, that Josie would be fine . . . . But, I'm happy, I'm
thrilled to be part of this, because I know you can do it, because
you have to do it."
Another guest on stage, the chair of the North Carolina State
Hospital Association, said: "An awful lot of people for a long time
Three S urprises About Change
21
have had their heads in the sand on this issue, and it's time to do
the right thing. It's as simple as that."
IHI made joining the campaign easy: It required only a one
page form signed by a hospital CEO. By two months after
Berwick's speech, over a thousand hospitals had enrolled. Once a
hospital enrolled, the IHI team helped the hospital embrace the
new interventions. Team members provided research, step-by
step instruction guides, and training. They arranged conference
calls for hospital leaders to share their victories and struggles with
one another. They encouraged hospitals with early successes to
become "mentors" to hospitals just joining the campaign.
The friction in the system was substantial. Adopting the IHI
interventions required hospitals to overcome decades' worth of
habits and routines. Many doctors were irritated by the new pro
cedures, which they perceived as constricting. But the adopting
hospitals were seeing dramatic results, and their visible successes
attracted more hospitals to join the campaign.
Eighteen months later, at the exact moment he'd promised to
return-June 14,2006, at 9 a.m.-Berwick took the stage again
to announce the results: "Hospitals enrolled in the 100,000 Lives
Campaign have collectively prevented an estimated 122,300
avoidable deaths and, as importantly, have begun to institution
alize new standards of care that will continue to save lives and
improve health outcomes into the future."
The crowd was euphoric. Don Berwick, with his 75-person
team at IHI, had convinced thousands of hospitals to change
their behavior, and collectively, they'd saved 122,300 lives-the
equivalent of throwing a life preserver to every man, woman, and
child in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This outcome was the fulfillment of the vision Berwick had
articulated as he closed his speech eighteen months earlier, about
Three 5 u
22
r
p r i s e s A b o u t e h a ng e
how the world would look when hospitals achieved the 1 00,000
lives goal:
And, we will celebrate. Starting with pizza, and ending
with champagne. We will celebrate the importance of
what we have undertaken to do, the courage of hon
esty, the joy of companionship,the cleverness of a field
operation, and the results we will achieve. We will cel
ebrate ourselves, because the patients whose lives we
save cannot join us, because their names can never be
known. Our contribution will be what did not happen
to them. And, though they are unknown, we will know
that mothers and fathers are at graduations and wed
dings they would have missed, and that grandchildren
will know grandparents they might never have known,
and holidays will be taken, and work completed, and
books read,and symphonies heard, and gardens tended
that, without our work, would have been only beds of
weeds.
11.
Big changes can happen.
Don Berwick and his team catalyzed a change that
saved 1 00,000 lives, yet Berwick himself wielded no power. He
couldn't change the law. He couldn't fire hospital leaders who
didn't agree with him. He couldn't pay bonuses to hospitals that
accepted his proposals.
Berwick had the same tools the rest of us have. First, he di
rected his audience's Riders. The destination was crystal clear:
Some is not a number; soon is not a time. Here's the number:
T h r e e S u r p rj 5 e 5 A b o u t e h a n 9 e
23
1 00,000. Here's the time: June 1 4, 2006-9 a.m. But that wasn't
enough. He had to help hospitals figure out how to get there, and
he couldn't simply say, "Try harder." (Remember "act healthier"
versus "buy 1 % milk.") So he proposed six specific interventions,
such as elevating the heads of patients on ventilators, that were
known to save lives. By staying laser-focused on these six inter
ventions, Berwick made sure not to exhaust the Riders of his au
dience with endless behavioral changes.
Second, he motivated his audience's Elephants. He made
them feel the need for change. Many of the people in the audience
already knew the facts, but knowing was not enough. (Remem
ber, knowing wasn't enough for executives at Jon Stegner's com
pany. It took a stack of gloves to get their Elephants engaged.)
Berwick had to get beyond knowing, so he brought his audience
face-to-face with the mother of the girl who'd been killed by a
medical error: "I know that if this campaign had been in place
four or five years ago, that Josie would be fine." Berwick was also
careful to motivate the people who hadn't been in the room for
his presentation. He didn't challenge people to "overhaul medi
cine" or "brillg TQM to health care." He challenged them to save
1 00,000 lives. That speaks to anyone's Elephant.
Third, he shaped the Path. He made it easier for the hospitals
to embrace the change. Think of the one-page enrollment form,
the step-by-step instructions, the training, the support groups,
the mentors. He was designing an environment that made it more
likely for hospital administrators to reform. Berwick also knew
that behavior was contagious. He used peer pressure to persuade
hospitals to join the campaign. (Your rival hospital across town just
signed on to help save 100, 000 lives. Do you really want them to have
the moral high ground?) He also connected people-he matched
up people who were struggling to implement the changes with
people who had mastered them, almost like the "mentors" found
24
T h r e e 5 u r p rj 5 e 5 A b o u t e ha n 9 e
in Alcoholics Anonymous. Berwick was creating a support group
for health care reform.
In this book, you'll learn about people like Berwick who've
created sweeping change despite having few resources and little
structural authority. You'll learn about an entrepreneur who saved
his small company by turning his skeptical employees into
customer-service zealots; a student fresh out of college who saved
an endangered species from extinction; a manager who plotted a
way to get his colleague to stop acting like a jerk; and a therapist
who reformed a group of child abusers.
Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your char
ity, in your organization, or in society at large,you'll get there by
making three things happen. You'll direct the Rider, motivate the
Elephant, and shape the Path.
DIRECT
TH E
RIDER
,
"
,
DIRECT THE RIDER
,
,
2
Find the Bright Spots
1.
In 1990, Jerry Sternin was working for Save the Children, the in
ternational organization that helps children in need. He'd been
asked to open a new office in Vietnam. The government had in
vited Save the Children into the country to fight malnutrition.
But when Sternin arrived, the welcome was rather chilly. The for
eign minister let him know that not everyone in the government
appreciated his presence. The minister told Sternin, "You have
six months to make a difference."
Sternin was traveling with his wife and 10-year-old son. None
of them spoke Vietnamese. "We were like orphans at the airport
when we arrived in Vietnam," he recalled. "We had no idea what
we were going to do." Sternin had minimal staff and meager re
sources.
Sternin had read as much as he could about the malnutri
tion problem. The conventional wisdom was that malnutrition
28
DI R E C T T H E R ID E R
was the result of an intertwined set of problems: Sanitation
was poor. Poverry was nearly universal. Clean water was not
readily available. The rural people tended to be ignorant about
nutrition.
In Sternin's judgment, all of this analysis was "TBU"-true
but useless. "Millions of kids can't wait for those issues to be ad
dressed," he said. If addressing malnutrition required ending
poverty and purifYing water and building sanitation systems, then
it would never happen. Especially in six months, with almost no
money to spend.
Sternin had a better idea. He traveled to rural villages and met
with groups of local mothers. The mothers divided into teams
and went out to weigh and measure every child in their village.
They then pored over the results together.
Sternin asked them, "Did you find any very, very poor kids
who are bigger and healthier than the typical child?" The women,
scanning the data, nodded and said, "Co, co, co. "(Yes, yes, yes.)
Sternin said, "You mean it's possible today in this village for
a very poor family to have a well-nourished child?"
"Co, co, co. "
"Then let's go see what they're doing."
Sternin's strategy was to search the community for bright spotr
successful efforts worth emulating. If some kids were healthy de
spite their disadvantages, that meant malnourishment was not
inevitable. Furthermore, the mere existence of healthy kids pro
vided hope for a practical, short-term solution. Sternin knew he
couldn't fix the thorny "root causes." But if a handful of kids were
staying healthy against the odds, why couldn't every kid be healthy?
Notice that Sternin was trying to focus the mothers' Riders.
The overall topic-what can you do to make your child health
ier?-is simply too big and loaded to take on at once. The moth
ers needed direction, not motivation. Mter all, every mother's
F i n d t he B r i g ht S p o t s
29
Elephant is going to be motivated to make her child healthier.
But how?
Remember the power of the 1 % milk campaign, which made
an abstract idea ("eat healthier") practical. Sternin was saying:
Let's not sit around analyzing "malnutrition." Let's go study what
these bright-spot mothers are doing.
As a first step, Sternin and the mothers had to eliminate any
bright spots who weren't "typical." For example, a boy might
have an uncle in the government who could send extra food his
way. Other families wouldn't be able to replicate that.
In order to recognize what the bright-spot mothers were
doing differently, the group had to synthesize the "conventional
wisdom" about feeding kids. So they talked to dozens of peo
ple-mothers, fathers, older brothers and sisters, grandparents
and discovered that the community norms were pretty clear:
Kids ate twice a day along with the rest of their families. They
ate food that was appropriate for kids-soft, pure foods like the
highest-quality rice.
Armed with an understanding of the norms, Sternin and the
mothers went into the homes of the bright-spot kids and ob
served the way the homes were run, alert for any deviations. Their
observation yielded some unexpected insights. For one thing,
bright-spot moms were feeding their kids four meals a day (using
the same amount of food as other moms but spreading it across
four servings rather than two). The larger twice-a-day meals eaten
by most families turned out to be a mistake for children, because
their malnourished stomachs couldn't process that much food at
one time.
The style of eating was also different. Most parents believed
that their kids understood their own needs and would feed them
selves appropriately from the communal bowl. But the healthy
kids were fed more actively-hand-fed by parents if necessary.
30
D I R ECT THE RIDER
They were even encouraged to eat when they were sick, which
was not the norm.
Perhaps most interesting, the healthy kids were eating differ
ent kinds of food. The bright-spot mothers were collecting tiny
shrimp and crabs from the rice paddies and mixing them in with
their kids' rice. Shrimp and crabs were eaten by adults but gen
erally weren't considered appropriate food for kids. The mothers
also tossed in sweet-potato greens, which were considered a low
class food. These dietary improvisations, however strange or "low
class," were doing something precious: adding sorely needed pro
tein and vitamins to the children's diet.
As an outsider, Stern in never could have foreseen these prac
tices. He knew nothing about sweet-potato greens. The solution
was a native one, emerging from the real-world experience of the
villagers, and for that reason it was inherently realistic and in
herently sustainable. But knowing the solution wasn't enough.
For anything to change, lots of mothers needed to adopt the new
cooking habits.
Most people in Sternin's situation would have been itching to
make an announcement, to call the village together and unveil a
set of recommendations. Gather 'round, everyone: I've studiedyour
problem and now I have the answer! Here are Sternill's 5 Rules for
Fighting Malnutrition.
But Sternin refused to make a formal announcement.
"Knowledge does not change behavior," he said. "We have all en
countered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage
counselors." He knew that telling the mothers about nutrition
wouldn't change their behavior. They'd have to practice it.
The community designed a program in which fifty malnour
ished families, in groups of ten, would meet at a hut each day
and prepare food. The families were required to bring shrimp,
crabs, and sweet-potato greens. The mothers washed their hands
Find the Bright S pots
31
with soap and cooked the meal together. Sternin said that the
moms were "acting their way into a new way of thinking.» Most
important, it was their change, something that arose from the
local wisdom of the village. Sternin's role was only to help them
see that they could do it, that they could conquer malnutrition
on their own.
By organizing these cooking groups, Steroin was addressing
both the Rider and the Elephant. The mothers' Riders got highly
specific instructions: Here's how to cook a tasty lunch with shrimp
and sweet-potato greens. And their Elephants got a feeling: hope.
There really is a way to make my daughter healthier. And it's not
very hard-it's something 1 can do! Notice that the Path played a
role, too. W hen so many of the mothers were doing something,
there was strong social pressure to go along. The cooking classes,
in effect, were changing the culture of the village.
Best of all, bright spots solve the "Not Invented Here" prob
lem. Some people have a knee-jerk skeptical response to "im
ported" solutions. Imagine the public outcry if an American
politician proposed that the United States adopt the French
health care system. (Or vice versa.) We all think our group is the
smartest.
By looking for bright spots within the very village he was try
ing to change, Sternin ensured that the solution would be a na
tive one. He would have faced a much more difficult quest if he'd
brought in a plan from a different village. The local mothers
would have bristled: Those people aren't like us. Our situation is
more complicated than that. Those ideas wouldn't work here.
Finding bright spots, then, solves many different problems at
once. That's no surprise; successful change efforts involve con
necting all three parts of the framework: Rider, Elephant, and
Path. (Although in this book we explain one part of the frame
work at a time, we'll continue to remind you that even an
32
DI R E C T T H E R IDER
example in the "Rider" chapters will influence the Elephant and
Path. Concepts are rarely exclusive.)
Six months after Sternin had come to the Vietnamese village,
65 percent of the kids were better nourished and stayed that way.
Later, when researchers from Emory University's School of Pub
lic Health came to Vietnam to gather independent data, they
found that even children who hadn't been born when Sternin left
the villages were as healthy as the kids Sternin had reached di
rectly. That discovery provided proof that the changes had stuck.
Sternin's success began to spread. "We took the first 14 villages
in different phases of the program and turned them into a social
laboratory. People who wanted to replicate the nutrition model
came from different parts of Vietnam. Every day, they would go to
this living university, to these villages, touching, smelling, sniffing,
watching, listening. They would 'graduate,' go to their villages, and
implement the process until they got it right. . . . The program
reached 2.2 million Vietnamese people in 265 villages. Our living
university has become a national model for teaching villagers to re
duce drastically malnutrition in Vietnam," Sternin said.
Stories don't come much more heroic than this. Sternin and his
small team of believers, working with a shoestring budget, man
aged to make a big dent in malnutrition. What makes it more re
markable is that they weren't experts. They didn't walk in with the
answers. All they had was a deep faith in the power of bright spots.
2.
The Rider part of our minds has many strengths. The Rider is a
thinker and a planner and can plot a course for a better future.
But as we've seen, the Rider has a terrible weakness-the
tendency to spin his wheels. The Rider loves to contemplate and
analyze, and, making matters worse, his analysis is almost always
Find the Bright S p ots
33
directed at problems rather than at bright spots. (You can prob
ably recall a conversation with a friend who agonized for hours
over a particular relationship problem. But can you remember an
instance when a friend spent even a few minutes analyzing why
something was working so well?)
These analytical qualities can be extremely helpful, obviously
many problems get solved through analysis-but in situations
where change is needed, too much analysis can doom the effort.
The Rider will see too many problems and spend too much time
sizing them up. Look again at Jerry Sternin and the Vietnam
story: Dozens of experts had analyzed the situation in Vietnam.
Their Riders had agonized over the problems-the water supply,
the sanitation, the poverty, the ignorance. They'd written posi
tion papers and research documents and development plans. But
they hadn't changed a thing.
In tough times, the Rider sees problems everywhere, and
"analysis paralysis" often kicks in. The Rider will spin his wheels
indefinitely unless he's given clear direction. That's why to make
progress on a change, you need ways to dz"rectthe Rider. Show him
where to go, how to act, what destination to pursue. And that's
why bright spots are so essential, because they are your best hope
for directing the Rider when you're trying to bring about change.
3.
"School stinks," said Bobby, a ninth grader who'd just reported
for his first school counseling session. John J. Murphy, the school
psychologist, was surprised Bobby had shown up at all.
Several teachers had referred Bobby for counseling, frustrated
by his bad behavior. He was constantly late, rarely did his work,
was disruptive in class, and sometimes made loud threats to other
kids in the hallways.
DI R E C T T H E R ID E R
34
Bobby's home life was just as chaotic. He'd been shuffied in
and out of foster homes and special facilities for kids with be
havioral problems. He and his father were on the waiting list for
family counseling. The local social service agency in Covington,
Kentucky, was keeping tabs on Bobby. By the time he showed up
for his session with Murphy, he was in danger of being placed in
another special facility because of his problems at school.
Murphy was almost powerless in the situation. The counselor
had no way to improve Bobby's situation at home, and time was
working against him-at best, he'd see Bobby for an hour here,
an hour there. Murphy couldn't reward Bobby if he behaved well
or punish him if he behaved poorly. (Not that punishment would
have worked. Bobby usually ended up in the principal's office by
mid-morning for disciplinary issues, but his behavior never
changed.)
Ignoring the "school stinks" comment, Murphy began talking
to Bobby and posed a series of unusual questions. So began the
first of a handful of conversations between Murphy and Bobby.
Now, fast-forward to three months later: A dranlatic change
had occurred. The number of days Bobby was sent to the princi
pal's office had declined by 80 percent. Bobby hadn't become an
Eagle Scout, mind you, but the improvement was strong enough
to keep social services from having to transfer him to the school
for troubled kids. Bobby, a chronic offender, had become an oc
casional offender. And it happened because of a few hours of talk
ing with a counselor.
What, exactly, happened in those conversations?
4.
John Murphy is a practitioner of solutions-focused brief therapy
("solutions-focused therapy" for short). Solutions-focused therapy
Find the Bright S pots
35
was invented in the late 1 970s by a husband-and-wife therapist
team, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, and their colleagues
at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee. Solutions
focused therapy is radically different from traditional therapy. In
classical psychotherapy (think Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi) , you
and your therapist explore your problem. What are its roots?
Does it trace back to something in your childhood? There's a
sense of archaeological excavation: You're digging around your
mind for a buried nugget of insight, something that may explain
why you behave the way you do. Excavating the past takes time.
A standard Freudian psychoanalysis might take five years ofwork,
with sessions once or twice a week. (And after five years and
$50,000, you discover it's all your mom's fault.)
Solutions-focused therapists, in contrast, couldn't care less
about archaeology. They don't dig around for clues about why
you act the way you do. They don't care about your childhood.
All they care about is the solution to the problem at hand.
Marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis was initially trained
as a classical psychoanalyst. Like all psychoanalysts, she believed
that childhood experiences created unresolved traumas that
fed current problems, and she tried to help her clients understand
how their upbringing had shaped their behavior in relationships.
But she was often unhappy with the outcomes her clients
achieved through psychoanalysis. In her book Divorce Busting,
she explained why: "My clients would frequently plead, 'Now I
see that we are reenacting our parents' marriages, but what do we
do about it? We can't stop fighting.' '' She learned that under
standing a problem doesn't necessarily solve it-that knowing is
not enough.
Weiner-Davis was initially skeptical about solutions-focused
brief therapy: "It seemed too simple. . . . Most people, including
most therapists, believe the change process has to be complicated
D I R E C T T H E R ID E R
36
and arduous. 'No pain, no gain' is the general rule of thumb." To
describe how her thinking about solutions-focused therapy
changed, she used an analogy from golE
At one point, her golf swing started misfiring, so she went to a
golf pro, thinking her technique needed a major overhaul. She
noted that the golf pro didn't do any archaeology. He never said,
"You obviously have a fear of winning. Did your father intimidate
you as a little girl?" Instead, all he did was suggest a minor modi
fication: relaxing her tight grip on the club. At first, she was a lit
tle peeved by this advice. It didn't seem profound enough to justifY
his fee. But later; on the course, her balls were going straighter and
farther. Maybe small adjustments can work after all she thought.
5.
Solutions-focused therapists use a common set of techniques for
discovering potential solutions. Early in the first session, after
hearing the patient explain his or her problem, the therapist poses
the Miracle Question: "Can I ask you a sort of strange question?
Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in
the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens
and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When
you wake up in the morning, what's the first small sign you'd
see that would make you think, 'Well, something must have
happened-the problem is gone!'?"
Here's how one couple in marital therapy answered the Mir
acle Question posed by their therapist, Brian Cade of Sydney,
Australia:
WIFE:
I'd be happy, feeling at ease at last. I'd be
more pleasant to Bob, not jumping down his
throat all the time.
F i n d the B r ig ht S pots
CADE:
WIFE:
H U S BAN D :
CADE:
WIFE:
H USBAN D :
37
What will you do instead?
Well, there would be more understanding
between us. We'd listen to what each other
was saying.
Yes. At the moment, we don't really listen to
each other. We just can't wait to get our own
point in.
How could you tell that the other was really
listening?
In the face, I think. We'd perhaps make more
eye contact. (Pauses, then laughs.) We'd nod
in the right places.
Yes. We'd both respond to what the other
was saying rather than just attacking or ignoring it.
Notice that Cade prods the couple for specifics: "What will
you do instead?" "How could you tell the other person was really
listening?" The Miracle Question doesn't ask you to describe the
miracle itself; it asks you to identifY the tangible signs that the
miracle happened.
Here's another example from a therapist's session with a man
with a drinking problem: !fa miracle solvedyour drinkingproblem,
what would you be doing differently the next morning? "I don't
know, I can't imagine." Try. "Well, all my friends drink, so what
do you expect me to do?" I know it's not easy, but think about it.
"Well, there are all sorts of things." Name one. "Maybe I would
go to the library and look at the newspapers." How wouldyour day
be different ifyou went to the library?
Solutions-focused therapists learn to focus their patients on
the first hints of the miracle-"What's the first small sign you'd
see that would make you think the problem was gone" -because
D I R E C T T H E R IDE R
38
they want to avoid answers that are overly grand and unattain
able: "My bank account is full, I love my job, and my marriage
is great. "
Once they've helped patients identify specific and vivid signs
of progress, they pivot to a second question, which is perhaps
even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was
the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a
short time?"
An alcoholic would be asked: "When was the last time you
stayed sober for an hour or two?" Or the wife in the dialogue
quoted above would be asked: "When was the last time you felt
like your husband was truly listening to you?"
It's an ingenious tactic. What the therapist is trying to demon
strate, in a subtle way, is that the client is capable of solving her
own problem. AB a matter of fact, the client is offering up proof
that she's already solved it, at least in some circumstances. For in
stance, Brian Cade worked with a mother whose children were
out of control. He asked her the Exception Question: "What was
different about the last time your kids obeyed you? In what cir
cumstances do they seem to behave better?"
MOM:
(after a pause) I guess it's when they realize they
have pushed me too far.
CADE:
MOM:
How could they tell that?
You know, it's funny. I think it's when I stop rant
ing and raving at them and my voice goes very,
very calm . . . . I think I'm able to do that when I
feel generally less harassed, when I feel I've got
things done rather than spent the whole day wor
rying about getting things done. When I feel I've
not been able to get on top of the housework, I
tend to panic.
F i n d the Bright S p ots
39
Cade asks her what the kids might notice on good days.
MOM:
I think I just look calmer.
CADE:
What else?
MOM:
I probably greet them more enthusiastically and
smile more.
Solutions-focused therapists believe that there are exceptions
to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can
be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event.
Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What
was happening? How did you behave? Were you smiling? Didyou
make eye contact? And that analysis can point directly toward a
solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked
before.
These "exceptions" are just like Jerry Sternin's bright spots.
Just as there were some kids in the Vietnamese village who man
aged to stay healthy despite the poverty, there are some moments
in an alcoholic's life when he is sober despite the cravings. Those
bright spots are gold to be mined. (Notice again that bright spots
provide not only direction for the Rider but hope and motivation
for the Elephant.)
What does this mean for you? You may not fight malnutri
tion, and you may not need therapy. But if you're trying to
change things, there are going to be bright spots in your field of
view, and if you learn to recognize them and understand them,
you will solve one of the fundamental mysteries of change: What,
exactly, needs to be done differently?
Suppose you're a human relations manager, and you've been
encouraging line managers to give feedback to their employees
more frequently, rather than storing it up for their once-a-year
performance reviews. You hosted an offsite training program for
ten managers so they could practice the recommended new style
DI R E C T T H E R IDE R
40
ofin-the-moment feedback, and they all left the program pledg
ing to experiment with it.
After four weeks, you start to hear back from some of the
managers, and their results have been mixed. Two of the man
agers seem genuinely transformed-excited about the way the
faster feedback has improved their relationships with team mem
bers. Five of the managers are weakly positive, saying they tried
it a few times. Two of the managers say, regretfully, that they've
been too busy
to
try. One is an outright skeptic and thinks the
whole initiative is hogwash.
What now? The bright spots give you an action plan: Go
investigate the two successful managers. First, see if either situ
ation is an anomaly. For instance, in your follow-up, you might
discover that one of the successful managers had not been giv
ing any more feedback to his t(lam-he'd simply been ap
proaching individuals more often to make small talk. The extra
social contact made him feel good but annoyed team members
(who were constantly interrupted) . That manager is not a real
bright spot.
The other success might be legitimate. Maybe the manager,
Debbie, devised a tracking sheet that reminds her to provide feed
back to every employee every week. Maybe she set a goal for her
self that her "quick feedback" will never last longer than two
minutes and will apply only to a specific project-it won't be a
referendum on an employee's overall performance. Maybe she set
up open-door "office hours" so that employees can drop by for
quick feedback on ongoing projects.
Now that you've defined your bright spot, you can try to clone
it. Have the other managers spend an hour or two shadowing
Debbie, seeing firsthand how she incorporated the new style into
her workday. Get Debbie to attend your next offsite training pro
gram so she can coach other managers on the mechanics of quick
Find the Bright S pots
41
feedback. Talk to IT and see if there's a way to roll out a more pol
ished version of Debbie's impromptu tracking sheet.
Bottom line: You are spending 80 percent of your time ex
ploring Debbie's success and finding ways to replicate it. You
aren't obsessing about the manager who was skeptical. You aren't
planning another training program with the same managers to
review the material. You are simply asking yourself, "What's
working and how can we do more of it?" That's the bright-spot
philosophy in a single question.
6.
Focusing on bright spots can be counterintuitive for businesses.
Richard Pascale, one of Jerry Sternin's collaborators, discovered
this in 2003 when he accepted a consulting assignment with
Genentech. The company had recently launched a drug called
Xolair, which had been regarded as a "miracle drug" for asthma.
It had proved effective in preventing asthma attacks for many pa
tients. Yet six months after launch, sales ofXolair remained well
below expectations.
Pascale and his team were asked to help figure out why Xolair
was underperforming. They immediately started looking for
bright spots and soon found one: Two saleswomen who worked
the Dallas-Fort Worth area were selling twenty times more Xo
lair than their peers. Further investigation revealed that the
women were using a fundamentally different kind of sales pitch.
Rather than selling the health benefits of the drug-which doc
tors largely understood-they were helping doctors understand
how to administer the drug. Xolair was not a pill or an inhaler; it
required infusion via an intravenous drip. This technique was un
familiar (and therefore Elephant-spooking) to the allergists and
pediatricians who would be prescribing the drug.
42
D I R E C T T H E R ID E R
Here was a classic bright-spot situation. Like the Vietnamese
mothers who mixed sweet-potato greens into their kids' rice, these
saleswomen were achieving radically different results with the
same set of resources everyone else had. Having discovered the
bright spot, Genentech's managers could help spread the innova
tion across their entire sales force.
But that didn't happen. And here is where a cautionary tale in
trudes on our success story. What actually happened was this:
The superior results of the Dallas-Fort Worth reps were viewed
with suspicion! Managers speculated that the saleswomen had an
unfair advantage, and their initial assumption was that the pair's
sales territories or quotas needed to be revisited. (Later investiga
tion established that the two women had the same type of client
base as the other reps.)
To be fair to the Genentech managers, let's acknowledge that
there was indeed a chance that those two reps were simply an
anomaly. But the managers' first reaction to the good news was
that it must be bad news! That reaction is a good reminder that
the Rider's capacity for analysis is endless. Even successes can look
like problems to an overactive Rider.
7.
Let's circle back to Bobby, the troubled student, because now we
can start to understand his rather abrupt transformation. Here's
a brief exchange from one of Bobby's counseling sessions. Notice
how Murphy, the school counselor, starts by popping the Excep
tion Question:
M U RPHY:
Tell me about the times at school when you
don't get in trouble as much.
Fin d t h e B r i g h t S p o t s
B O B BY:
43
I never get in trouble, well, not a lot, in Ms.
Smith's class.
M U RP H Y :
B O B BY:
M U RPHY:
What's different about Ms. Smith's class?
I don't know, she's nicer. We get along great.
What exactly does she do that's nicer?
Murphy wasn't content with Bobby's vague conclusion that
Ms. Smith is "nicer." He kept probing until Bobby identified sev
eral things about Ms. Smith and her class that seemed to help
him behave well. For instance, Ms. Smith always greeted him as
soon as he walked into class. (Other teachers, understandably,
avoided him.) She gave him easier work, which she knew he
could complete (Bobby has a learning disability) . And whenever
the class started working on an assignment, she checked with
Bobby to make sure he understood the instructions.
Ms. Smith's class was a bright spot, and as we've seen, any
time you have a bright spot, your mission is to clone it. Using
Ms. Smith's class as a model, Murphy gave Bobby's other teach
ers very practical tips about how to deal with him: Greet Bobby
at the door. Make sure he's assigned work he can do. Check to
make sure he understands the instructions.
What Murphy had avoided, of course, was archaeology. He
didn't dig into Bobby's troubled childhood, and he didn't try to
excavate the sources of his anger and willfulness. For Murphy, all
that information would have been TBU, as Sternin would say:
true but useless. The other thing Murphy avoided was Genen
tech's knee-jerk skepticism. The mental quibbles could have come
so easily: Ms. Smith isjust a nicerperson than the other teachers or
Her class is easier or Teachers shouldn't have to adapt their approach
to aproblem student. Instead, Murphy found a bright spot, and he
trusted it.
D I R E C T T H E R ID E R
44
Bobby's teachers were pleased when Murphy approached
them with such specific guidance, and they promised to give his
recommendations a try. Murphy asked the teachers to help him
track whether the solutions were working by recording Bobby's
performance on three metrics: (1) arriving to class on time,
(2) completing assignments in class, and (3) behaving acceptably
in class. Over the next three months, as reported earlier, Bobby's
rate of being sent to the principal's office for a major infraction
decreased by 80 percent. Bobby also made striking progress on
day-to-day behavior as measured by the three metrics. Before
solutions-focused therapy, his teachers typically rated his perfor
mance as acceptable in only 1 or 2 out of 6 class periods per day.
After solutions-focused therapy, he was rated as acceptable in 4 or
5 of the 6 periods. Bobby is still not a model student. But he's a
lot better.
8.
Notice something remarkable about both the Vietnam and the
Bobby case studies. In each one, relatively small changes
cooking with sweet-potato greens, greeting Bobby at the door
had a big impact on a big problem. There is a clear asymmetry
between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution. Big
problem, small solution.
This is a theme you will see again and again. Big problems
are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. lnstead, they
are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes
over weeks, sometimes over decades. And this asymmetry is why
the Rider's predilection for analysis can backfire so easily.
W hen the Rider analyzes a problem, he seeks a solution that
befits the scale of it. If the Rider spots a hole, he wants to fill it,
and if he's got a round hole with a 24-inch diameter, he's gonna
Find the Bright Spots
45
go looking for a 24-inch peg. But that mental model is wrong.
For instance, in analyzing malnutrition in Vietnam, the experts
had exhaustively analyzed all the big systemic forces that were re
sponsible for it: lack of sanitation, poverty, ignorance, lack of
water. No doubt they also concocted big systemic plans to ad
dress those forces. But that was fantasy. No one, other than
Sternin, thought to ask, "What's working right now?"
In reviewing Bobby's situation at high school, the teachers
and administrators whispered about all the things that were bro
ken: broken home, learning disability, uncontrollable impulses.
Any normal person, analyzing Bobby's situation, would have
craved an intensive, complex solution to match the intensive,
complex problem. But no one, other than the counselor Mur
phy, thought to ask, "What's working right now?"
To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's work
ing, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it?
Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked.
Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's
broken, and how do we fix it?"
This problem-seeking mindset is a shortcoming of the Rider
in each of us. Psychologists who have studied this phenomenon
our predilection for the negative-have reached some fascinat
ing conclusions.
Ai;
an illustration of what they've found, take a
look at the following words taken from a "Learn English at home"
website. They're all words for emotions. We've excerpted the first
twenty-four of them from an alphabetical list. See if you notice
any patterns:
ANGRY
DELIGHTED
ANNOYED
D I SAPPOINTED
APPALLED
ECSTATIC
APPREHENSIVE
EXCITED
46
DI R E C T T H E R ID E R
ASHAMED
EMOTIONAL
BEWILDERED
ENVIOUS
BETRAYED
EMBARRASSED
CONFUSED
FURIOUS
CONFIDENT
FRIGHTENED
C H EATED
GREAT
CROSS
HAPPY
DEPRESSED
HORRIFIED
Those are 24 of the most common "emotion" words in En
glish, and only 6 of them are positive! In a more exhaustive study,
a psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words-every one that he
could find in the English language-and found that 62 percent
of them were negative versus 38 percent positive. That's a pretty
shocking discrepancy. According to an old urban legend, Eski
mos have 100 different words for snow. Well, it turns out that
negative emotions are our snow.
This negative focus is not confined to emotions. Across the
board, we seem wired to focus on the negative. A group of psy
chologists reviewed over two hundred articles and concluded that,
for a wide range of human behavior and perception, a general
principle holds true: "Bad is stronger than good."
Exhibit A: People who were shown photos of bad and good
events spent longer viewing the bad ones.
Exhibit B: When people learn bad stuff about someone else,
it's stickier than good stuff. People pay closer attention to the bad
stuff, reflect on it more, remember it longer, and weigh it more
heavily in assessing the person overall. This pattern is so robust
that researchers who study how we perceive one another have a
label for it-"positive-negative asymmetry."
Exhibit C: A researcher reviewed seventeen studies about how
people interpret and explain events in their lives-for example,
F i n d the Bright S p ots
47
how sports fans interpret sporting events or how students describe
their days in their journals. Across multiple domains-work and
politics and sports and personal life-people were more likely to
spontaneously bring up (and attempt to explain) negative events
than positive ones.
We could present plenty more exhibits, but for now we'll give
the study's authors the last (disappointed) word on the subject:
"When we began this review we anticipated finding some excep
tions that would demarcate the limits of the phenomenon . . .
[but] we were unable to locate any significant spheres in which good
was consistently stronger than bad" (emphasis added) .
Bad is stronger than good. As Leslie Fiedler once said, lots of
novelists have achieved their fame by focusing on marital problems,
but there's never been a successful novel about a happy marriage.
9.
A particular strain of this "bad is stronger than good" bias is crit
ical when it comes to tackling change. Let's call it a problemfocus.
To see it, consider this situation: Your child comes home one day
with her report card. She got one A, four B's, and one F. Where
will you spend your time as a parent?
This hypothetical comes from author Marcus Buckingham,
who says that nearly all parents will tend to fixate on the F. It's
easy to empathize with them: Something seems broken-we should
.fix it. Let's get her a tutor. Or maybe she should be punished-she's
grounded until that grade recovers. It is the rare parent who would
say, instead, "Honey, you made an 'N. in this one class. You must
really have a strength in this subject. How can we build on that?"
(Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of
your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)
When the Rider sees that things are going well, he doesn't
48
D I R E C T T H E R IDE R
think much about them. But when things break, he snaps to at
tention and starts applying his problem-solving skills. So when
your kids are making Ns and B's, you don't think much about
their grades. But when they make a 0 or an F, you spring into ac
tion. It's weird when you think about, isn't it?
What if the Rider had a more positive orientation? Imagine a
world in which you experienced a rush of gratitude every single
time you flipped a light switch and the room lit up. Imagine
a
world in which after a husband forgot his wife's birthday, she gave
him a big kiss and said, "For thirteen of the last fourteen years you
remembered my birthday! That's wonderful!"
This is not our world.
But in times of change, it needs to be. Our Rider has a prob
lem focus when he needs a solutionfocus. If you are a manager, ask
yourself: "What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems
to the time I spend scaling successes?"
We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to
bright-spot evangelizing. There's no question that it's possible to
do. Take Jerry Sternin. He came into an environment riddled
with failure. The opportunities for analysis were endless. He
could have stayed in Vietnam for twenty years, writing position
papers on the malnutrition problem. But what he knew was this:
Even in failure there is success.
An alcoholic goes an hour without a drink. Three sales reps out
of fifty sell like crazy. A few Vietnamese mothers, with no more
money than any others, manage to raise healthy kids.
These flashes of success-these bright spots--can illuminate
the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible.
3
Script the Critica l Moves
1.
A doctor was asked to consider the medical records of a
67-year-old patient who had chronic hip pain from arthritis. In
the past, the patient had been given drugs to treat his pain, but
they'd been ineffective, so the doctor was forced to consider a
more drastic option: hip-replacement surgery, which involves slic
ing open the thigh, wrenching the bone out of the socket, saw
ing off the arthritic end, and replacing it with an implant.
Recovery from hip-replacement surgery is long and painful.
Then came an unexpected break in the case: A final check with
the patient's pharmacy uncovered one medication that hadn't been
tried. Now the doctor faced a dilemma: Should he prescribe the
untried medication, even though other medications had failed, or
should he go ahead and refer the patient for surgery?
This dilemma, based on real medical cases, was created by
physician Donald Redelmeier and psychologist Eldar Shafir, who
50
DIRECT THE RIDER
used it to study the way doctors make decisions. 'When doctors
were presented with this case history, 47 percent of them chose
to try the medication, in hopes of saving the patient from going
under the knife.
In a variation on the dilemma, another group of doctors were
presented with almost exactly the same set of case facts-except
this time, the patient's pharmacy discovered two untried medica
tions. If you were the patient with the arthritic h ip, you'd be
thrilled-certainly two nonsurgical options are better than one.
But when the doctors were presented with two medications, only
28 percent chose to try either one.
This doesn't make sense. The doctors were acting as though
having more medication options somehow made medication a
worse bet than surgery. But if 47 percent of doctors thought med
ication A was preferable to surgery, the mere existenci' of a second
medication shouldn't have tipped them toward surgery.
'What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even
good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan,
which in this case was a painful and invasive hip-replacement sur
gery. This behavior clearly is not rational, but it is human.
Decisions are the Rider's turf, and because they require care
ful supervision and self-control, they tax the Rider's strength.
(Remember the radish/chocolate-chip cookie study from
Chapter 1.) The more choices the Rider is offered, the more ex
hausted the Rider gets. Have you ever noticed that shopping is a
lot more tiring than other kinds oflight activity? Now you know
why-it's all those choices. This is important, because we en
counter excess choice all around us. Consider three real examples
of decision paralysis:
Scene 1 : A gourmet food store. The store managers have set
up a table where customers can sample imported jams for free.
One day, the table showcases 6 different jams. Another day,
S c r i p t t h e C r i t i ca l M oves
51
24 jams. As you'd expect, the 24-jam display attracts more cus
tomers to stop by for a sample-but when it comes time to buy,
they can't make a decision. Shoppers who saw only 6 jams on dis
play are 10 times more likely to buy a jar of jam!
Scene 2: The office. The employees of a large company read
over their 40 1 (k) materials, ready to start saving for retirement.
The human resources department has thoughtfully provided
many investment options: domestic growth stock funds, domes
tic value stock funds, municipal bond funds, real estate invest
ment trusts, emerging market funds, developed market funds,
money market accounts, and more. Each category might have
several choices within it. (Really complete 401 (k) plans might
offer dozens of options.) The extra options backfire, however, be
cause for every 1 0 options offered, the employees' rate of partic
ipation goes down by 2 percent. Decision paralysis deters people
from saving for their own retirement! And because many com
panies match employees' contributions, employees may also be
walking away from free money.
Scene 3: A local bar. It's speed-dating night. Singles meet a
series of other singles one-on-one, spending perhaps five min
utes with each person, in hopes of making a romantic connec
tion. But decision paralysis thwarts even Cupid. Young adults
who meet eight other singles make more "matches" than those
who meet twenty.
Bottom line: Decision paralysis disrupts medical decisions
and retail decisions and investment decisions and dating deci
sions. Let's go out on a limb and suggest that it might affect de
cisions in your job and life, too.
Think about the sources of decision paralysis in your organi
zation. Every business must choose among attractive options.
Growing revenue quickly versus maximizing profitability. Mak
ing perfect products versus getting products to market faster.
52
DI R E C T T H E R IDE R
Being innovative and creative versus optimizing efficiency. If you
fold together lots of those tensions, you create
a
surefire recipe
for paralysis. It took only two medications to fuzz the doctors'
brains. How many options do your people have?
Think about your local school board. Every year, the prob
lems and solutions multiply. You can just imagine the mental
conversation: "Property tax revenue is falling, but the teachers
need a 3 percent cost-of-living raise, and we can't forget about
extracurriculars (cutting the marching band last year was a killer) ,
but we must continue to invest in our new science magnet
school-if it doesn't work, there will be egg on our face-yet it's
ridiculous to consider any of this until we fix our crumbling in
frastructure and address our overcrowded classrooms." For the
frazzled school board member, it suddenly looks a lot more
attractive to roll over last year's budget with a 1 . 5 percent increase
on every line item.
As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox a/Choice,
as we face more and more options, "we become overloaded.
Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to
tyrannize."
2.
The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the
choice has been squeezed out. You have your routines, your ways
of doing things. For most of your day, the Rider is on autopilot.
But in times of change, autopilot doesn't work anymore, choices
suddenly proliferate, and autopilot habits become unfamiliar de
cisions. When you're on a diet, the habitual daily trip for Nachos
Bell Grande is disqualified, and in its place is left a decision.
When you've got a new manager, the way you communicate stops
being second nature and starts being a choice.
Script the Critica l Moves
53
Change brings new choices that create uncertainty. Let's be
clear: It's not only options that yield decision paralysis-like pick
ing one donut from 100 flavors. Ambiguity does, too. In times of
change, you may not know what options are available. And this
uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24
Jams.
Ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider, because the Rider is
tugging on the reins of the Elephant, trying to direct the Ele
phant down a new path. But when the road is uncertain, the Ele
phant will insist on taking the default path, the most familiar
path, just
as
the doctors did. Why? Because uncertainty makes
the Elephant anxious. (Think of how, in an unfamiliar place, you
gravitate toward a familiar face.) And that's why decision paraly
sis can be deadly for change-because the most familiar path is
always the status quo.
Many leaders pride themselves on setting high-level direction:
I'll set the vision and stay out of the details. It's true that a com
pelling vision is critical (as we'll see in the next chapter) . But it's
not enough. Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn't likely to work
in a change situation, because the hardest part of change-the
paralyzing part-is precisely in the details.
In Chapter 1 , we explained why what looks like resistance is
often a lack of clarity. The citizens of two West Virginia com
munities, unhealthy in their eating habits, underwent a major
change when a couple of professors coached them to buy 1%
milk. They didn't need a big-picture vision-no one needs con
vincing that "eating healthy" is an admirable goal. What they
needed was someone who could bring a noble goal within the
realm of everyday behavior, someone who could cut through the
bewildering array of potentially healthy choices and suggest a
good place to start.
Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a
DI R E C T T H E R IDE R
54
translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short,
to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.
3.
In 1 995, Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso de
cided to privatize Brazil's railroads. He split the system into
seven different branches (shades of Ma Bell) and auctioned off
the rights to run them. Previous administrations had not in
vested much in the rail system, and at the time of the auction,
it was a deteriorating mess. A study concluded that 50 percent
of the network's bridges needed repair and 20 percent of them
were on the verge of collapse. The technologies used in Brazil
were far behind those in other developed countries. In fact, the
rail system was still using twenty locomotives powered by steam
engines.
A private firm, GP Investimentos Limited, decided to bid for
the branch known as the "southern line," which ran through
Brazil's three southernmost states. GP was high bidder in the auc
tion in December 1 996. After an interim period of management,
the firm put one of its own executives, Alexandre Behring, in
charge of the company, which was later renamed America Latina
Logistica (ALL). When Behring took charge, he was in his early
30s-just four years out of business school.
Behring didn't have much to work with. ALL had only 30
million Brazilian reals in cash on its balance sheet. At one of
Behring's first meetings, a mid-level manager beseeched him for
5 million reals to repair a single bridge. Though sympathetic,
Behring knew that fixing everything that was broken would re
quire hundreds of millions of reals. The needs were profound,
but he faced an unyielding constraint: ALLS depleted bank ac
count.
Script the Critical Moves
55
The railroad purchased by GP was in chaos, and when
Behring and his team took charge, with new personnel and new
priorities, more chaos was whipped into the preexisting chaos.
The resulting decision paralysis should have been inescapable.
And it likely would have been if Behring hadn't made clear exactly
what needed to be done.
His top priority was to lift ALL out of its precarious, cash
strapped financial state. To accomplish this, he and his 35-year
old CFO, Duilio Calciolari, developed four rules to govern the
company's investments:
Rule 1 : Money would be invested only in projects
that would allow ALL to earn more revenue in the
short term.
Rule 2: The best solution to any problem was the
one that would cost the least money up front--even
ifit ended up costing more in the long term, and even
if it was a lower-quality solution.
Rule 3: Options that would fix a problem quickly
were preferred to slower options that would provide
superior long-term fixes.
Rule 4: Reusing or recycling existing materials
was better than acquiring new materials.
The four rules were clear: ( 1 ) Unblock revenue. (2) Minimize
up-front cash. (3) Faster is better than best. (4) Use what you've
got. These rules, taken together, ensured that cash wouldn't be
consumed unless it was being used as bait for more cash. Spend
a little, make a little more.
This is what we mean by "scripting" the critical moves.
56
DI R E C T T H E R IDE R
Change begins at the level of individual decisions and behaviors,
but that's a hard place to start because that's where the friction is.
Inertia and decision paralysis will conspire to keep people doing
things the old way. To spark movement in a new direction, you
need to provide crystal-clear guidance. That's why scripting is im
portant-you've got to think about the specific behavior that
you'd want to see in a tough moment, whether the tough mo
ment takes place in a Brazilian railroad system or late at night in
your own snack-loaded pantry.
You can't script every move--that would be like trying to fore
see the seventeenth move in a chess game. It's the critical moves
that count. Recall that, in West Virginia, the researchers decided
to focus their campaign on milk because it was the source of the
most saturated fat in the average diet. The researchers didn't offer
suggestions about bread or soda or butter or potato chips. They
scripted the critical move: Switch to 1 % milk.
Similarly, Behring's four rules were focused on financial triage.
He didn't have the luxury of long-term planning. He needed his
people to move, immediately, in a new direction, in hopes that
they could buy ALL enough time to make a fuller transforma
tion. (Notice that he didn't say a word about other important is
sues such as employee morale or marketing or R&D.) By staying
focused on the critical moves, he made it easier for his people to
change direction.
In 1 998, for instance, the company had to turn down busi
ness hauling grain because it didn't have enough locomotives.
While its competitors were negotiating for new locomotives,
ALL's engineers worked around the clock repairing old locomo
tives. (Faster is better than best. Minimize up-front cash.)
Also, ALL's engineers figured out a way to boost the locomo
tives' fuel capacity so they could operate longer without refueling.
This reduced downtime, allowing more routes per locomotive,
Script the Critical Moves
57
just as Southwest Airlines gets more flights per plane than its
competitors because of its quick turnarounds at the gate. (Un
block revenue.) Engineers also found a creative solution to the nag
ging problem of damaged tracks, which limited a train's speed.
Rather than purchasing new metal rails, which cost US$400 per
ton, they ripped up tracks at abandoned stations and installed
them on active routes. (Use whatyou've got.)
Three years later, Behring's discipline was paying off. ALI.;s
performance improved from a net loss of 80 million reals in 1 998
to a net profit of 24 million reals in 2000.
Knowing what we know about the Rider, it's no surprise that
Behring's strategy worked. Behring had scripted the moves that
helped his people make hard decisions. What tires out the
Rider-and puts change efforts at risk-is ambiguity, and Behring
eliminated it. For every investment decision, his rules suggested
the correct choice.
To see the power of this, let's return to the doctors and the pa
tient with the arthritic hip. Imagine that the leaders of the hos
pital had scripted their critical moves, and that one of those
moves was this: Use invasive options only as a last resort. Does any
one doubt that this guideline would have caused a big shift in
the doctors' decisions?
4.
In the shaded area that follows, we present a feature that we call
a "Clinic. " In each Clinic, we describe a real-world situation and
challenge you to think about how to apply the Switch framework
to create change. At the end of each Clinic, we give our own sug
gestions, but we encourage you to generate your own game plan
bef...
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