Switch - Chip Heath [119]
The White House was so troubled. The case study of drug use by soldiers before and after the Vietnam War is in Lee N. Robins, John E. Helzer, and Darlene H. Davis (1975), “Narcotic Use in Southeast Asia and Afterward,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 32, 955–961.
36 percent of the successful changes. See Todd F. Heatherton and Patricia A. Nichols (1994), “Personal Accounts of Successful Versus Failed attempts at Life Change,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 664–675.
Peter Gollwitzer. Gollwitzer’s summary of his work on triggers—Gollwitzer calls them “implementation intentions”—can be found in Gollwitzer (1999), “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans,” American Psychologist, 54, 493–503. Most of the studies described in this section are referenced in that article. The quotation about “passing control to the environment” is on p. 495.
Recovering from hip-or knee-replacement surgery. See Sheina Orbell and Paschal Sheeran (2000), “Motivational and Volitional Processes in Action Initiation: A Field Study of the Role of Implementation Intentions,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 30, 780–797.
Recent meta-study. Peter M. Gollwitzer, Paschal Sheeran, and Thomas L. Webb (2005), “Implementation Intentions and Health Behaviors,” in M. Conner and P. Norman (eds.), Predicting Health Behavior: Research and Practice with Social Cognition Models (2nd edition). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
Stand-up meeting. See William G. Pagonis with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank (1992), Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War, Boston: Harvard Business School Press; the quotation is on pp. 185–186. For the use of stand-up meetings in software development, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_meeting (accessed May 27, 2009). Agile programmers disdain the typical IT style of delivering a whole program all at once (and typically late). Instead, they collaborate on a series of quick prototypes, each of which receives customer input, in the hope of catching problems early and preventing costly rework later.
Two cups of soup each day. See Barbara J. Rolls, Liane S. Roe, Amanda M. Beach, and Panny M. Kris-Etherton (2005), “Provision of Foods Differing in Energy Density Affects Long-Term Weight Loss,” Obesity Research, 13, 1052–1060.
Natalie Elder. Dan Heath interviewed Natalie Elder in August 2008.
The humble checklist. Parts of the section on checklists originally appeared in our Fast Company column (March 2008), “The Heroic Checklist,” http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/123/heroic-checklist.html.
Holy Grail of checklists. See Atul Gawande (December 10, 2007), “The Checklist: If Something So Simple Can Transform Intensive Care, What Else Can It Do?” New Yorker, pp. 86–101.
Checklists educate people about what’s best. We’re not advocating the kind of checklists that are associated with some quality improvement processes—for example, the elaborate procedure manuals compiled for ISO 9000 certification. To educate people about what’s best and to help them avoid blind spots, a checklist has to be simple enough that people will actually use it. The pre-flight checklist for a 747 is less than one page long. If your checklist requires more than one sheet of paper, you need to simplify it.
Chronic parking problem. For the parking study, see C. F. Gettys et al. (1987), “An Evaluation of Human Act Generation Performance,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 39, 23–51.
“Standardize on the mission-critical elements.” Dan Heath interviewed Dr. Pronovost in January 2008.
Chapter Ten
A stream of smoke. See Latané and Darley (1968), “Group Inhibition of Bystander Intervention in Emergencies,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10, 215–221. Latané and Darley’s work on bystander nonintervention is one of the cleverest streams of research in social psychology. Because it’s a classic, professors of social psychology teach it often, and they recommend to their students