Switch - Chip Heath [24]
To see why this is so important, consider a campaign that is essentially the “antimatter” version of the 1% milk campaign—a campaign that, while well intentioned, systematically ignores or reverses every smart component of the 1% milk intervention. What would such an antimatter campaign look like? It might look very much like the U.S. government’s Food Pyramid.
The Food Pyramid, which specifies the types and quantities of food that make up a healthy diet, is the perfect example of how not to change people’s behavior. It’s worth considering for a moment, because what dooms the Pyramid could doom your efforts to create change in your life, as well.
Let’s start with the pyramid shape. A pyramid signifies hierarchy, yet no hierarchy is evident in the Food Pyramid. The first version of it displayed rows of food, one row on top of the next, with grains at the bottom and oils at the top. Some people interpreted this arrangement to mean that oils were the most important food group. (Whoops.) The revised version, shown here, abandoned that construct for vertical-ish streaks of color intended to eliminate any implied ranking. What this means is that the pyramid structure itself has no meaning whatsoever. The Food Pyramid might as well be a Food Rhombus or a Food Rooster.
Look at it again—its meaning is almost completely opaque. What do the streaks mean? The only meaning that can be gleaned quickly comes from the stick figure dashing up the side. The meaning is clear enough: “You should exercise.” The answers to more meaningful questions—How much? How often? What kind?—aren’t as easy to infer, which of course adds more ambiguity.
To learn what the Food Pyramid has to say about food, you must be willing to decipher the Pyramid’s markings. If you make the effort, you’ll find that each streak of color represents a class of food. For instance, the yellow streak (the tiny one near the middle) is “oils,” and the orange streak (on the far left) is “grains.” If you dig even further, you’ll find that with every color streak comes a recommendation. For instance, the USDA advises that adults consume about 5 to 7 teaspoons of oil each day.
Quick, how many teaspoons of oil did you consume today?
Quick, how many “ounce equivalents” of grain did you have today?
Can you imagine any message that would be less effective in changing people’s eating behavior? The language and concepts here are so hopelessly abstracted from people’s actual experience with food—which consists of things like buying groceries and ordering hamburgers at restaurants, not tabulating grain portions—that the message confuses and demoralizes: I can’t understand this stuff.
As an analogy, most of us have internalized the rule of thumb to get the oil in our cars changed every 3 months or 3,000 miles. It’s transparent and actionable, like the 1% milk campaign. What if, instead, the auto industry publicized its version of the disastrous Food Pyramid—say, a Car Rainbow, where each color of the rainbow represents a different diagnostic test. (Pink would warn you not to let your engine oil exceed a certain “sludge threshold.”) Jiffy Lube would be out of business in months.
OK, the Food Pyramid is almost too easy to pick on. But the lessons here are serious and practical. If you are leading a change effort, you need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change. Granted, this is asking a lot. It means that you’ll need to understand how to script the critical moves, to translate aspirations into actions. It’s not good enough to ask your team to “be more creative” or to “tighten up on the purse strings.” That’s like telling the American public to “be healthier.”
In a pioneering study of organizational change, described in the book The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, researchers divided the change efforts they’d studied into three groups: the most successful (the top third), the average (the middle third), and the least successful (the bottom third). They found that, across the spectrum, almost everyone set goals: 89 percent of the top third and 86 percent of the bottom