Switch - Chip Heath [32]
Now Esserman had two powerful assets: a proper home for the Center and a staff who increasingly embraced her vision for a new kind of care. Patients flocked to the Breast Cancer Center. From 1997 to 2003, the number of patients seen per month skyrocketed from 175 to 1,300. In time, the Center became a major source of revenue for UCSF and a recognized national leader in breast cancer care and research. The Center evolved to be the place that Esserman described in her destination postcard.
Here’s how Esserman describes the way the patient’s experience looks today:
When a patient comes into the Breast Care Center, I can walk around the corner and look at her films that day. While she’s in the room, we can do a biopsy and get the diagnosis in five minutes. We have a gynecologist on staff that specializes in fertility issues for women with breast cancer, and I have a psychologist and genetic counselor on staff that is one of the nurse practitioners. The patient stays in the same place and doesn’t need to go anywhere.
The Breast Care Center also has a relaxing healing garden and a café that serves coffee. The boutique sells not only the usual flowers and gifts but also wigs and scarves for patients undergoing chemo.
“For the first time,” said Esserman, “we put the woman at the center.”
3.
When you describe a compelling destination, you’re helping to correct one of the Rider’s great weaknesses—the tendency to get lost in analysis. Our first instinct, in most change situations, is to offer up data to people’s Riders: Here’s why we need to change. Here are the tables and graphs and charts that prove it. The Rider loves this. He’ll start poring over the data, analyzing it and poking holes in it, and he’ll be inclined to debate with you about the conclusions you’ve drawn. To the Rider, the “analyzing” phase is often more satisfying than the “doing” phase, and that’s dangerous for your switch.
Notice what happens, though, when you point to an attractive destination: The Rider starts applying his strengths to figuring out how to get there. For instance, after Esserman announced her “under one roof” vision, her team could start thinking through the implications of that: Let’s see, we’ll never pull that off unless we have access to radiology, so we’ll need to give up square footage to them …
You have a choice about how to use the Rider’s energy: By default, he’ll obsess about which way to move, or whether it’s necessary to move at all. But you can redirect that energy to helping you navigate toward the destination. For that to happen, you need a gut-smacking goal, one that appeals to both Rider and Elephant. Think of Esserman’s “under one roof” vision or of Crystal Jones’s challenge to her kids to become third graders.
Goals in most organizations, however, lack emotional resonance. Instead, SMART goals—goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely—have become the norm. A typical SMART goal might be “My marketing campaign will generate 4,500 qualified sales leads for the sales group by the end of Q3′09.″
The specificity of SMART goals is a great cure for the worst sins of goal setting—ambiguity and irrelevance (“We are going to delight our customers every day in every way!”). But SMART goals are better for steady-state situations than for change situations, because the assumptions underlying them are that the goals are worthwhile. If you accept that generating 4,500 leads for the sales force is a great use of your time, the SMART goal will be effective. But if a new boss, pushing a new direction, assigns