Switch - Chip Heath [43]
Waters thought carefully about what her colleagues would see because she knew what she wanted them to feel: energized, hopeful, creative, competitive. They took the bait.
Let’s remember, too, the story about Jon Stegner from Chapter 1, the man who created the Glove Shrine. He knew his colleagues weren’t enthused about his idea for centralized purchasing, so he didn’t bother talking about the numbers. Instead, he showed them something that made them feel something. (We really buy all these different kinds of gloves?) SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.
Trying to fight inertia and indifference with analytical arguments is like tossing a fire extinguisher to someone who’s drowning. The solution doesn’t match the problem.
It can sometimes be challenging, though, to distinguish why people don’t support your change. Is it because they don’t understand or because they’re not enthused? Do you need an Elephant appeal or a Rider appeal? The answer isn’t always obvious, even to experts.
3.
Pam Omidyar, the founder of HopeLab, knew the struggles of teenagers with cancer. They endured weeks of brutal chemotherapy in the hospital and went home a mess—sapped of energy, their hair falling out, their throats raw and tender, their immune system wrecked. But when they finally walked out of the hospital to return home, there was one silver lining: The worst was likely over. Going forward, their obligations would be relatively simple: They’d need to immediately report any symptoms they developed, such as a fever, and take their medicine faithfully, which might include a regimen of antibiotics and low-dosage chemotherapy pills for two years.
But many teens simply failed to comply, partly because following the medication regimen wasn’t easy. The side effects of chemotherapy, even at low doses, were rough—nausea, skin breakouts, tiredness, irritability. The side effects of the home regimen, though, were nothing compared to the horror of intensive chemotherapy, and by missing their doses, kids were risking a recurrence of their cancer. Steve Cole, the research director for HopeLab, says, “If you skip 20 percent of your doses, you don’t just have a 20 percent higher chance of getting cancer again. Your odds go up 200 percent.”
How could teens take such a terrible risk? Omidyar was convinced that teens simply weren’t getting the message. She sought a new way of influencing their behavior—something unconventional, something that spoke in their language. Her inspiration: We’ll make a video game.
After months of effort, HopeLab developed a game called Re-Mission. In the game, teens became Roxxi, a silver-suited nanobot who charged through the bloodstream zapping tumor cells with electric-green chemo-rays. In between rounds of gameplay, teens watched short “briefing” videos featuring Smitty, a mentor robot, who provided additional information about chemotherapy and recovery.
Re-Mission featured twenty levels of play, each lasting an hour and packed with information. The team at HopeLab was convinced that if it could get kids to play the whole game, any misunderstandings that could lead to noncompliance would be wiped out.
Eventually the team launched the first clinical trial for Re-Mission. In 2008, the results were announced in the medical journal Pediatrics. To the team’s delight, the game had increased kids’ adherence to their medication plans. The amount of chemotherapy drugs circulating in the blood of kids who played the game went up by 20 percent. That may not sound like much, but small differences in adherence make a big difference in health. The odds of surviving cancer double if you can bump up chemotherapy adherence by 20 percent.
But there was a surprise buried in the evidence of success. A lot of the kids didn’t actually play the game all that much, attempting only one or two