Switch - Chip Heath [49]
In short, the “burning platform” is a great, uplifting tale for your people: “Team, let’s choose a dangerous plunge into the ocean over getting burned to death! Now get back to work!”
Leaving aside the silliness of the burning-platform metaphor, fear can indeed be a powerful motivator. Think of LBJ’s famous “Daisy” campaign ad in 1964, in which a young girl holds a flower while a mushroom cloud rises behind her. If you vote for Goldwater, the ad suggested, you might as well nuke your child. Or consider the sleazy real-estate-sales boss in Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play: “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado…. Second price is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”
Health educators, too, have gotten in on the act. Remember the ads showing photos of smokers’ black, gnarled lungs, or the famous “This is your brain on drugs” commercial, which analogized drug users’ brains to frying eggs (those visuals, in turn, made pot smokers very hungry).
There’s no question that negative emotions are motivating. No one wants to see a kid nuked. But what, exactly, are these emotions motivating?
“If you have a stone in your shoe, it hurts and you’ll fix the problem,” said Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In a sense, removing the stone from your shoe is what negative emotions are designed to do—to motivate specific actions. When you’re angry, your eyes narrow and your fists clinch and you get ready for a confrontation. When you’re disgusted, your nose wrinkles and you avoid whatever has grossed you out. When you’re afraid, your eyes grow wide and your body tenses up and prepares to flee. On a daily basis, then, negative emotions help us avoid risks and confront problems.
Bottom line: If you need quick and specific action, then negative emotions might help. But most of the time when change is needed, it’s not a stone-in-the-shoe situation. The quest to reduce greenhouse gases is not a stone-in-the-shoe situation, and neither is Target’s mission to become the “upscale retailer,” or someone’s desire to improve his or her marriage. These situations require creativity and flexibility and ingenuity. And, unfortunately, a burning platform won’t get you that.
So what will?
8.
In 1998, after psychologists had spent decades studying negative emotions, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson wrote a provocative paper called “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” The paper became a classic. It eventually would be cited over a hundred times more often than a typical psychology paper, and it helped to fuel the rise of the discipline of positive psychology, which has yielded many popular books on happiness over the past few years. As Fredrickson suggested in her title, positive emotions are a bit of a puzzle. Unlike negative emotions, they don’t seem engineered to produce particular actions, such as punching or fleeing or avoiding. They don’t even have their own signature facial expressions. In fact, the emotions of joy, contentment, pride, love, and interest all tend to produce the same generic “I’m pleased” expression, which is known as the Duchenne smile (lips curled up at the corners along with a crinkling in the muscles around the eyes—or the way your spouse looks when you ask, “Have you lost weight?”). Most of our positive emotions are funneled through this same Duchenne mask, like a symphony pumped through a tuba. Worse, we can’t even distinguish readily between a genuine Duchenne smile and a fake Duchenne smile, as generations of beauty pageant winners have illustrated. (Hint: A genuine Duchenne