Switch - Chip Heath [50]
Negative emotions tend to have a “narrowing effect” on our thoughts. If your body is tensing up as you walk through a dark alley, your mind isn’t likely to wander over to tomorrow’s to-do lists. Fear and anger and disgust give us sharp focus—which is the same thing as putting on blinders. Police detectives, for instance, frequently are frustrated by the testimony of gun-crime victims, who often can provide a rich description of the gun held by the perpetrator but can’t recall whether the perpetrator had a beard.
Fredrickson argues that, in contrast with the narrowing effects of the negative emotions, positive emotions are designed to “broaden and build” our repertoire of thoughts and actions. Joy, for example, makes us want to play. Play doesn’t have a script, it broadens the kinds of things we consider doing. We become willing to fool around, to explore or invent new activities. And because joy encourages us to play, we are building resources and skills. For instance, kids learn physical skills through rough-and-tumble play; they learn to work with objects by playing with toys and blocks and crayons; they learn to get along with others by pretending to be animals or superheroes.
The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.
Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don’t look like burning-platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.
This brings us back to Robyn Waters, who was a master of positive emotions. She didn’t try to create a burning platform: “Wal-Mart is eating our lunch! Target is on its deathbed! Come with me into the fiery seas!” Instead, she found a way to engage the fresh thinking and enthusiasm of her colleagues. What if we had colors that “popped” like these iMacs? And look at this Paris boutique’s display—what if we could arrange our sweaters like that?
Waters helped shift an entrenched culture, product by product, because she found a way to instill hope and optimism and excitement in her coworkers. She found the feeling.
6
Shrink the Change
1.
In 2007, two researchers, Alia Crum and Ellen Langer, published a study of hotel maids and their exercise habits. The topic of the study may sound unremarkable, but the results were so surprising that you might find them hard to believe. (In fact, we’ll argue that the researchers themselves came to the wrong conclusion in explaining their findings.)
Let’s start at the beginning, with the maids.
The average hotel maid cleans fifteen rooms a day, and each room takes 20 to 30 minutes to complete. Take a moment and imagine an hour in the life of one of these maids. If you fast-forward through your brainfilm, you’ll see the maids walking, bending, pushing, lifting, carrying, scrubbing, and dusting. What they’re doing, in short, is exercising. A lot. In fact, they are dramatically exceeding the daily doses of exercise recommended by even the most exercise-conscious Surgeon General.
But the maids don’t seem to recognize what they’re doing as exercise. At the beginning of the study, 67 percent of the maids reported to Crum and Langer that they didn’t exercise regularly. More than a third said they didn’t get any exercise at all. Huh? It’s like a third of talk-show hosts complaining that they never get to meet anyone new.
Then again, what is “exercise”? If we accept the cultural definition of exercise as something we do on a treadmill in a fitness club, while surrounded by spandexed women and perspiring men, then the maids were correct. But our bodies don’t make style