Switch - Chip Heath [55]
HOW DO WE MAKE THE SWITCH?
• Direct the Rider. 1. Follow the bright spots. Can Carr find some success stories about department heads who figured out how to save money in creative ways (for example, by installing sensor-controlled lighting/heating or by outsourcing administrative functions)? If so, she should help to clone the success across departments.
• Motivate the Elephant. 1. Shrink the change. The need to cut 5 percent is clear, but cutting is the kind of task that inspires dread. “People tend to panic a little when you say, ‘We have to cut our budget by five percent,’” says Carr. How can she break down the task? Well, as it turns out, Mary Carr is a Fly Lady fan, and she takes inspiration from the 5-Minute Room Rescue. So she picks two or three budget lines every week—say, office supplies, training, and travel—and asks the department heads whether they can cut 5 percent out of those line items. Carr reports, “Picking out tiny chunks of work at a time stays the panic.” Carr is shrinking the change, making it less likely to engage the Elephant’s resistance. 2. Grow your people. Once the department heads have tackled the first three budget lines, Carr wants to keep the momentum going. She tells them, “We’re already one third of the way there!” She is putting two stamps on their car-wash cards—letting them know that they’ve already made great progress toward the goal.
• Shape the Path. 1. Build habits. Every Monday, like clockwork, Carr sends out budget updates. She requests updates and gives simple action items, such as, “If you don’t think you’ll be able to meet the 5 percent cut in travel, call me today.” By using a very consistent and predictable process, Carr tries to make the cycle of budget cuts more routine, more automatic. 2. Rally the herd. At one point in the budget cutting, all the department heads attend their yearly planning retreat. On the first day, everyone sees what cuts all the departments made in the initial round. Then each department head spends some time, over night, planning a round of deeper cuts. The next morning, they share their proposed cuts with one another. Carr says, “Everyone got to see what each person was already cutting and the implications of future cuts. And knowing that, the whole body made decisions, not just individual department heads. Everyone was looking at the university as a whole.” In essence, the department heads are exercising positive peer pressure on one another. It becomes the social norm to think of cuts from the perspective of the university as a whole (a strong, shared identity), rather than from the perspective of individual departments.
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One way to shrink change, then, is to limit the investment you’re asking for—only 5 minutes of housecleaning, only one small debt. Another way to shrink change is to think of small wins—milestones that are within reach. (Our dad, Fred Heath, who worked over thirty years for IBM, would tell his teams that when “milestones” seemed too distant, they should look for “inch pebbles.” Nice one, Dad.)
Say that you’re trying to motivate your teenager to do some housecleaning. You might embrace the 5-Minute Room Rescue to overcome his initial resistance. But what if you also put a bit of strategic thought into which room he starts with? You might ask him to start his work in the tiny guest bathroom, because you’re confident that after 5 minutes of work, he’ll have it gleaming. The overall goal—cleaning the whole house—is too distant to be motivating, but if you can engineer a small win in the first 5 minutes, it might buy you enough enthusiasm to pursue the next milestone. (Then