Switch - Chip Heath [56]
If you’ve ever faced a really long drive, no doubt you used this technique on yourself. Maybe you thought about your journey one town at a time, or an hour at a time, or maybe you promised yourself a coffee stop after the next 75 miles. It’s a lot easier to think “75 miles to coffee” than to think “8.5 more hours of sitting here until I’m at Grandma’s.”
You can’t count on these milestones to occur naturally. To motivate change, you’ve got to plan for them.
We’ve been talking about small wins at an individual level—using them to motivate a road-trip driver or a teenage house-cleaner. But the same concept goes for large organizations. For example, a man named Steven Kelman had to figure out a way to create small wins in the federal government.
Kelman, a professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, got a call from the Clinton administration in 1993, asking him to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP). As the head of OFPP, he would be responsible for reforming the government’s procurement efforts. Procurement is the process by which people buy things, and the government does a lot of procuring. In 2003, it spent $320 billion on purchases of discretionary goods and services, a figure that includes everything from paper clips to helicopters for the National Park Service. With that kind of money at stake, you can’t have people running down to Bell Helicopter and plopping down a credit card for a new helicopter. (On the other hand, think of the airline miles.)
Kelman was reluctant to head up OFPP, knowing there was a pretty good chance that despite his best efforts nothing would change, but in the end he accepted the job. He knew exactly what he was getting into, because three years earlier, he’d written a book about procurement reform.
There were lots of problems with procurement. Over the years, the government had established many protocols and protections to prevent abuses of various kinds. There were good intentions behind these protections, but as they built up, layer upon layer, they began to cause more harm than the abuses they’d been designed to prevent. For instance, when making purchase decisions, procurement officials could not use evidence of vendors’ “past performance.” As an example, let’s say the government gave the company CodeLords a contract to develop software, and the product CodeLords delivered was absurdly behind schedule and inexcusably poor in performance. The government would be barred from using that performance data when evaluating CodeLords for a different job! (Imagine if you had to select a hairdresser without regard to the way he cut your hair in the past.)
Sometimes, too, the sheer quantity of rules was smothering common sense. In one famous example, the Defense Department sought a supplier of chocolate-chip cookies for the troops and published a 20-page set of “milspecs,” detailed specifications that dictated, among other things, ingredients, cookie size, and baking process. These requirements led to outrageously high cookie prices because companies that actually understood how to produce lots of cookies efficiently—say, Keebler or Nabisco—would never bid on the job because some part of the milspecs inevitably conflicted with their standard way of doing things. Meanwhile, the contract did not even stipulate that the cookies taste good.
As head of OFPP, Kelman would lead procurement reform, but he didn’t have much structural power. He had a staff of about twenty people, none of whom purchased anything significant. The actual purchasing decisions were spread across dozens of large federal agencies. Kelman would have to reform procurement by reforming the behavior of purchasing agents scattered across the government.
If ever there was an underdog story, this is it. To put the government’s $320 billion in discretionary purchases in perspective, that’s about the same amount of money it would take to purchase everything that’s produced in a year by the entire computer hardware industry