Switch - Chip Heath [57]
Thousands of people in the government are involved in procurement, and their desire to please Bill Clinton, the new president in 1993, is tempered by the knowledge that Clinton will be gone in four years (or, worst case, eight). Into this vast, sprawling sand trap of inertia walks one guy named Steven. He’s a professor, no less. He wrote a good book about the sand trap. Now he’s on the hook to fix it, yet he doesn’t control any of it (except for twenty grains of sand on the eastern periphery). You might as well hire a computer-savvy reporter named Phil to overhaul the computer industry.
Kelman knew he’d have to make some progress quickly or else he’d be dismissed. “If an example of successful change could somehow be achieved quickly, it might be possible to use that to set other changes in motion,” he wrote later. He sought a victory that would be fast, achievable, and visible—a small win that would work for all of his constituents, whether the Defense Department or the Health and Human Services Department. If he could get their Elephants moving with an easy mission—the government equivalent of the 5-Minute Room Rescue—he thought he would be able to keep them moving.
One day, a conversation with a government employee sparked an idea. The employee told Kelman that when she needed simple, inexpensive items, such as a few computer disks, the procurement rules made it impossible for her to walk to the computer superstore across the street and buy them. She found this limitation was infuriating.
Kelman spotted an opportunity. He went to the senior procurement executives and issued a challenge: I want you to double your agency’s use of government credit cards over the next year. (Notice the precision of the challenge, à la the 1% milk campaign. By being specific about the behavioral change, Kelman was directing his constituents’ Riders.) In his vision, anytime employees needed something small—computer disks or a replacement hard drive or a carton of office paper—they should be able to march across the street, armed with their credit cards, and purchase what they needed on the spot. Kelman asked the agencies to make a formal “Pledge” to embrace the idea. The agencies were supportive, so Kelman pushed further. Over the next year, he organized four more pledges.
The second pledge was a biggie: Kelman asked the agencies to break with the tradition of ignoring past performance. He knew this would be a tough sell, so he decided to push for it publicly only when he was sure he had at least eight agencies onboard. He hit the phones, and his employees and advisers rallied the people in their networks. Eventually, his team had eight agencies signed up, but he wasn’t finished. “After we got to nine agencies, participation started snowballing, and soon we could say to the holdouts, ‘Almost everyone but you is participating.’” (This outcome foreshadows a point that we make in Chapter 10 about behavior being contagious. Kelman managed to address all three parts of the framework—directing the Rider, motivating the Elephant, and shaping the Path.)
In the end, twenty different agencies agreed to take the “Past-Performance Pledge.” To ensure that the pledge would be taken seriously, Kelman prodded the agencies to identify fifty-eight upcoming contracts in which they would explicitly consider past performance.
With the pledges, Kelman turned an unspeakable level of bureaucratic inertia into demonstrable forward momentum. Five years later, in an internal survey, 70 percent of front line employees said that they were proponents of procurement reform. The Brookings Institution, a well-respected think tank, published a study in 1998 that graded the success of various “reinventing government” initiatives attempted over the previous eight years. Kelman’s procurement reform was the only initiative that earned an “A.” A single guy had managed to come in and catalyze