Switch - Chip Heath [71]
Other hospitals abandoned their adoption of MICS. At Decorum Hospital, the chief cardiac surgeon, Dr. D, was motivated to adopt MICS for competitive reasons. “We’d like everyone to know we can do it. It’s a marketing thing. Patients want to know we can do it.” His team members talked about adopting the procedure to “keep up with the Joneses” (the other large hospitals in the area). MICS, then, was seen almost like a desirable new toy to be acquired—especially since all the cool kids had one.
Dr. D ended up implementing the procedure in a unique way: He continued to split the breastbone of his patients, albeit with a smaller incision. One of his nurses remarked, “Dr. D is a creature of habit.” And the old habits eventually won out. The use of the new procedure gradually dwindled, and eventually it was abandoned.
Across the hospitals she studied, Edmondson found that the teams who failed made the mistake of trying to “get it right on the first try” and were motivated by the chance to “perform, to shine, or to execute perfectly.” But of course no one “shines” on the first few tries—this mindset set the teams up for failure. By contrast, the successful teams focused on learning. They didn’t assume that mastery would come quickly, and they anticipated that they’d face challenges. In the end, they were the ones who were more likely to get it right.
Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment. A famous story about IBM makes that point well. In the 1960s, an executive at IBM made a decision that ended up losing the company $10 million (about $70 million in 2009 dollars). The CEO of IBM, Tom Watson, summoned the offending executive to his office at corporate headquarters. The journalist Paul B. Carroll described what happened next:
As the executive cowered, Watson asked, “Do you know why I’ve asked you here?”
The man replied, “I assume I’m here so you can fire me.”
Watson looked surprised.
“Fire you?” he asked. “Of course not. I just spent $10 million educating you.”
12.
In 1995, Molly Howard, a long time special education teacher in Louisville, Georgia, watched as the new Jefferson County High School building was being built.
“Every day I’d drive by the building, and I’d wonder, ‘Who’s gonna run that school?’ And it kept tugging at me, ‘Why don’t you apply?’” Howard said.
She applied and got the job, but with the promotion came a very tough challenge. Eighty percent of the school’s students lived in poverty. Only 15 percent of students in the previous high school had continued on to college. “The kids you’d expect to be successful were successful,” said Howard. “But what about the other 85 percent?”
Many teachers had a nearly defeatist attitude. “There was this belief that some children can and some children can’t. That we’re here for the ones that can get it, and we’ve got to accept that we’re going to lose some. I knew I’d have to challenge that,” said Howard.
Howard acted quickly. First, she had to sell a new identity. Howard believed that every student could aspire to go to college, so she abolished the school’s two-track system that had separated “college-bound” students from “vocational” students. In her school, everyone would share the college-bound identity.
She beefed up assessments and tutorial programs. She matched students with teachers who’d be their “on-campus advisers” through all four years. Perhaps her most distinctive