Switch - Chip Heath [74]
First, to distinguish “saints” from “jerks,” they polled all the students in a particular dorm, asking them to assess which of their dorm-mates (out of roughly one hundred) were most likely and least likely to make a donation. Once they compiled those rankings, they had a pretty good idea of which students were charitable or uncharitable types.
Then they altered the Path. Some students received a basic letter announcing the launch of a food drive the following week and asking them to bring canned food to a booth on Tressider Plaza (a well-known spot on campus). Other students received a more detailed letter, which included a map to the precise spot, a request for a can of beans, and a suggestion that they think about a time when they’d ordinarily be near Tressider Plaza so they wouldn’t have to go out of their way to get there.
The two letters were randomly sent to the saints and the jerks. A week later, after the food drive was over, the researchers had a precise list of who had given food and who hadn’t.
Students who received the basic letter were not very generous. Only 8 percent of the saints donated and not a single one of the jerks. So far, the jerks were living up to their reputation (but the saints weren’t exactly outperforming).
Then came the shock. Students who received the more detailed letter were substantially more charitable: 42 percent of the saints donated, and so did 25 percent of the jerks! This is an inspiring result. These researchers got 25 percent of the worst individuals in the dorm to donate simply by smoothing the Path a bit. (Bottom line: If you’re hungry and need a can of food, you’re three times better-off relying on a jerk with a map than on a budding young saint without one.)
What’s more, the Path wasn’t changed in any dramatic way—the letter just gave moderately more concrete instructions. Imagine what would have happened with a more aggressive intervention: What if volunteers had gone door-to-door collecting the canned food?
What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. And no matter what your role is, you’ve got some control over the situation.
3.
Today, as you go through your day, notice how many times people have tweaked the environment to shape your behavior. Traffic engineers wanted you to drive in a predictable, orderly way, so they painted lane markers on the roads and installed stoplights and road signs. Grocery store managers wanted you to spend more time in their store, so they positioned the milk coolers all the way at the back. Your boss’s boss wanted to encourage more collaboration among employees, so she approved an “open floor plan” layout with no cubicles or dividers. The bank was tired of your leaving your ATM card in the machine, so now the machine forces you to remove it before you can claim your cash.
Tweaking the environment is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. It’s that simple. As an inspiration, think about Amazon’s 1-Click ordering. With one-tenth the effort of dialing a phone number, you can buy a new book or DVD. Talk about instant gratification. Amazon’s site designers have simply made a desired behavior—you spending money on their site—a little bit easier. They’ve lowered the bar to a purchase as far as humanly possible (at least until they launch “1-Blink Ordering”). By doing this, they’ve generated untold millions of dollars in incremental revenue.
The opportunities are endless for simple, 1-Click-style tweaks. A few years ago, a consultant named Peter Bregman was asked to help a management consulting firm with an administrative problem. Employees weren’t submitting their time sheets on time, which slowed the firm’s billing because charges to clients were based on hours worked. Traditionally, the consultants had submitted their time sheets on paper, and they’d done so pretty reliably. Then the firm developed an online time-sheet tool. Consultants weren’t using it. The executives held education classes to explain the new tool, but people kept