Switch - Chip Heath [78]
One IT group adopted the “sterile cockpit” concept to advance an important software project. The group had embraced a substantial goal—to reduce new-product development time from three years to nine months. In previous projects with tight deadlines, the work environment had become increasingly stressful. When workers fell behind schedule, they tended to interrupt their colleagues for quick help, and their managers would wander by regularly and ask to be “statused” on the project. As a result, the software engineers were interrupted more and more, and workweeks expanded to sixty and seventy hours as people started showing up on weekends, hoping to get some work done without interruption.
The leaders of the IT group decided to try an experiment. They established “quiet hours” on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings before noon. The goal was to give coders a sterile cockpit, allowing them to concentrate on complex bits of coding without being derailed by periodic interruptions. Even the socially insensitive responded well to this change in the Path. One engineer, previously among the worst interrupters, said, “I always used to worry about my own quiet time and how to get more of it, but this experiment made me think about how I’m impacting others.”
In the end, the group managed to meet its stringent nine-month development goal. The division vice president attributed this accomplishment to the sterile cockpit quiet hours: “I do not think we could’ve made the deadline without it,” he said. “This is a new benchmark.”
In these disparate environments—airplane cockpits and hospitals and IT work groups—the right behaviors did not evolve naturally. Nurses weren’t “naturally” given enough space to work without distraction, and programmers weren’t “naturally” left alone to focus on coding. Instead, leaders had to reshape the Path consciously. With some simple tweaks to the environment, suddenly the right behaviors emerged. It wasn’t the people who changed; it was the situation. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
6.
We’ve seen lots of environment tweaking in organizations—offices and airlines and hospitals—but, make no mistake, we can turn these tools on ourselves, too. Many people have discovered that, when it comes to changing their own behavior, environmental tweaks beat self-control every time.
For instance, Brian Wansink, the author of the popcorn-bucket study described in Chapter 1, has a devoted following of dieters who swear by his prime directive: Shrink your dinnerware. Use smaller plates, bowls, and cups.
Wansink knows that if we use big plates, we feel obligated to cover them with food—a half-full plate feels morally wrong somehow. And because we’re wired to finish what’s on our plate, that’s a big problem. Big plates = big portions = overeating. To achieve eating control, according to Wansink, you must start with plate control. Store your dinner plates in a box in your closet, and start eating dinner every night off your salad plates. Use small wineglasses, not huge goblets. Never, ever eat snack food directly out of the bag or box; instead, pour a reasonable portion onto a small appetizer plate. These very simple environmental tweaks—swapping out the plates and bowls and glasses in your cabinet—have huge effects on eating behavior.
We all play these games with ourselves, trying to nudge ourselves to do the right thing. We know a guy who religiously lays out his jogging clothes and shoes before he goes to sleep. That way, when he wakes up, it’s just a tiny bit easier to get going. Another friend never goes to bed without setting the coffeepot to auto-brew at wake-up time. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee helps to fight the oversleeping urge. And there’s a woman who actually freezes her credit card in a block of ice, so that when she feels the urge to spend, she forces herself to have a cooling-off (or, rather, a warming-up) period.
Self-manipulation works. Amanda Tucker used these same