Switch - Chip Heath [80]
Our struggles with e-mail are a bit pathetic, but the larger topic is worth considering: Is it possible to design an environment in which undesired behaviors—whether yours or your colleagues’—are made not only harder but impossible? As it turns out, lots of people actually make their living contemplating how to wipe out the wrong kinds of behaviors.
Consider industrial safety. Many factories use dangerous machines that have a bad habit of lopping off fingers or hands that are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suppose you’re a factory foreman and one of your workers loses an index finger in an industrial accident. You want to make sure this never happens again. How might you accomplish that?
You could give your workers’ Riders clear direction by means of clear signage—KEEP HANDS CLEAR OF THE MACHINE or DANGER: RISK OF INJURY—accompanied by an illustration identifying the machine’s trouble spot.
You could appeal to your workers’ Elephants, using fear. Here we can take inspiration from driver’s-education courses in which teenagers watch films full of bloody, gruesome car crashes, so that when they finish driver’s ed they will avoid driving like teenagers. In homage to these films, you could call together your workers and show them a video of the guy who lost his finger. Show them what the gory wound looked like. Have him urge his colleagues to take safety seriously. “I wish I’d paid more attention,” he’d say.
Or you could focus on the Path, in which case you would disregard hearts and minds entirely. In fact, suppose you stipulated outright that your workers are hopeless, that they’re irredeemable daredevils who are determined to waggle their fingers in the machine’s danger zone for the sheer sport of it. Could you still keep them from dismembering themselves?
Absolutely. Many factories have done exactly that. For instance, one machine is designed so that it can be activated only if two buttons are pressed at the same time. The buttons are positioned so that to press both of them you must place your arms high and wide (like the “Y” in the “YMCA” dance). The beauty of this arrangement is that, if your hands are pressing those buttons, they are (by design) nowhere near the danger zone. And if they’re not pressing the buttons, the machine is off. Either way, your fingers win.
Poof—you have made a dangerous behavior impossible.
8.
With that example in mind, think about all the innovations that have made “bad behavior” impossible or nearly impossible: childproof caps on medicine bottles, cars that won’t shift out of park unless the brake pedal is pressed, anything that’s fireproof. Notice that these are product-design innovations created to prevent injuries. “Injury prevention” is, in fact, a thriving field. Every state government has a few people on staff—usually heinously under-funded—whose job is to think about how to reduce injuries or deaths caused by small children falling into swimming pools, the elderly falling in their homes, car crashes, and other misfortunes. Rarely can such incidents be made impossible, but injuries resulting from them can be reduced.
In trying to minimize the risk of bad outcomes, injury-prevention experts often turn to the Haddon Matrix, a simple framework that provides a way to think systematically about accidents by highlighting three key periods of time: pre-event, event, and post-event.
Let’s say our goal is to reduce serious injuries from car wrecks. Pre-event interventions would include anything that would tend to prevent wrecks from happening: installing bright lighting on highways, painting clear lane markers on the roads, popularizing antilock brakes, launching advertising campaigns against drunk driving.
With event interventions, we accept that crashes will happen and ask ourselves how we can reduce the chances of injury. Seat belts and air bags are classic event interventions, but also think about breakaway light poles and those big orange barrels that line exit