Switch - Chip Heath [86]
The concept of preloading is easier to see with an example. Imagine that you are one of the college students in Gollwitzer’s study. It’s Christmastime, and you’re at home. Your parents are doting on you, and your siblings are having an interesting conversation. The TV is on, the Christmas tree is lit up, and your elderly Chihuahua Fredo is staring at you adoringly. Let’s not forget the food—turkey and dressing, pecan pie, chocolate truffles—and Guitar Hero, and naps, and the calls you’re getting from old high school friends. Distractions are everywhere. So if you walk into this buffet line of stimuli and you haven’t preloaded a decision about your extra-credit report—if you haven’t told yourself, “I’ll do this report in my dad’s office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up”—you are sunk.
That’s why action triggers have unexpected value. Gollwitzer says that when people predecide, they “pass the control of their behavior on to the environment.” Gollwitzer says that action triggers “protect goals from tempting distractions, bad habits, or competing goals.”
There are countless ways to use action triggers at work. If your salespeople are more motivated to close new business than to cultivate existing relationships, give them a “coffee and call” trigger. Tell them that whenever they pour their first cup of coffee, they are to place a check-in call to one of their most important customers. Or think about your employees who will be attending an industry conference. By the time they get back to the office, their e-mail will be so backed up that they won’t be in the mood to share their learnings. So give them an action trigger—suggest that during the flight home, whenever the “OK to use electronics” announcement is made, they type up some reflections for everyone on the team. Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness. A trigger to “praise your employees when they do something great” is too vague to be useful.
Gollwitzer has shown that action triggers are most useful in the most difficult situations—the ones that are most draining to the Rider’s self-control. One study analyzed people’s success in accomplishing “easy” goals or “hard” goals. With easy goals, the use of action triggers increased success only slightly, from 78 to 84 percent. But with hard goals, action triggers almost tripled the chance of success—goal completion skyrocketed from 22 to 62 percent.
To see how action triggers can aid people in difficult times, consider a study of patients recovering from hip-or knee-replacement surgery. On average, the patients were 68 years old, and they had been in pain for about a year and a half before the surgery. The surgeries initially make things even worse; they take such a toll on the body that the patients require assistance with the basic tasks of daily life, such as bathing, getting into bed, and even standing up. The road to recovery can be long and painful.
All patients aspired to get back on their feet as soon as possible, of course. But patients in one group were asked to set action triggers—for instance, “If you are going to go for a walk this week, please write down when and where you plan to walk.”
The results of the study were dramatic. On average, action trigger patients were bathing themselves without assistance in 3 weeks. Other patients took 7 weeks. Action-trigger patients were standing up in 3.5 weeks. The others took 7.7 weeks. In just over 1 month, the action-trigger patients were getting in and out of a car on their own. The others took 2.5 months.
Gollwitzer says that, in essence, what action triggers do is create an “instant habit.” Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s exactly what action triggers are setting up. Here’s the proof of the “instant habit” concept: One study showed that the single biggest predictor of whether women gave themselves a monthly breast examination was if they had a habit of doing