Switch - Chip Heath [89]
How can you create a habit that supports the change you’re trying to make? There are only two things to think about: (1) The habit needs to advance the mission, as did Pagonis’s stand-up meetings. (2) The habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace. If it’s too hard, then it creates its own independent change problem. For instance, if you’re trying to exercise more and you decide to “create a habit” of going to the gym, you’re really only renaming the core problem. It might be more productive to try to start by building an easier habit, like laying out your gym clothes before you go to bed or asking a friend who already works out to pick you up on his way to the gym.
Consider a one-year study of dieters conducted at Penn State University. A baseline diet condition led to weight loss of 17.8 pounds over the course of the year. That’s an impressive result, but the drawback of many diet programs is that once the program ends, the dieters’ old habits start to reemerge and their weight begins to creep up again. In this study, one warning flag was that only 36 percent of the people in the baseline condition rated themselves as “very full” or “extremely full” on the diet. How sustainable is a diet that doesn’t make you really full?
Other dieters in the same study were asked to eat two cups of soup each day, in addition to their regularly scheduled meals. The two cups of soup were bonus food. These dieters lost 15.4 pounds over the year, and 55 percent of them rated themselves as “very full” or “extremely full.” They didn’t lose quite as much weight, but their odds of feeling full went up substantially. Eating two cups of soup is a classic supporting habit. It was an easy habit to implement—the researchers were simply asking the dieters to eat more. And it helped the broader mission—it helped the dieters feel full, which made it easier for them to control their portions at mealtime.
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This focus on creating habits was used masterfully, in a totally different context, by Natalie Elder, an elementary school principal in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When Elder was first considering the job as principal of Hardy Elementary School, she asked to see a copy of the school’s results on statewide tests. As it turned out, she didn’t get to see the data until after she’d already accepted the job. Looking back, she joked that the school board tricked her into taking the job first.
When Elder finally saw the scores, she could not believe what she was reading. Hardy Elementary didn’t just have low test scores; it had the lowest scores in the state of Tennessee. She wondered, “What have I gotten myself into?”
It was a brutal beginning, but things got even worse. On the first day of school, she had to expel a student. Every week, it seemed, Elder encountered a new form of bad behavior. In the classrooms, students were cussing at their teachers. (Remember, we’re talking about 6-to-8-year-old kids.) Parents sometimes barged into classrooms in the middle of a lesson to talk to their kids. One parent was escorted out of the building in handcuffs after he verbally abused the cafeteria manager.
Elder’s attempts to restore discipline in the school were met with resistance. “Parents were coming in and cussing at me, hollering at me. One parent tried to run me over with a car,” she said. Elder wasn’t facing a teaching problem or a learning problem. She was facing something much more fundamental. She said, “I knew I had to get control of the building before I could teach.”
She forbade parents from entering the building during school hours without permission from her office. She suspended the chronic misbehavers in the classroom. She got the police involved, when necessary, to enforce the new rules.
But those actions were just a way of eliminating the really egregious behavior. Her real goal was to transform chaos into calm. In her judgment, the trouble began the moment students arrived at