Switch - Chip Heath [90]
The problems began in the driveway where parents dropped off their kids each day. Elder said that often “the mom would already be yelling at the child, and sometimes the music was going BOOM-ta-ta-BOOM, and by the time the kid comes into the building, they’re already upset or angry.” So Elder and her staff did something amazing: They turned themselves into valets.
They resolved to greet every student before he or she entered the school building. They waited at the curb outside, opened car doors for the kids, smiled and said good morning to the parents, and then walked each child inside to the cafeteria. Their valet service helped smooth the transition to the school day from what for many kids was a raucous home environment.
Once the kids were gathered inside the cafeteria, Elder started every day with a disciplined group assembly. “Continuity is good for any child,” she said. “What these kids don’t get in their lives is stability. They have to know that here they’ll get structure and order.”
At the assembly, Elder began with announcements and a brief call-and-response with the kids. “We’re a school of what?” a teacher would call out. The kids would respond by shouting, “Excellence!” At 7:50, Elder taught a brief lesson in character education, typically focusing on a single word, such as perseverance. She’d have volunteers spell the word and define it. At 7:55, everyone stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance, then sang a patriotic song (for instance, the Whitney Houston version of “America”). Sometimes kids read aloud, or Elder gave them a quick spelling or math quiz. (Often the prize was a coveted “out of uniform” pass for Friday, allowing them to wear what they wanted.)
At 8:00, the kids stood and silently walked to class with “traveling arms,” meaning that the kids’ arms were folded behind them, reducing the nearly irresistible urge to mess with their friends. By the time the kids sat down at their desks, they were ready to learn.
Elder shows us how new habits can clear the Path. She inherited chaos at Hardy Elementary School, and she asked herself, “Which parts of this chaos can I tame? What kind of morning routine can I set up that will improve the chances that the kids are ready to learn?”
She had to fight the forces that stirred up kids before they’d even set foot in the classroom: the tense drop-offs, the cafeteria pandemonium, the erratic transition to the classroom. By bringing order and continuity to the environment, she was able to create forward movement for a group of children who’d grown used to a destructive cycle of behavior.
Notice, too, that because of the calm environment that Elder managed to create, “bad” kids started acting like good kids. A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”
8.
So far, as we’ve discussed how to shape the Path, we’ve encountered two strategies: (1) tweaking the environment and (2) building habits. There’s a tool that perfectly combines these two strategies. It’s something that can be added to the environment in order to make behavior more consistent and habitual.
That tool is the humble checklist. We discuss it with some trepidation, because we know the associations buzzing in most readers’ heads: mundane, routine, bureaucratic. “Use a checklist,” we admit, sounds like advice a dad would give a college student, along with some tips on tire-pressure gauges and not charging beer to his Exxon card.
But bear with us, because your perceptions are about to change. What if we asserted that checklists can be game-changing, that checklists can save lives?
The Holy Grail of checklists may be one reported by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker. Patients in intensive care units (ICUs)