Switch - Chip Heath [92]
You’ll also avoid making the Fundamental Attribution Error. Dr. Pronovost’s research showed that line infections—life-threatening problems that are preventable—were rampant. Yet he didn’t conclude, “We’ve got a health care system full of sloppy, negligent doctors.” Instead, he asked himself, “How can I change these doctors’ situations so that they’re more likely to avoid line infections?” (So before you conclude that your husband is hopelessly absentminded, always forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning and the milk, maybe you should try shaping his Path. How about taping a checklist to his steering wheel?)
As you try to make a switch, the hardest struggle will be to maintain your motivation, to keep your Elephant on the road. This puts a huge burden on your Rider, who has to rein in the Elephant when it strays. In this chapter, and the last one, we’ve been searching for ways to use the environment to relieve the Rider’s burden. We started with the story of Mike Romano, the soldier who came back from Vietnam with an addiction to opium. If Romano’s fate had hinged solely on the one-on-one battle between his Rider and his Elephant, he couldn’t have kicked his addiction. It was the environment that tipped the forces in his favor. When Romano came back to his hometown of Milwaukee, he found it a lot easier to change.
How can you create an environment that would make it easier for you, or your team, to change? We’ve seen that supportive habits—like holding stand-up meetings or eating two daily bowls of soup—can help, and so can action triggers that allow you to preload difficult decisions. Even a simple checklist can make a difference. In the next chapter, we’ll get the final piece of the puzzle: the influence of other people. It’s easier to persevere on a long journey when you’re traveling with a herd.
10
Rally the Herd
1.
Think of the last time you were in a situation where you weren’t totally sure how to behave. Maybe it was your first time in a new church, or your first time in another country, or maybe it was a dinner party where you didn’t know many of the guests. What did you do to try to fit in?
You watched other people, of course.
In ambiguous situations, we all look to others for cues about how to behave. Maybe you’ve had the experience of scanning the table frantically at a fancy dinner, trying to figure out which fork is for dessert. (If you haven’t had that experience, we hope you know your forks, because the rest of us copied you.) When the environment is unfamiliar, we sprout social antennae that are exquisitely sensitive.
In the fancy dinner situation, our antennae work great, because someone at the table knows what to do, and we can just copy that person. But sometimes in times of change, nobody knows how to behave, and that can lead to problems. For instance, if you ever find yourself in an emergency situation, we pray that there’s only one person in the vicinity who can help you, rather than a crowd. To see why, consider some research conducted by Bibb Latané and John M. Darley.
Columbia University students, having volunteered for a research study, were asked to sit in a room and fill out a survey. Some were left alone; others were put in rooms with two other students. As they filled out their surveys, a “crisis” emerged. Smoke began to pour into the room through a wall vent. The smoke continued to flow, in irregular puffs, until eventually the room was filled with haze. Of the students sitting in a room by themselves, 75 percent got up and found someone to alert about the smoke. But when three students were placed in the room at the same time, only 38 percent of the groups of three ever reported the smoke. They just sat there, inhaling the smoke, each individual’s inaction signaling to the other two people