The Leadership Almanac

In their new book, Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, authors Chip and Dan Heath cite some fascinating research about a car wash promotion that has big implications for leaders of change efforts.

This little gem of a story offers what I believe is a little known, but very simple technique to jump-start your next change project.

At the car wash, customers were given a card to record stamps for each car wash. Once they got eight stamps, they had earned a free car wash. Here’s the wrinkle that makes this so interesting:

• One group of customers was given card with eight spaces for stamps. Once they collected eight stamps, the next car wash was free.
• Another group of customers was given a slightly different card, with spaces for ten stamps. But, the cards had two stamps already on them – they were given what appears to be a head start.

Both sets of customers needed to collect the same number of stamps (8) for the reward. But, as the authors point out, the second group was 20% of the way to their goal from the beginning – a huge psychological boost.

The results?

• In the first group, 19% had earned a free car wash several months later.
• In the second group, by the same time, 34% had reached the goal.

Why?

The authors write, “People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one.” They go on to say,

One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish than they might have thought. If you’re leading a change effort, you better start looking for those first two stamps to put on your team’s cards.

In other words, remind people of what’s already been accomplished. If the goal is to reduce spending by 5%, share examples of how the team has already trimmed spending. If the goal is to adapt to a new paperwork flow, talk about how the team has already succeeded in adapting to other changes in the system.

If your own goal is to lose twenty pounds, make a list of the small changes you’ve already incorporated (eliminating soda, or parking further away from store entrances, or switching to non-fat milk). You’ll avoid the psychological speed bump of feeling like you’re at square one. You’re not – you’re already on your way.

Think about the change effort you’re about to lead. How can you put two stamps on their cards right out of the gate?

Tags: managing change, momentum, switch

When is good enough good enough?

You see it all the time. That draft of the report is good enough. The presentation to staff was good enough. The error rate on product defects was good enough. The budget for that new project was good enough. The response time to customer emails is good enough. But is it, really?

What sustains the tension between “good enough” and “excellence” is that there simply isn’t enough time, money, or resources to move everything from good enough to great, but we want to do our best work. Right? We know we could improve our deliverables,  whatever they are.

So how do you decide when good enough is good enough? When action is more important than improvement? Here’s three suggestions to keep in mind:

1. When a life is on the line.
   
   While having an actual life on the line is pretty rare (thank goodness!) the point is this: when the need to act clearly supersedes the need to perfect whatever you’re working on, act.

   Remember Apollo 13? In the race against time to save the astronauts, engineers jerry-rigged an air filter made with duct tape. No doubt as engineers they would have liked to keep testing and improving their design, but urgency had to trump elegance.

2. When incremental improvements are becoming a hobby.
   
   I recall studies down when desktop publishing became widely available that showed that productivity did not rise, as expected. It slowed down because people were endlessly tweaking their products – because they could. True, the bar of professionalism had been raised, and what was acceptable before (a typewritten newsletter, for example) was not acceptable now.
3. When you’ve crossed the 5 yard line.
   
   If you’ve invested a big chunk of time and effort to create a solid draft of the report, or a beta website, or a working prototype, you’ve probably no more than five yards from the goal line of perfection. The problem is that the next five yards will probably require as much time and effort as what you’ve already expended.

   Maybe it’s time to publish the report, launch the website, or start producing the product. Rarely is it true that it can’t be improved afterwards.

   I wrote my book several years ago. Even today, I see ways of improving it. But if I’d waited until I’d exhausted all the possible improvements, I’d still be an unpublished author.

Tags: "good enough", decision-making Apollo 13, excellence, Leadership