The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  New Year’s resolutions should really be called New Year’s absolutions.

  Milkman realized that if her “fresh start” theory was right, then the slate-cleaning effect shouldn’t be confined to New Year’s Day. It should also be true for other landmark dates that would give us an excuse to reset our record, such as the start of a new month or even a new week.

  Milkman and her colleague Hengchen Dai tracked down attendance data for a university fitness center, and they found strong proof of their “fresh start” hypothesis. The probability that students visited the gym increased at the beginning of each new week (by 33%), new month (by 14%), and new semester (by 47%).

  So “fresh starts” happen not only on New Year’s Day, but also on any other landmark date. If you’re struggling to make a transition, create a defining moment that draws a dividing line between Old You and New You.

  3.

  There are certain landmark dates that are near universal. A survey by the researchers Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield asked participants to specify the most significant birthdays across a person’s life span. The winners (ranked in order of votes) were:

  18

  21

  30

  40

  50

  60

  100

  These are milestone birthdays, and every one of them calls for a celebration or, in the case of the 100th birthday, a grudging gratitude that the odometer is still moving. Other than 18 and 21, which come with an expansion of civic and alcoholic rights, respectively, these numbers are arbitrary. Turning 50 seems like a real threshold of some kind, but of course it’s not. There is no day in your whole life when you are more than a day older than the day before (unless Daylight Savings is the black magic it seems to be). Aging is exquisitely incremental. To add meaning to our lives, though, we concoct these thresholds—30, 40, 50—and then freak out when we get close to them.

  But being arbitrary doesn’t make these occasions less meaningful. Milestones are milestones. And just as there are familiar defining moments that mark transitions, such as graduation ceremonies, there are others that commemorate milestones: 40th birthday parties. 25th anniversary trips. 30th-year-on-the-job plaques or gold watches.

  We will not dwell on milestones, since people seem to have a natural knack for noticing them. But, as with moments of transition, there are some milestones that seem to go ignored. Students get short-changed, for instance. Sure, they advance in “grade,” but why not celebrate their 1,000th day in the classroom, or their 50th book read? And why don’t we celebrate teachers for their 1,000th student taught?

  Companies in this era of apps and personal tracking devices have grown much smarter about surfacing milestones that were previously invisible. The app Pocket, which stores articles from the Internet on your phone for later reading, informs users when they’ve read 1 million words. The fitness-tracking bracelet Fitbit presents users with awards such as the 747 Badge, given for climbing 4,000 lifetime flights of stairs (which rises roughly to the altitude that 747s fly), and the Monarch Migration Badge, which is described as follows: “Every year the monarch butterfly migrates 2,500 miles to warmer climates. With the same lifetime miles in your pocket, you’re giving those butterflies some hot competition!”

  These companies are cleverly conjuring up defining moments of pride—for the trivial cost of an email. All it required was some attention to milestones.

  4.

  To think in moments is to be attuned to transitions and milestones as well as to a third type of experience: pits. Pits are the opposite of peaks. They are negative defining moments—moments of hardship or pain or anxiety.

  Pits need to be filled. Most of the time, this is simply common sense. Disney knows, for example, that people hate long lines. So Disney invests in ways to fill that pit, by creating interesting displays as a distraction, and having performers interact with guests, and setting expectations about the wait. And in our personal lives, it’s similarly obvious. You need not study a book on defining moments to understand that if your partner is suffering, you attend to them.

  Yet as we’ve seen, common sense can have a limited range. Graduations are common sense; first-day-of-work experiences are not. 40th birthday parties are common sense; 1,000th-day-in-school parties aren’t. And the same is true with pits. As a small example, take someone who leases a car and dies during the lease term. No doubt your common sense says that the deceased’s family could simply return the car and discontinue the lease. Wrong. Rather than recognize an opportunity to perform a simple act of kindness in a difficult time, most car finance companies say: Pay up. Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, rare among its competitors, sends a condolence letter to the lessee’s family with an offer to forgive the lease obligation.

  Or consider patients who have just learned that they have cancer. Doctors and nurses know to be compassionate and supportive in those fraught moments. But comfort only goes so far; what about quick action? In many cases, patients must wait several weeks or more to begin seeing the chain of specialists who will treat them. Not at Intermountain Healthcare. As reported by Leonard Berry and two colleagues, the patient and his or her family are invited to a meeting within a week of the cancer diagnosis. They stay put in one room and the members of their caregiving team circulate in and out: surgeons, oncologists, dietitians, social workers, and nurses. The patients walk out at the end of the day with a comprehensive plan of care and a set of scheduled appointments. This is not to minimize the importance of giving comfort to a patient. Of course that’s vital. It’s simply to say that giving comfort is commonsensical. But scheduling a rapid, all-hands meeting to formulate a plan of attack—that’s not common sense, that’s a conscious effort to fill a pit.

  What’s least commonsensical is that pits can sometimes be flipped into peaks. A study of service encounters asked customers to recall recent satisfying and dissatisfying interactions with employees of airlines, hotels, or restaurants. Almost 25% of the positive encounters cited by customers were actually employees’ responses to service failures: slow service, mistaken orders, lost reservations, delayed flights, and so on. When employees handled these situations well, they transformed a negative moment to a positive one. Every great service company is a master of service recovery. (An executive of a company that builds custom homes shared with us an insight from his customer satisfaction data. To maximize customer satisfaction, he said, you don’t want to be perfect. You want to get two things wrong, have the customer bring those mistakes to your attention, and then hustle like mad to fix those problems. Thankfully, he hadn’t instructed his team to start making mistakes on purpose. But we could tell he was tempted . . .)

  Business leaders who can spot their customers’ moments of dissatisfaction and vulnerability—and take decisive action to support those customers—will have no trouble differentiating themselves from competitors. Offering to help someone in a difficult time is its own goal and reward. It also has the side effect of being good for business.

  Take the story of Doug Dietz, an industrial designer from General Electric. He’d spent two years working on a new MRI machine, and in the fall of 2007, he had his first chance to see the machine installed in a hospital. He said he felt like a “proud Papa” going to see his baby.

  When he entered the MRI suite, he saw the new diagnostic imaging machine and “did a happy dance,” he said in a 2012 TED Talk. Dietz retreated to the hall to watch for the first patients. While he waited, he saw a couple and their young daughter coming down the hallway. The girl was crying. As they got closer to the room, the father leaned down to the girl and said, “We’ve talked about this. You can be brave.”

  As soon as the little girl entered the room, she froze, terrified. And in that moment, Dietz could see the way the room looked through her eyes.

  On the wall was a giant warning sign with a magnet and an exclamation point. On the floor, there was yellow and black tape that looked like it belonged at a crime scene. The room was oddly dim, with fl
ickering fluorescent lights, and all the colors were shades of antiseptic beige. The atmosphere was sterile bordering on menacing.

  “And the machine itself, that I designed, basically looked like a brick with a hole in it,” Dietz said.

  He knew, too, that the experience would only get worse. The girl would be fed into the claustrophobic bore of the MRI and she’d have to lie there, motionless, for 30 minutes, trying to ignore the machine’s loud, alien hums and clangs.

  Dietz saw the parents exchange an anguished look. They didn’t know how they were going to get their daughter through the next hour.

  He was crushed. In an instant, his pride had turned to horror. “It just broke my heart,” said Dietz.

  What he realized was that he and his designer colleagues had been focused on the machine: How do we make it faster? Sleeker? More powerful?

  Patients, however, focused on the experience. And when they feared the MRI machine, there were real health consequences: 80% of children undergoing MRIs had to be sedated to get through the experience, and every sedation carries risks. After his epiphany in the MRI suite, Dietz reframed his mission as a designer. He wondered, what if we could design an experience that was actually fun?

  He convened a team to help him rethink the experience: leaders of a children’s museum, “design thinking” experts from Stanford, teachers at a day care center, health care staffers who worked with children, and others. The conversations helped him realize the power of a child’s imagination to transform a situation.

  “What is three kitchen chairs and a blanket?” he asked. To a child, it’s a castle. It’s a spaceship. It’s a truck.

  What if the MRI machine weren’t an MRI machine but a spaceship? A submarine? Dietz’s team reimagined the scanner as part of a larger story. One of the first rooms they designed, for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, was known as the Jungle Adventure. In the hallway leading into the room, the team placed stickers on the floor that looked like rocks. The kids would instinctively hop from one rock to the next. All the walls inside the room were painted in rich, colorful jungle scenes. And the rocks from the hallway led to a painted koi pond, stocked with fish, which surrounded the machine.

  The MRI table lowered so that children could climb on top. It had been redesigned to look like a hollowed-out canoe, and the kids were urged to hold still so they wouldn’t tip over the canoe as it floated through the jungle. The kids readily embraced the challenge of not rocking the canoe. In his talk, Dietz mimed a kid with his arms straight down at his side with only his eyes moving. “These kids are like statues—they’re frozen,” he said.

  Another theme was Pirate Island, where kids got to “walk the plank” to reach the machine, which was painted to look like a pirate ship. On the wall, a monkey with a pirate’s bandana glided through the air on a rope swing. The supply cabinets were disguised as tiki huts.

  Dietz and his colleagues stayed focused on the kids’ “anxiety points,” such as the loud noises made by the machines. In a San Francisco hospital, they created a Cable Car Adventure room. When kids would come in, they’d get a ticket for the car. One day, Dietz watched a hospital employee talk with a little boy: “Bobby, have you been in the cable car in the city? You remember how it was kind of noisy? So is ours!”

  One day in the Pirate Island room, Dietz was talking with the mother of a girl who’d just had a scan. As they talked, the little girl kept tugging on her mom’s shirt. Finally the mother said, “What is it, honey?”

  The little girl asked, “Can we come back tomorrow?”

  Dietz began to weep. He had transformed terror into delight.

  GE’s “Adventure Series,” led by Dietz, have since been installed in dozens of children’s hospitals, and the results have been dramatic. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, one of the early adopters of Dietz’s design, found that the number of kids needing sedation dropped from 80% to 27%. For the shorter CT scan, only 3% of children needed sedation. The child’s key moment of anxiety—lying down on a sterile table that feeds into a threatening-looking machine—has been eliminated. The kids, Dietz said, “are excited to get to the adventure, versus holding on to mom’s leg. . . . Before, to get them up on the table took 10 minutes, and the scan took 4 minutes. Now they get up on the table in 1 minute, and the scan takes 4.”

  Because of the kids’ comfort, the extra expense of the friendly designs is unimportant—since the scans go faster, the hospitals can complete more in a day.

  Dietz’s triumph is a story of smart, empathetic design. But it’s also a story of thinking in moments. He realized that it wasn’t the machine that needed more attention, it was the experience. For patients, a moment of agony was transformed into a moment of elevation. Dietz flipped a pit into a peak.

  5.

  Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled. That’s the essence of thinking in moments. To be clear, not all defining moments fit into these three categories. Many defining moments could happen anytime. The Popsicle Hotline, for instance, is a source of on-demand delight. Similarly, you could pick any Saturday to surprise your kids with a trip to the zoo and they probably wouldn’t complain.

  For most of the types of moments in this book—moments of elevation and connection and pride—almost any time is a good time. The more you can multiply them, the better. The point we’re emphasizing here is that certain circumstances demand attention. And particularly in organizations, these circumstances tend to go unnoticed, as with the neglected first-day experience.

  Here are some other examples of potential moments in organizations that cry out to be shaped:

  Transitions

  Promotions: Getting promoted feels good naturally, of course—it’s a classic moment of pride. But it can also be a tough transition for some managers. Many people are thrust into their first managerial assignments without any training on giving feedback or motivating teams. What’s needed is a managerial rite of passage that combines celebration of the honor with, say, a week’s worth of shadowing and counseling by an experienced senior manager.

  The first day of school: Michael J. Reimer, the principal of Roosevelt Middle School in San Francisco, wanted to help sixth graders make the transition from elementary school to junior high. He created a two-day orientation program that reviewed core math/science concepts and, more importantly, made the students comfortable navigating the school building and their more complex academic schedule. He even set up “Locker Races,” which spurred students to get faster at opening their combination lockers (an unfamiliar technology for most). He said that two days later, when the seventh and eighth graders showed up, the sixth graders “felt like they owned the school.”

  The end of projects: In most organizations, the end of a project is commemorated by the immediate start of a new one. But it’s useful to provide closure. For inspiration, consider that Steve Jobs once held a mock funeral onstage for the death of Mac Operating System 9: “Mac OS 9 was a friend to us all. He worked tirelessly on our behalf, always hosting our applications, never refusing a command, always at our beck and call, except occasionally when he forgot who he was and restarted.” It was a silly but meaningful landmark in time.

  Milestones

  Retirement: When a person retires after a long career, the moment is a hybrid of a transition and a milestone—and for some, also a pit (due to a loss of purpose or fulfillment). Yet retirement celebrations tend toward the mundane: a sheet cake in a conference room with some hastily convened coworkers. The moment deserves so much more. In Deloitte’s audit practice, retiring partners are honored at the group’s annual meeting. A colleague takes the stage and tells the story of the retiree’s life and career. At the end, all the partners toast the retiree, who then has a chance to address the group. It’s like a winning hybrid of a wedding toast and a eulogy. (Note: We know some introverts might sooner slink into a janitor’s closet than endure this, but surely there are less public ways to achieve the same thoughtfulness, for instance
a keepsake book with handwritten memories from colleagues.)

  Unheralded achievements: We celebrate employees’ tenure with organizations, but what about their accomplishments? Isn’t a salesman’s 10 millionth dollar of revenue earned worth commemorating? Or what about a talented manager who has had 10 direct reports promoted?

  Pits

  Dealing with negative feedback: Your organization may offer 360 reviews to managers. (The 360 is a tool that collects feedback from a leader’s employees, peers, and managers, thus providing a “360-degree” view of how that person is perceived.) If so, what happens if someone gets a lousy report? Are you ready with an action plan to help them escape the resulting pit?

  Loss of loved ones: Employees will lose loved ones, and when they do, they deserve support. Shouldn’t organizations be ready with a plan for these unpredictable moments? Imagine if a team could be assembled quickly to provide for time off, a seamless delegation of urgent tasks, and personal support (meals, child care, errands) as needed.

  Life and work are full of moments that are ripe for investment. In the pages ahead, we’ll learn the art of planning them.

  Clinic 1

  The Missed Moments of Retail Banking

  Note to readers: At the end of each section, we’ve included a “Clinic,” demonstrating how you can use the book’s ideas to solve real-world problems. This Clinic focuses on the art of “thinking in moments.”

  The situation. Major retail banks—Citibank, Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, and others—spend billions of dollars to brand themselves as trustworthy. They also invest lavishly in technology and their physical environments to improve the “customer experience.” What’s shocking, though, is that even as these banks compete fiercely for customer loyalty, they seem blind to the moments that matter in those customers’ lives. Customers might have a relationship with a bank that lasts for decades. Think of how many landmark moments happen in that time! And, more to the point, many of those moments actually involve the bank: purchasing homes, changing jobs, saving for education, weddings, retirement, etc.