Chip Heath Quotes

No detail is too small.

Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.

Multitracking keeps egos in check. If your boss has three pet projects in play, chances are she'll be open to unvarnished feedback about them, but if there's only one pet project, it will be harder for her to hear the truth. Her ego will be perfectly conflated with the project.

This message is that skin damage is cumulative and irreversible. So we've rewritten the message to stress that point and eliminate nonessential information. We've done this to illustrate the process of forced prioritization; we've had to eliminate some interesting stuff (such as the references to melanin) in order to let the core shine through. We've tried to emphasize the core in a couple of ways. First, we've unburied the lead - putting

W. Edwards Deming, the chief instigator of the Total Quality Management movement that revolutionized manufacturing, told a story about a company that used a variety of flammable products in its production process. Unsurprisingly, fires frequently broke out in its plants. But the president of the company didn't think he had a situation problem; he thought he had a person problem. He sent a letter to every one of the company's 10,500 employees, pleading with them to set fewer fires. Ahem. (What

Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle

The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

punch line: The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don't yet care about and something they do care about.

A pyramid signifies hierarchy, yet no hierarchy is evident in the Food Pyramid.

ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you

The problem is this: Often the heart and mind disagree. Fervently.

Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many

Mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice

Say your husband wants to start a business creating topiary sculptures for clients. You think the idea is bonkers, but you admire his passion, so it seems cruel to veto it. Instead, set a tripwire. Okay, dear, let's give the topiary-sculpture business a shot, but can we agree that we won't invest more than $10,000 of our savings in it? Alternatively, you might say: Go for it, but if you don't have a paying customer within three months, let's talk seriously about Plan B.

Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely

Sportsmanship" had been stretched too far. Like "relativity," it had migrated far afield from its original meaning. It used to refer to the kind of behavior that Lance Armstrong showed Jan Ullrich. But over time the term was stretched to include unimpressive, nonchivalrous behavior, like losing without whining too much or making it through an entire game without assaulting a referee.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages, if I already "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I be obsessed about remembering it.

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions - those that increased revenues, profits, and market share - they found that "process mattered more than analysis - by a factor of six." Often a good process led to better analysis - for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic.

As stories are told and retold, they evolve. They come to emphasize individuals, not organizations; to celebrate a flash of insight over stepwise improvements; and to exaggerate obstacles while downplaying institutional support.

The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Don't obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes.

What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?

serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission.

The Springboard. Denning

Our struggles with e-mail are a bit pathetic, but the larger topic is worth considering: Is it possible to design an environment in which undesired behaviors - whether yours or your colleagues' - are made not only harder but impossible? As it turns out, lots of people actually make their living contemplating how to wipe out the wrong kinds of behaviors.

The first problem of communication is getting people's attention.

So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate - find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message - i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, Hey, there's some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there's some extra capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?

Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.

Rather than focusing solely on what's new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what's already been conquered.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, decribes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the poll's findings:

* Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why
* Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team's and their organization's goals
* Only one in five said they had a clear "line of sight" between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals
* Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals
* Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for



Then, Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, "If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.

Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you've made the best decision that you could.

Seeking out one more option. Finding someone else who's solved our problem. Asking, "What would have to be true for you to be right?" Ooching as a way to dampen politics. Making big decisions based on core priorities. Running premortems and preparades. Laying down tripwires. Using these techniques will improve the results of your group decisions.

Plans are useful in the sense that they're proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. Bus as for the plans themselves they just don't work on the battle field

Work to make the core message itself more interesting.

Any time in life you're tempted to think, 'Should I do this OR that?' instead, ask yourself, 'Is there a way I can do this AND that?

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

successful change transformations were more likely to set behavioral goals:

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience." By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.

a technique called "failure mode and effect analysis" (FMEA), a precursor to the premortem that has been used for decades in the military and government.

Stories are flight simulators for our brains.

Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.

You've got a good idea, how do you make it stick?

Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.

Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?

Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot. They allow lots of good behaviors to happen without the Rider taking charge. Remember that the Rider's self-control is exhaustible, so it's a huge plus if some positive things can happen "free" on autopilot.

Create a need for closure.

(We cut back on expenses today to yield a better balance sheet next year. We avoid ice cream today for a better body next year.)

Most analysts are SO SMART and have amazing ideas, but they can't convey their genius ideas to others.

You say 10 things, you say nothing.

To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?

When you engineer early successes, what you're really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort.

There's a good reason why change can be difficult: The world doesn't always want what you want.

Make a switch, you need to script the critical moves

For individuals' behavior to change, you've got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds.

When people know the desired destination, they're free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.

In life, we can work so hard to get the kinks out that we forget to put the peaks in.

Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something. But it's the next best thing. And the right kind of a story is a simulation.

The discovery of Viagra was a similar story. Initially, the drug had been tested as a treatment for chest pain (angina), and for that purpose it was a failure. Then patients started reporting a curious side effect. (Imagine those awkward conversations: "Doc, my chest still hurts ... but, um, I've been noticing an effect somewhere else ... ")

When you're at the beginning, don't obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there.

The problem is that urgencies - the most vivid and immediate circumstances - will always hog our spotlight.

If I already intuitively "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what sounds like common sense often isn't ... It's your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.
(p.72)

Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.

As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.

When you say three things, you say nothing.

If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and e-mail records and Web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities?

Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can't control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.

You don't have to speak monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by simple is finding the core of the idea.

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don't make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself - that's asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we'll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others,

Smart enough to get into Yale. Economists studied students who had been admitted to two schools of higher and lower prestige but decided to attend the school with lower prestige. Estimated sacrifice in lifetime earnings from attending the less prestigious school: none.

Weaknesses - the tendency to get lost in analysis.

More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan,

One of his friends, a marketing professor at Stanford, said, "Think about this from a marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don't do it with information. We do it with identity: 'If I buy a BMW, I'm going to be this kind of person.

The Curse of Knowledge: when we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it's like to LACK that knowledge.

Knowledge does not change behavior," he said. "We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors.

What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?

The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You

What's broken, and how do we fix it?

One of my favorite bloggers who can articulate his ideas clearly is Avinash Kaushik. The only problem? His ideas are so awesome his posts are a mile long, but I promise they are worth the time.

If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn't be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson.

A friend of a friend . . ." Have you ever noticed that our friends' friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?