by Chip Heath
The desire. Could banks learn to “think in moments”?
What moments could a retail bank create?
As we saw in this chapter, three situations constitute natural defining moments and deserve our attention: (1) transitions; (2) milestones; and (3) pits. Let’s examine each category as it relates to banking relationships.
Transitions: (1) Buying a house. Doesn’t such a big change deserve commemoration? Many realtors will leave their clients a housewarming gift. And what about the bank holding your six-figure mortgage—what kind of gift does it send? Your first monthly statement. What a missed opportunity. (2) The first paycheck from a new job. What if a bank sent a congratulatory note? Or a gift card for an audio book to listen to on your commute? (3) Young person opening a first account. At one Canadian bank, a boy brought in his piggy bank to open an account. His savings amounted to (let’s say) $13.62. The teller said, “We are so proud of you for saving your money—why don’t we round that up to an even $20?” The boy and his parents were thrilled, and the moment only cost a few dollars. What if bank tellers were empowered to make such gestures more frequently, making their jobs more fun and meaningful? (See the Pret A Manger story in Chapter 4 for inspiration.) (4) Getting married. Imagine a client calling the bank to add her spouse’s name to her accounts, and then a few days later, finding that the bank had bought an item from her wedding registry! Or what if the bank offered free financial counseling to engaged couples?
Milestones: Remember how Fitbit and Pocket commemorate moments that people would otherwise have missed? (1 million words read!) Banks could easily do the same thing in countless ways, sending congratulatory messages: (1) when your savings balance reaches milestone targets such as $1,000 or $10,000; (2) when you’ve maintained an “emergency fund” balance for six months or one year; (3) when you’ve earned $100 or $1,000 in interest from the bank; (4) when you’ve paid off 25 or 50 or 75% of your mortgage. And then when you finally pay off your mortgage completely, wouldn’t it be striking if someone from the bank personally delivered the deed to your home (now yours) and shook your hand? (Managers at one Australian bank admitted to us that not only did they not hand-deliver the deed, they actually charged the clients a fee for transferring it!)
Pits: (1) Getting divorced or being laid off. What if banks gave their clients the option of a three-month “pause” on their mortgage payments while they got back on their feet? The same number of mortgage payments would be made, in total, it’s just that the final payment would shift three months later to accommodate the pause. This same “pause” could also be offered to new parents—“We thought you might have some new things to buy around the house, so we thought you might appreciate a few months’ ‘mortgage holiday’!” (2) Assistance handling parents’ affairs following death or disability. So many people struggle in this situation—trying to untangle bills and assets and debts—and banks are in a unique position to offer counsel and support.
Final reflections: It’s possible some of these suggestions are too expensive or too intrusive. (Some people might not appreciate their banks’ “noticing” a new job or new spouse.) The point is that banks miss countless opportunities to boost customer loyalty by creating moments, and the lack of attention to these moments contradicts banks’ talk about building strong relationships with clients. A relationship in which one party is oblivious to the most profound moments in the life of the other is no relationship at all.
Your business may not have the central role in people’s lives that a bank does. But are you missing opportunities to offer support, congratulations, or counsel at critical times? Are you thinking in moments?
Moments of ELEVATION
Moments of INSIGHT
Moments of PRIDE
Moments of CONNECTION
Introduction to Moments of Elevation
* * *
So far, we’ve answered three key questions: What are defining moments? Why would you want to create them? And when should you be ready to “think in moments”? But we haven’t yet addressed the most important question: How do we create defining moments?
As we’ve seen, the leaders of YES Prep created Signing Day, a defining moment for the school’s graduating seniors. Doug Dietz and his colleagues created the “Adventure Series” of MRI installations, which turned a pit experience into a peak for young patients. So we know that defining moments can be consciously created. You can be the architect of moments that matter.
In the sections that follow, we’ll offer some practical strategies for creating special moments using the four key elements of memorable experiences: elevation, insight, pride, and connection.
We’ll begin with elevation. Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the everyday. Times to be savored. Moments that make us feel engaged, joyful, amazed, motivated. They are peaks.
Moments of elevation can be social occasions that mark transitions: birthday parties, retirement parties, bar/bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, and weddings.
Then there are other moments of elevation where we feel elevated by virtue of being “onstage,” so to speak: competing at sporting events, giving a presentation, performing in a play. The stakes are higher. We’re absorbed in the moment.
Finally, there are moments of elevation that happen spontaneously: The unplanned road trip. The walk on a sunny day that leaves you smiling. The first touch of a lover’s hand.
Can we create more moments of elevation? Absolutely. We can also learn to make an existing peak “peakier”—to redesign a birthday party or client presentation to make it more memorable. The recipe for building a moment of elevation is simple, and we’ll describe it in detail soon. But while elevated moments are simple to conceive, they can be maddeningly hard to bring to life. (On that subject, there’s a surprising twist ahead about the John Deere “First Day Experience” story.) The absence or neglect of peaks is particularly glaring in organizations—from churches to schools to businesses—where relentless routines tend to grind them down from peaks to bumps.
In the two chapters ahead, you’ll see how to find and enhance moments of elevation, and discover how hard that effort can sometimes be. You’ll also see why such moments are worth fighting for. No one reflecting on their life has ever wished there had been fewer.
3
Build Peaks
1.
You are a sophomore at Hillsdale High School, a public school in San Mateo, California. In your history class, you’ve been studying the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, in English, you’re reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which tells the story of a group of boys who are marooned on an island. Detached from the stabilizing influences of society and culture, they revert to a state of savagery. Golding said that he wrote the novel partly as a reaction to the brutality he observed during his service in World War II. The book was his “attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.”
One day in English, your class is discussing a part of the novel where violence breaks out among the boys, but then the conversation is interrupted. To your surprise, you’re handed an official-looking legal complaint (see below).
The document announces that William Golding has been accused of libel, for grossly misrepresenting human nature in his portrayal of the boys. You and your classmates will conduct Golding’s trial. Each of you will choose a role: witness, attorney, or judge.
The trial will hinge on big, provocative questions: Was Golding right that human nature is defective? Is civilization just a veneer over a violent core?
This event takes place every year for sophomores at Hillsdale High and has become known as the Trial of Human Nature (or the Golding Trial). You and your classmates will have about two months to prepare. Then, when the day comes, you’ll ride a school bus to an actual courtroom and conduct the trial in front of a jury made up of Hillsdale teachers and alumni. A gallery full of your peers and parents will watch the action.
As on
e of the attorneys, you will call famous witnesses from history and literature—people who have a strong opinion about the true nature of humanity, good or bad. Some predictable figures will take the stand, such as Hitler, Hobbes, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, but the witnesses will also include some surprises: Jane Goodall, Mark Twain, Darth Vader, and even Tupac Shakur. All of them will be impersonated, in costume, by your fellow students, who will have diligently researched and rehearsed their testimonies on the question of human nature.
Over the years, many juries have convicted Golding. Many have freed him. It’s up to you what will happen this time.
The Trial of Human Nature was created in 1989 by Greg Jouriles, a social studies teacher in his third year, and Susan Bedford, an English teacher with 20 years of experience. They didn’t know each other well until the time their students complained that both teachers had picked the same due date for a major assignment. That got them talking, and they realized they had a lot in common. For one thing, both had grown disillusioned with teaching and were struggling with whether they wanted to continue.
“I had fallen into the English teacher’s rut of ‘read a novel, talk about it, take a test,’ ” Bedford said. “I was looking for something that would reignite the spark that I felt at the beginning of my career.”
They also craved something for their students, and as they talked, they came to a disturbing realization: Even though high school students log more time in the classroom than anywhere else, their most memorable experiences rarely take place there. Instead, they remember prom, football games, musical productions, student body elections, swim meets, talent shows.
Jouriles and Bedford then asked themselves a question that would guide the rest of their careers: What if we could design an academic experience that was as memorable as prom?
Think about that question. They wanted to build a peak moment. One as memorable as prom, the night when teenagers rent stretch limos and vomit on each other. That’s a tall order.
They also wanted the experience to draw on some of the great themes of their courses, including a basic mystery they share: What is humanity’s true nature?
Inspiration struck when Jouriles came across an account of someone conducting a mock trial of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, who killed his brother Abel. (In the Bible, Cain is the first person who is born and also the first murderer, which is its own comment on human nature.) The mock trial format seemed perfect—it would be different, dramatic, and unpredictable.
“We purposely tried to think about ways to up the ante,” said Bedford. “To give the experience more challenge, more value, to ask kids to stretch themselves in ways that virtually all of them had never stretched themselves before.”
In the first year of the Trial, they raised the stakes by inviting the principal of the school and the captain of the football team, among other Hillsdale celebrities, to join the jury. They wanted their students to feel the challenge of performing in front of the school’s power players.
As the weeks of preparation unfolded, Jouriles and Bedford felt some pressure of their own. If they failed, they would fail with the principal observing firsthand. “We were going through the same things the kids were going through,” said Bedford. “I would never have said I’m a risk taker.”I
Their confidence grew as they saw how seriously the students were taking their tasks. “There was intensity and excitement and engagement,” Jouriles said, “and extra work that we never asked for. Kids were coming in after school to do more.”
“The students never asked, ‘How many points is this worth?’ ” said Bedford, incredulous. “That’s always the first question out of kids’ mouths, but they never asked it. We thought, Whoa! We’ve hooked into something powerful.”
In its first year, the Trial was far from smooth. Some witnesses were brilliant, others woefully underprepared, and others shaken by nerves. But the spectacle was unforgettable: Witnesses taking their place in a genuine Superior Court witness stand. Student attorneys, wearing suits, making oral arguments in front of an audience. Observers watching a cross-examination of Gandhi. It was extraordinary. When the verdict came down—not guilty!—the kids burst into cheers and applause.
After the Trial, Jouriles watched a student who had never shown much interest in the classroom “bounding down the hall like he’d just hit a game-winning shot. He said, ‘That was great. What are we going to do next?’ ”
Since then, the Trial of Human Nature has become an institution at Hillsdale High. The fall of 2017 will see the 29th consecutive run.
Bedford and Jouriles succeeded at creating an academic event as memorable as senior prom. In fact, even more memorable. As Jouriles said, with no little pride, “In every graduation speech I’ve heard, the Trial has been mentioned. I’ve never heard prom mentioned.”
The spirit of the Trial was contagious. A group of other teachers at Hillsdale High got sick of hearing their senior class students, year after year, reminisce about how memorable the Trial was. A bit of professional jealousy kicked in. They wanted their own peak experiences for seniors. So they created the “Senior Exhibition,” which challenged students to design their own research project, develop it over the course of the year, and then prepare for a final “oral defense” of their work in the spring. Topics ranged from magical realism to anorexia to the future of nuclear fusion.
Many parents attended the oral defense sessions. Their pride was obvious. “I think it’s very rare for parents to see their students’ work,” said Jeff Gilbert, one of the creators of the Senior Exhibition and now the principal of Hillsdale High. “They see swim meets. They see dance performances. They see plays. But it’s very rare for parents to see the academic work their kids do.
“School needs to be so much more like sports,” he added. “In sports, there’s a game, and it’s in front of an audience. We run school like it is nonstop practice. You never get a game. Nobody would go out for the basketball team if you never had a game. What is the game for the students?”
That’s thinking in moments. In essence, Gilbert is asking, “Where’s the peak?” With sports, games provide peaks. We might depict a school athlete’s experience in a graph like the one below—mapping a student’s level of enthusiasm over the course of a week, with the three practices (all a drag) dipping below the midline and the game rising high above it, as the peak that makes the sacrifice worthwhile:
With school, though, there is a flatness to the experience. Final exams might create pits, but in general, the day-to-day emotions are pretty even:
The Trial of Human Nature or the Senior Exhibition adds a peak to the flat line:
Note that this isn’t costless. The time and energy invested in the Trial of Human Nature had to come from somewhere. Jouriles and Bedford sacrificed some of their free time, and it’s likely they invested somewhat less time in other lessons in order to focus on the Trial.
Is this sacrifice worth it? Almost certainly yes. Recall the mantra about great service experiences from the first chapter: “Mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable.” That mantra applies to school experience (and life experience) as well. The “occasionally remarkable” moments shouldn’t be left to chance! They should be planned for, invested in. They are peaks that should be built. And if we fail to do that, look at what we’re left with: mostly forgettable.
There are more than 35,000 high schools in the United States. How many of them have even one academic experience that compares with the Trial of Human Nature? Our high schools—which were excellent public schools—certainly didn’t. Did yours?
2.
While “mostly forgettable” experiences are disappointing in school and in our personal lives, they can look quite different in the business world. Here’s hoping that your experiences are mostly forgettable with companies that provide you with power, water, cable, Internet, shipping, gasoline, plumbing, and dental care. That would be a success, wouldn’t it? Because in many customer relationships, the moments most like
ly to be remembered are pits. The cable goes out. The toilet backs up. The hygienist flosses you a little too vigorously. In other words, “mostly forgettable” is actually a desirable state in many businesses! It means nothing went wrong. You got what you expected.
Think of it as the first stage of a successful customer experience. First, you fill the pits. That, in turn, frees you up to focus on the second stage: creating the moments that will make the experience “occasionally remarkable.” Fill pits, then build peaks.
What’s striking, though, is that many business leaders never pivot to that second stage. Instead, having filled the pits in their service, they scramble to pave the potholes—the minor problems and annoyances. It’s as though the leaders aspire to create a complaint-free service rather than an extraordinary one.
Take the Magic Castle Hotel as an example. If the hotel lacked hot water, that would be a pit, and until it was filled, guests would not be charmed by the Popsicles. In the hotel industry, delighting your guests is an unattainable goal until you provide the basics: reasonably quick check-in, reasonably attractive rooms, reasonably comfortable beds, and so on. But some customers are still going to complain! The lamp wasn’t bright enough. You didn’t have HBO. There were no gluten-free Pop-Tarts on the Snack Menu.
In service businesses, there are a huge number of potholes to fix, and that’s why executives can get trapped in an endless cycle of complaint management. They’re always playing defense and never offense.