by Chip Heath
What we’ll explore ahead are the larger moments of insight, the ones that deliver a jolt. Sometimes the emotions are dark: I’m no good at this. Or, I don’t believe in what I’m doing anymore. Other moments of insight can also be wildly positive: This is the person I’m going to spend the rest of my life with! Or the “eureka!” moment of creative discovery.
Many moments of insight are serendipitous. Lightning strikes, and there’s no explaining why. You can’t schedule epiphanies.
But these experiences are not wholly out of our control. We’ll explore two strategies for creating moments of insight. We can cause others to “trip over the truth” (Chapter 5). And when we need to understand ourselves better, we can “stretch for insight” (Chapter 6).
In the pages ahead are stories of sharp emotion—disgust, enlightenment, heartbreak, and exhilaration. But we begin with the story of a shocking realization you won’t soon forget.
5
Trip Over the Truth
1.
In 2007, the British Medical Journal asked its readers to vote on the most important medical milestone that had occurred since 1840, when the BMJ was first published. Third place went to anesthesia, second place to antibiotics. The winner was one you might not have expected: the “sanitary revolution,” encompassing sewage disposal and methods for securing clean water.
Much of the world, though, is still waiting for that revolution to come.
In 2016, there were about a billion people worldwide who lacked access to clean water, and also a billion (likely many of the same people) who, lacking toilets, defecated outdoors—often in areas used by multiple people. This practice of open defecation has dire health consequences, just as it did in 1840. It leads to the mass spread of diseases, among them cholera, hookworm, roundworm, and schistosomiasis, that cause people to suffer or die.
How could you end the practice of open defecation? The answer may seem obvious: provide latrines. And for years, that was the strategy of many development organizations. In a typical example, WaterAid funded the construction of latrines in 1999 in some villages in northern Bangladesh. To ensure that the project had been executed successfully, they invited an outside expert named Dr. Kamal Kar to conduct an evaluation of the work. He traveled to the site in Bangladesh, and that’s where our story begins.
Warning to readers: The story ahead is full of disgusting images, and it also makes frequent use of the “s-word” for feces. We do not use this term gratuitously; indeed, it’s the very heart of the story. But if you prefer to avoid the word, we recommend that you skip ahead to the next section, labeled “2.”
In Bangladesh, Kar found that the project had gone exactly as planned. The latrines were well built and many people used them. But he also found something else: “I would walk behind the villages and go into the fields, and in every village we went in, I stepped on shit,” he said. Open defecation was still rampant. And he knew that, as soon as rainy season came, the shit would disperse all around the village.I It wasn’t enough, in other words, for some people to use the latrines or even half. To solve the village’s health problems, it had to become the norm.
It was an eye-opening moment for him. The world’s development organizations had been thinking about open defecation as a hardware problem: If we just distribute enough latrines, we will solve the problem. But it wasn’t that simple. For some villagers, the latrines seemed like a solution to a problem that they hadn’t asked to be solved. Sometimes the latrines would be disassembled, with their parts used for other purposes. In one project in Malawi, no one used their fancy latrines at all. Umelu Chiluzi, a development worker, said, “If you ask them, why are you not using that latrine? They would tell you, ‘Are you sure I should put shit in that structure . . . that is even better than my house?’ ”
Kar realized that open defecation was not a hardware problem, it was a behavioral problem. Until the people in a given area wanted to change, the hardware was meaningless.
Acting on this insight, he developed a methodology called Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), which has since been used in more than 60 countries around the world. But don’t let the boring acronym fool you: This is a shocking process. Here’s a stylized description of a typical intervention:
A CLTS facilitator arrives in a village and introduces himself. “I’m studying the sanitation profiles of different villages in the area,” he says. “Mind if I look around and ask some questions?” Once he has hung around long enough to attract a small crowd, he conducts a “transect walk,” leading the crowd from one side of the village to the other.
“Where do people shit?” he asks, and the villagers direct him to the common areas of defecation. They are embarrassed, eager to move on, but he lingers. He points: “Whose shit is this?” He asks them, “Did anyone shit here today?” A few hands go up.
The stench is overpowering. People are covering their noses with their clothes. The facilitator keeps asking disgusting questions: “Why is this shit yellow? Why is this one brown?”
The facilitator draws attention to the flies flitting between piles. “Are there often flies here?” Nods all around. He sees a chicken pecking at the shit. “Do you eat this kind of chicken?” More reluctant nods. All his questions are studiously neutral. The facilitator has been trained only to ask questions, not to offer advice or opinions.
The group completes the transect walk and stops in a large public space. The crowd has grown larger, curious about what’s happening. The facilitator asks them to draw a rough map of the village in the dirt. Quickly, the villagers map out the boundaries of the village, along with important landmarks—a school, a church, a stream. Then the facilitator asks them to use stones or leaves to mark where their individual homes are.
Once the map has been filled in, he points to a bag of yellow chalk he has brought and asks them to sprinkle some on the places where people shit. He says, “Where there’s more shit, use more chalk.” There is nervous laughter. The kids enjoy sprinkling the chalk on the open defecation areas.
Now the facilitator asks, “Where do you shit in an emergency—say if there’s a rainstorm, or if you have diarrhea?” More laughter as new heaps of yellow chalk are scattered around. Often it circles people’s homes—in those emergency situations, people can’t make it to the common areas.
It is hard to miss, at this point, that the entire village is covered in yellow.
There is a turbulent energy in the crowd: anxious, disgusted, angry, and embarrassed. They aren’t sure what it all means.
The facilitator asks for a glass of water.
Someone provides the water, and he asks a woman if she would feel comfortable drinking it, and she says yes. He asks others and they agree.
He pulls a hair from his head. “What’s in my hand?” A hair. “Can you see it clearly?” No, not really. He walks over to a pile of shit near the meeting area and dips his hair into it. Then he plunges the dirty hair into the glass of water and swirls it around.
He hands the glass to a villager and asks him to take a drink. The man refuses. He passes it along, but they all refuse. “Why do you refuse?” Because it has shit in it!
The facilitator looks puzzled. He asks, “How many legs does a fly have?” Six. “Right, and they’re all serrated. Do you think flies pick up more or less shit than my hair?” More.
“Do you ever see flies on your food?” Yes. “Then do you throw out the food?” No. “Then what are you eating?”
The tension is unbearable now. This is what Kamal Kar calls the “ignition moment.” The truth is inescapable: They have been eating each other’s shit. For years.
Often at this point, the discussion spirals out of the facilitator’s control. People are agitated. They start challenging each other: We can’t continue this! This is madness! How can we stop this?
They often ask the facilitator what they should do. But he declines to answer. “You know your village better than I do. You’re free to choose anything you want, including continuing t
o defecate in public.” But the villagers are determined now. It feels intolerable to live with the status quo another day.
Kar, the inventor of CLTS, knows it is an emotionally wrenching process. “Disgust is the number one trigger,” he said. “And shame. ‘What the hell are we doing? Are we human beings? Eating each other’s shit!’ ”
CLTS is brutal, and it is effective. Thousands of communities worldwide have declared themselves open-defecation-free (ODF) as a result of the intervention, and in Bangladesh, where CLTS became a cornerstone of national sanitation work, the rate of open defecation has declined from 34% to 1%.
What’s odd is that CLTS is not really introducing any “news.” In the example above, for instance, people in the village defecated in public every day. They saw their neighbors doing the same. They smelled shit. They stepped over it. They saw the flies, the chickens. Why did the villagers need CLTS to realize something that was right in front of them?
Kar said that villagers will often tell him, “This a truth which nobody wanted to discuss. We’re always pushing it under the carpet—and then it was brought out in public and into the daylight. . . . Now there’s no way out. The naked truth is out.”
They didn’t really “see” the truth until they were made to trip over it.
2.
Tripping over the truth is an insight that packs an emotional wallop. When you have a sudden realization, one that you didn’t see coming, and one that you know viscerally is right, you’ve tripped over the truth. It’s a defining moment that in an instant can change the way you see the world.
The psychologist Roy Baumeister has studied these kinds of sudden realizations: people who joined and then left a cult, alcoholics who became sober, intellectuals who embraced communism and then recanted. Baumeister said that such situations were often characterized by a “crystallization of discontent,” a dramatic moment when an array of isolated misgivings and complaints became linked in a global pattern. Imagine a husband who has a ferocious outburst of temper, and in that moment, his wife realizes that his outbursts aren’t just “bad days,” as she’s always written them off, but a defining character trait. And a trait that she can no longer abide. That’s the crystallization of discontent.
Ex–cult members tend to recall a specific moment when their bubble burst, when they could no longer sustain an elevated view of their cult’s leader. Baumeister said that their stories reveal that “they had indeed suspected the truth all along but had held their doubts in check, until a focal incident made them see the broad pattern.”
The crystallization moments studied by Baumeister are serendipitous. There’s no predicting when (or if) if they will happen. Notice, though, that the realization sparked by CLTS is very similar in character. Because of the facilitators’ questions, people in the villages are made to “see” what had been in front of their eyes the whole time. And that’s not a serendipitous “aha!” moment, it’s an engineered moment.
How do we engineer powerful insights in more ordinary organizational situations? Consider the way Scott Guthrie handled a situation at Microsoft in 2011. He’d been tapped by Steve Ballmer to lead the company’s fast-growing cloud computing service, called Azure. Guthrie visited Azure customers, and their feedback about their experience with the service was clear: Azure’s underlying technology was good, but it was hard to use. Guthrie knew Azure would never meet its growth expectations until it was much more customer-friendly. But how could he get his colleagues to understand, viscerally, how far off track they were?
He called an off-site meeting with his senior managers and software architects, and he gave them a challenge: Build an app using Azure, just as one of their customers might. It wasn’t supposed to be a difficult challenge. But the team struggled. Some execs couldn’t use certain features; others couldn’t even figure out how to sign up. Guthrie told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca, “It was a complete disaster.” Chastened, the executives resolved to fix the problems they’d encountered. By the end of their second day, they had produced a plan to completely rebuild Azure.
The Microsoft story and Kamal Kar’s story have power for similar reasons. First, the leader knows what truth he wants to share. Guthrie’s truth: Our customers can’t use our product. Kar’s: These villagers are making themselves sick. Second, the realization strikes fast. It takes minutes or hours, not weeks or months. Tripping happens quickly.
Finally, people in the audience discover the truth for themselves. In turn, that discovery makes the need for action obvious. Guthrie doesn’t share his findings from his customer meetings; he creates a situation where they can replicate his discovery. It becomes their own insight, and as a result, they’re motivated to act. Similarly, CLTS facilitators see the problem vividly, but they don’t share their concerns directly. They let the villagers see for themselves. The “aha!” moment should always happen in the minds of the audience.
This three-part recipe—a (1) clear insight (2) compressed in time and (3) discovered by the audience itself—provides a blueprint for us when we want people to confront uncomfortable truths. It would have been so easy for CLTS facilitators to lecture the villagers, to show them facts and data about sanitation practices. But it’s so much more powerful when the crystallizing insight happens inside them.
3.
To trip is to catch one’s foot on something and stumble. To trip over the truth is to catch one’s brain on something and struggle. What exactly is the “something” that your brain catches on?
Imagine that you have a good idea that you want other people to support. What would you do? You’d try to sell them on it: I’ve explored a lot of different ideas, and this is the best one, because it’s supported by a mountain of evidence, and other people who have embraced similar ideas have profited immensely, and did I mention that it’s incredibly easy to implement?
Your focus, in other words, would be on the virtues of the solution. But in the stories we’ve seen so far in this chapter, you’ll notice that no one is talking about solutions. Kamal Kar did not tout the virtues of latrines. Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie did not pitch a new feature set for Azure.
What they did, instead, was dramatize the problems: Ingesting feces. Struggling to use a software package. And once those problems became vivid in the minds of the audience members, their thoughts immediately turned to . . . solutions.
You can’t appreciate the solution until you appreciate the problem. So when we talk about “tripping over the truth,” we mean the truth about a problem or harm. That’s what sparks sudden insight.
Honoring this principle requires us to try a new method of persuasion. Take the example of Michael Palmer, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia and also the associate director of the university’s Teaching Resource Center. In 2009, he started a weeklong program called the Course Design Institute (CDI). He created the CDI to help professors design the courses they’d be teaching. On Monday morning, the professors bring in their draft syllabi, and by Friday afternoon, they’ve overhauled them and created an improved game plan for their courses.
“The dirty secret of higher education is that faculty aren’t taught how to teach,” said Palmer. Over the course of the week at Palmer’s CDI, the professors learn the science of teaching: how to motivate students, how to reach different types of learners, and how to ensure that students retain the most important concepts.
A central element of Palmer’s approach to planning a course is called “backward-integrated design.” First, you identify your goals. Second, you figure out how you’d assess whether students had hit those goals. Third, you design activities that would prepare students to excel at those assessments.
Sounds simple, no doubt. But the life of a college professor makes this kind of planning very counterintuitive. What typically happens to a professor is this: You’re assigned to teach a course, often with very little notice before the semester. Let’s say it’s “Intro to Chemistry I.” You flip through a textbook and experience a sh
ock: How in the world can I get through all this material in one semester? It’s overwhelming.
There are too many variables to consider all at once, so you put a stake in the ground. You pick a textbook. Now at least you’ve got a table of contents to use as a rough road map. That’s comforting. So you start mapping the chapters to the 14 weeks in your semester. Then, for each week, you can subdivide the topics into lectures. Finally, based on the topics you’ll lecture on, you decide what will be on the students’ exams.
That may sound like a logical process, but it bears no resemblance to “backward-integrated design.” Instead of starting with your goals and working backward, you started with no goals at all! You simply took a big pile of content and subdivided it into class-sized chunks.
Now put yourself in Palmer’s shoes. He knows professors are approaching curriculum design the wrong way, and he has a solution for them (backward-integrated design). If he pitched the virtues of the solution, that would make him, in essence, a salesman for backward-integrated design. But how do audiences respond to sales pitches? With skepticism. We quibble and challenge and question.
If Palmer wants to persuade the professors, he needs them to trip over the truth. And that starts with a focus on the problem, not the solution.
On the afternoon of the first day of the Course Design Institute, Palmer introduces an activity called the “Dream Exercise,” inspired by an idea in L. Dee Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences.
He puts the following question to his audience of 25 to 30 professors: “Imagine that you have a group of dream students. They are engaged, they are perfectly behaved, and they have perfect memories. . . . Fill in this sentence: 3–5 years from now, my students still know . Or they still are able to do . Or they still find value in .”