The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  • Sharp’s recommitment to the customer experience had all three elements: (1) the All-Staff Assembly; (2) the voluntary “Action Teams”; and (3) a call for dramatic improvements in the way customers were cared for.

  3. Groups bond when they struggle together. People will welcome a struggle when it’s their choice to participate, when they’re given autonomy to work, and when the mission is meaningful.

  • Xygalatas’s study of religious devotees concludes that the shared experience of pain can be seen as “social technology to bind in-groups together.”

  4. “Connecting to meaning” reconnects people with the purpose of their efforts. That’s motivating and encourages “above and beyond” work.

  • Hansen’s research: When it comes to performance, strong purpose trumps strong passion.

  5. In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that’s not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly.

  • Fisherow and her team turned around the troubled Stanton Elementary School by relying, in part, on short parent-teacher home visits before the start of school.

  6. According to the psychologist Harry Reis, what deepens individual relationships is “responsiveness”: mutual understanding, validation, and caring.

  • Stanton’s teachers showed responsiveness by listening to parents’ hopes for their kids.

  • In health care, caregivers are switching from the question “What’s the matter?” to “What matters to you?”

  • “Baggage-handling” customer service reps validate customers’ past experiences.

  7. Responsiveness coupled with openness leads to intimacy. It happens via “turn-taking.”

  • Art Aron’s 36 Questions experiment leads total strangers to become intimate—in 45 minutes!

  Clinic 5

  How Can You Combat the “Silo” Mentality?

  The situation: At dinner, the VP of sales and the VP of marketing of a large company have finally acknowledged something they’ve both known for a long time: Their departments have a dysfunctional relationship. Although marketing and sales should work hand in hand, their teams have been operating in silos. The marketing team creates slick promotional materials and advertising, and the sales team complains that the materials don’t reflect how customers think about the company’s products. Sales insists that the products would sell better at a lower price, but marketing scoffs that the sales team is just chasing a quick deal rather than having deeper conversations about the product’s virtues. Although this story is fictional, similar conflicts are all too common.

  The desire: The executives are fed up with the lack of collaboration. Their teams aren’t at war, really—they are just too comfortable staying in their own spheres. The two leaders are determined to get their teams working together more effectively, but they know it will require a shock to the system.

  How Do We Create a Defining Moment?

  What’s the moment? The moment needs to be created. The VPs schedule a two-day off-site meeting. The question is: How can they design a meeting that becomes a defining moment for their teams?

  Add ELEVATION:

  1: Break the script. The off-site meeting itself breaks the script. It’s a change of environment, a disruption of routines.

  2: Boost sensory appeal, raise the stakes. When the meeting begins, participants are led outside to an actual Formula One racing car in the parking lot. Teams are formed—with sales and marketing intermixed—and trained to act as a “pit crew.” The teams compete to see who can change the car’s tires most quickly. With each attempt, the teams get better and better at collaborating. It’s pure fun. By the end, the teams are laughing and clowning—but deadly serious when it’s their time to act as the pit crew. Afterward, back in the meeting room, the teams discuss their experience and what it means for effective collaboration.

  Add INSIGHT:

  1: Trip over the truth. The leaders surprise the group by inviting a customer to address them. The customer discusses the “whiplash” effect of interacting with the marketing and sales teams. “It’s like I’m talking to two different companies,” he says.

  2: Trip over the truth and stretch for insight. Prior to the off-site, two marketers and two salespeople were “embedded” with the other team for a week. Then, at the off-site meeting, they share what they learned: The marketers embedded in sales present, “What marketing doesn’t understand about sales,” and their counterparts present, “What sales doesn’t understand about marketing.”

  Add PRIDE:

  1: Recognize others. The departments have not worked well together in general, but there have been exceptions. The people who made those bright spots happen are given a Team Chemistry Award—a pack of Mentos and a jug of Diet Coke. (If that combo seems puzzling, Google it.) After the meeting, the two VPs keep a supply of Mentos and Diet Coke stashed in their offices so they can give out more awards spontaneously when their teams earn it.

  2: Practice courage. One reason why the sales and marketing teams don’t collaborate is that their communication tends to be passive-aggressive. They are polite to each other when they’re face-to-face; later, they complain to their colleagues and drag their feet. So at the off-site, people practice “crucial conversations.” The session is such a hit that the term crucial conversation becomes a kind of inside joke. Back at the office, people will often approach each other by saying, “Could we have a crucial conversation?” (But it’s only half-joking, since the humor defuses the difficulty of starting the discussion.)

  3: Multiply meaningful milestones. The two teams set goals for themselves—moments they will celebrate. The moments they choose include: (1) the first time a sales staffer trades more emails in a week with the marketing team than with the sales team; (2) the first time someone from either group lobbies for the other to get more resources; and (3) the first time someone solves a problem for the other team.

  Add CONNECTION:

  1: Note that many of the activities already discussed would be effective at creating connections, including the pit crew experience, the embed presentations, and the “crucial conversations” practice. Often the same “moment” will include more than one element of a defining moment.

  2: Create shared meaning. The act of holding the off-site is itself a powerful signal. Bringing everyone physically together, outside the office, sends the message: We are in this together. It’s a synchronized moment.

  3: Create shared meaning. At the conclusion of the meeting, the executives challenge their teams to collaborate on a plan for approaching an important client prospect. They must formulate the plan and present it to the two vice presidents in two hours. It’s a difficult mission—but it’s precisely the difficulty that helps to bond the team members to each other.

  Final reflections: The two things we want to highlight about this case: (1) Creating a moment is critical in a complex, political situation like this. The moment is a demarcation point where you announce: Before this retreat, we were siloed. After this retreat, we commit to working together. The shared context gives the goal social momentum: If I behave badly, you can call me on it because you know that I know I committed to do better. (2) The reason many people hate meetings is that emotion is deliberately squeezed out. Participants sit and listen to programmed presentations. But this is a choice, not an inevitability. You can just as easily conduct a meeting that has drama, meaning, and connection. You cannot bring two teams together by simply talking about unity. They must experience unity. That’s what makes it a defining moment.

  12

  Making Moments Matter

  1.

  Once you realize how important moments can be, it’s easy to spot opportunities to shape them. Take a high school student waiting for her college admissions decisions. Years ago, the decisions would arrive in the mail; now they’re as likely to come via email. But her emotions are the same. When the moment comes, her stomach
churns. She takes a deep breath, opens the letter, and scans frantically for key words and phrases, and—there it is!—the sweet word Congratulations! She lets out a shout of delight and reads it again. Seven times.

  That’s a great moment of pride and elevation. But, let’s be honest, the university deserves very little credit for making the moment matter. A letter? An email? That’s the best they can do? Keep in mind that, for teenagers, the waiting game is a classic time of transition. How could we heighten the peak?

  Just by applying the tools in this book, we can come up with many suggestions:

  • Include a school T-shirt or sweatshirt or hat. Shouldn’t the student immediately feel like part of the family? (Boost sensory appeal) To its credit, MIT went even further, sending its acceptance packet in a tube stuffed with a poster, refrigerator magnet, and best of all, confetti! (Breaking the script)

  • Encourage the students to post a picture of themselves wearing the school swag on social media with a hashtag that allows them to connect with other admittees. (Creating shared meaning)

  • Deliver the news in a personalized video from the admissions director, sent straight to the student’s phone: “Katie, I just wanted to tell you how excited we are to have you join the class!” (Deepening ties via responsiveness) Now, obviously Ohio State can’t send so many video messages, but smaller schools could, and shouldn’t they exploit that advantage?

  • Add anticipation by texting students that their decision will be available online at exactly 5:58 p.m., and they should use the following secret code to log in. (Raising the stakes)

  • Have a current freshman text them the evening after they receive their admission, offering congratulations and asking whether they have any questions. (Deepening ties via responsiveness)

  • Include a set of photos that highlight the freshman experience: 10 Things You Should Definitely Try Your First Semester (the library’s collection of foreign films or the gym’s climbing wall or the homecoming football game or the museum’s archive of literary love letters . . .). (Multiply milestones)

  That’s how we imagine you using the ideas in this book. Target a specific moment and then challenge yourself: How can I elevate it? Spark insight? Boost the sense of connection? Life is full of “form letter in an envelope” moments, waiting to be transformed into something special.

  A bit of attention and energy can transform an ordinary moment into an extraordinary one. We’ve seen high school graduations transformed into defining moments—not just for the graduates but for sixth graders in the audience! (YES Prep’s Signing Day) We’ve seen an average hotel pool made magical by the presence of a Popsicle Hotline. We’ve seen the power of simple gestures: a teacher praising a student, a couple recording their fights in a journal, a pastor giving an intern the chance to preach at Easter Vigil service. And we’ve seen how massive changes often hinge on single moments: The Sharp staffers meet and reconnect under one roof. Stanton teachers visit parents in their homes—and really listen to them—for the first time. A CLTS facilitator swirls a hair in a glass of water as a crowd watches with dawning horror.

  But what’s the payoff for all these moments? Can you measure it? Does it show up on the bottom line? Yes—think of all the tangible outcomes that have been created by better moments: More revenue (Forrester data, Southwest Airlines). Greater customer satisfaction and loyalty (Magic Castle). More motivated employees (data on recognition). More effective employees (purpose versus passion). And also many payoffs more personal in nature: More happiness (gratitude visits). Closer relationships (responsiveness). Self-transformation (Cinderella/ugly duckling moments in school, stretching for insight).

  Defining moments lead to countless positive and measurable outcomes, but in our judgment they are not a means to an end. They are the ends. Creating more memorable and meaningful experiences is a worthy goal—for your work, for the people you care about, and for you personally—independent of any secondary impacts. What teacher would not want to design a lesson that students still reflect on years later? What service executive would not want to create a peak experience for customers? What parents would not want to make memories for their kids that endure for decades?

  Our good intentions to create these moments are often frustrated by urgent-seeming problems and pressures. School administrators harp on the upcoming state assessment, so the teacher stops planning his special lesson and teaches to the test. Some customers complain about a “pothole,” so the manager shelves the peak moment she’s considering and scrambles to respond.

  In the short term, we prioritize fixing problems over making moments, and that choice usually feels like a smart trade-off. But over time, it backfires. Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse who served patients for the final weeks of their lives, wrote a moving article called “Regrets of the Dying.” She shared the five most common regrets of the people she had come to know:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. (“Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.”)

  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. (“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others.”)

  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. (“Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.”)

  It is striking how many of the principles we’ve encountered would serve as antidotes to those common regrets:

  1. Stretching ourselves to discover our reach;

  2. Being intentional about creating peaks (or Perfect Moments, in Eugene O’Kelly’s phrasing) in our personal lives;

  3. Practicing courage by speaking honestly—and seeking partners who are responsive to us in the first place;

  4. The value of connection (and the difficulty of creating peaks);

  5. Creating moments of elevation and breaking the script to move beyond old patterns and habits.

  Ware’s patients were people who had let the demands of the present interfere with their hopes for the future. In life, we can work so hard to get the kinks out that we forget to put the peaks in.

  2.

  Finally, we’d like to share a “moment of insight” of our own that came in the course of our research. It began with a story told to us by a woman named Julie Kasten.

  In 1999, Kasten said, she was sitting in her cubicle at her office in Washington, D.C., eavesdropping on the woman in the neighboring cube.

  Kasten, 24, was working for a well-respected consulting firm. She had joined the firm about 18 months earlier, attracted by the chance to work in marketing communications. The cubicle next to her was reserved for the use of out-of-town executives while they were visiting the D.C. office. Kasten didn’t know the woman who was using the cube that day. Nevertheless, the woman changed her life.

  “She was smartly attired. . . . Blue pantsuit. Well tailored. Polished. She stuck out among the other visitors,” said Kasten. “She was on the phone pretty much for the duration of her stay. And what struck me was her enthusiasm.

  “I knew she was looking at the blank walls around her—same as mine. But she was so skillful at what she was doing, and obviously enjoying herself.”

  It occurred to Kasten that the woman was doing the same job she would be doing someday if she advanced at the firm.

  Kasten’s next thoughts came as a jolt.

  If that’s what success in this role sounds like, I don’t want it. She’s energized by what she’s talking about. But it bores me to death.

  “I imagined myself wanting to be like she was,” Kasten said. “But talking about something else.”

  At that moment, she knew she would quit her job.

  Kasten began plotting her exit. A few months later, she visited a career counselor, hoping to discov
er a job that better suited her interests. That’s when her life shifted a second time.

  The counselor listened to her aspirations and offered some tools—personality tests and skills assessments—to clarify the kind of work she wanted to do. Armed with this data, the counselor suggested a few careers that might fit her. But Kasten had already decided. She remembers looking at the counselor, thinking, I want to do what you do.

  A few months later, in the fall of 1999, Kasten was enrolled in graduate school for counseling. As of 2016, she had been a career counselor for 14 years.

  Two lightning-bolt moments changed Kasten’s career. Neither one was foreseen. They just happened, she acted, and in an instant, her life was different.

  Kasten’s experience was a classic “crystallization of discontent” moment, as we described in Chapter 5. We were struck by the suddenness of her realizations, and we were interested in collecting other crystallizing moments. So we sent Kasten’s story to our newsletter subscribers, asking if anyone had experienced something similar. Our question struck a nerve. We received more than 400 replies, many of them achingly personal—stories of marriages collapsing and love reborn, stories of careers abandoned and embraced.I Here’s a sampling:

  • Suresh Mistry was working as an assistant manager at Lloyds Bank in London. Every day he sat at his desk with an “out of order” report that listed all the business clients who had breached their overdraft or loan limits. He had to decide whether to bounce their checks or let them slide. Opposite him was his manager, who was also sitting with an “out of order” report. “The only difference was that the numbers on his list had an extra 0,” Mistry wrote. “I dealt in £10,000s. He dealt in £100,0000s. It was then that I spotted the Divisional Director in his glass office in the corner. He sat behind a large desk with a sheet of paper in front of him. Yup, you’ve guessed it—an out of order list with £1,000,000s. I saw my future laid out in front of me and I despaired.” Within a week, Mistry had applied for a new job in sales and marketing, a field he has enjoyed for more than 20 years now.