9
Change Their Space

STRUCTURAL ABILITY

You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success—or are they holding you back?

Clement Stone

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When it comes to enabling vital behaviors, we’ve already looked at two sources: improving personal mastery through deliberate practice and gaining assistance from others. For our third and final source for increasing our ability (“Can I do it?”), we move away from human influence altogether and examine how nonhuman forces—the world of buildings, space, sound, sight, and so forth—can be brought to bear in an influence strategy. To show how this might work, we start with an example that, when it comes to influence theory, is a genuine classic.

In the late 1940s, representatives from the National Restaurant Association (NRA) asked William Foote Whyte, a professor at the University of Chicago, to help them with a growing problem. As World War II came to an end, the United States was in a period of incredible growth and prosperity. Along with this flourishing economy, Americans began eating out in unprecedented numbers. Unfortunately, the restaurant industry wasn’t ready for the surge of customers.

Along with the return of soldiers came an awkward change in the restaurant pecking order. GIs returned from battle to take over the higher-paying job of cook, one that, along with “Rosie the Riveter,” women had occupied for the first time during the labor-starved war years. Many of the displaced cooks were forced to step down to the job of waitress, and they were upset with the new circumstance. When they shouted their orders to the kitchen, they weren’t always polite. And the gnarled veterans weren’t always pleased to be taking orders from these women.

Given the increased workload and growing social tension, loud arguments often broke out at the kitchen counter. The results were predictable. The commotion annoyed the patrons, and the power struggles often resulted in late or incorrect orders—sometimes out of confusion, often out of revenge. By the time Dr. Whyte entered the scene, both customers and employees were stomping out of restaurants in increasing numbers.

Dr. Whyte started his work by observing a sample of restaurants, doing his best to identify the behaviors behind the growing conflict. He noted that a waitress would rush to the counter, shout an order, and then rush back to her customers. If the order was not ready when she returned, she would urge the cook to hurry, shouting expressions of encouragement such as, “Hey, hairball, where’s the breaded veal? You got a broken arm or what?” The cooks usually responded in kind. Later, when the waitress received an incorrect order, the two would exchange still more unflattering remarks. After being yelled at a couple of times, the cooks often took revenge by slowing down. Dr. Whyte even observed cooks turning their backs on the servers and intentionally ignoring them until they left, sometimes in tears.

While many consultants might have been tempted to alter this unhealthy social climate by teaching interpersonal skills, conducting team-building exercises, or changing the pay system, Whyte took a different approach. In his view, the best way to solve the problem was to change the way employees communicated.

And now for Whyte’s stroke of genius.

Dr. Whyte recommended that the restaurants use a 50-cent metal spindle to gather orders. He then asked servers to skewer a detailed written order on the spindle. Cooks were then to pull orders off and fill them in whatever sequence seemed most efficient (though generally following a first-in, first-out policy).

Whyte’s recommendation was tried at a pilot restaurant the next day. Training consisted of a 10-minute instruction session that was given to both cooks and servers. Managers reported an immediate decrease in conflict and customer complaints. Both cooks and servers preferred the new structure, and both groups reported that they were being treated better.

The National Restaurant Association distributed information about the new system to its membership. Whyte’s spindle (which quickly transformed into the now-familiar order wheel) did not directly affect behavior. Whyte chose not to confront norms, history, or habit. Instead, he simply eliminated the need for verbal communication and all its attendant problems. He did so immediately, and the improvements lasted forever by changing not people, but things.

FISH DISCOVER WATER LAST

If you didn’t think of Whyte’s solution, you’re in good company. Rarely does the average person conceive of changing the physical world as a way of changing human behavior. We see that others are misbehaving, and we look to change them, not their environment. Caught up in the human side of things, we completely miss the impact of subtle yet powerful sources such as the size of a room or the impact of a chair. Consequently, one of our most powerful sources of influence (our physical space) is often the least used because it’s the least noticeable. In the words of Fred Steele, the renowned sociotechnical theorist, most of us are “environmentally incompetent.” If you doubt this allegation, just ask any of today’s cooks and servers why they don’t scream and curse at one another as did many of their predecessors a half century ago. See if any of them ever point to the order wheel as the source of their cooperation.

The impact of physical space and the things that occupy it on human behavior is equally profound within the business world, and as you might suspect, just as hard to spot. For example, the authors once met with the president of a large insurance company that was losing millions of dollars to quality problems that were widely known but rarely discussed. To turn things around, the president had decided to nurture a culture of candor within the organization. He declared: “We’ll never solve our quality problems until every single person—right down to the newest employee on the loading dock—is comfortable sharing his or her honest opinion.”

Despite the president’s passion for candor, the heartfelt speeches he had given, the fiery memos he had written, and even the engaging training he had initiated, his efforts hadn’t done much to propel people to share their frank opinions. When talking privately with his HR manager, he explained, “I keep telling people to open up, but it’s not working.” So he asked us (the authors) to help him come up with a plan to create a culture in which people, no matter their position or station, could comfortably disagree with anyone—particularly people in authority.

To reach the president’s office, we had to traverse six hallways (each the length of an aircraft carrier), walk by hundreds of thousands of dollars of museum-quality artwork, and pass four different secretary stations. At each station we were visually frisked and subtly interrogated. Finally, we entered the president’s office to find him seated behind a desk the size of a 1964 Caddy. Then, while seated in loosely stuffed chairs that slung us next to the floor and pushed our knees up and into our chests, we stared up at the president, much like grade-school children looking up at the principal.

The president’s first words were, “I get the feeling that people around here are scared to talk to me.” Perhaps he had missed the fact that his office was laid out like Hitler’s chancellery. (Hitler demanded more than 480 feet of hallway so that visitors would “get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich” on arriving.) Granted, there were several forces that had kept employees in this particular company from talking candidly. However, the physical features of the executive suite alone were enough to terrorize anyone.

“I’m not sure that you’ll ever be able to overcome the intimidating effect of your office suite,” one of us eventually shared, in a quivering voice.

From that point on, we developed a plan that contained a variety of features, starting with the strategy of placing decision-making groups in physical surroundings that didn’t shout, “Behold, the great and mighty Oz!”

Consider the profound yet mostly unnoticed effect of things on entire communities. Realizing that the physicality of a neighborhood can send out unspoken messages that encourage socially inappropriate behavior, George Kelling started a community movement that is largely credited for reducing felonies in New York City by as much as 75 percent. Few people are aware of how this influence expert manipulated things to achieve such impressive results.

Before the arrival of George Kelling, New York subways were a favorite venue for muggers, murderers, and drug dealers. Kelling, a criminologist and originator of the “broken windows theory” of crime, argued that disordered surroundings send out an unspoken but powerful message that encourages antisocial behavior. “A broken window left in disrepair,” Kelling explained, “suggests that no one is in charge and no one cares.” This relatively minor condition promotes more disorderly behavior, including violence.

Committed to lessening the effect things were having on the community, Kelling advised the New York Transit Authority to implement a strategy that others before him had simply ridiculed. He told community leaders that they needed to start sweating the small stuff. He pointed out small environmental cues that provided a fertile environment for criminal behavior.

Kelling’s crew began a systematic attack against the silent force, attacking things like graffiti, litter, and vandalism. Officials organized crews in the train yard that rolled paint over newly applied graffiti the instant a car came in for service. Over time, a combination of cleanup and prosecution for minor offenses began to make a difference. Surroundings improved, community pride increased, and petty crimes declined. So did violent crime. Kelling taught people to sweat the small, silent, physical world, and they reaped great rewards.

All this talk about the powerful but often undetected influence of things is good news. It offers hope. If you can influence behavior by eliminating graffiti, shifting a wall, changing a reporting structure, putting in a new system, posting numbers, or otherwise working with things, the job of leader, parent, or change agent doesn’t seem like such a daunting task. After all, these are inanimate objects. Things lie there quietly. Things never resist change, and they stay put once you change them.

There are two reasons that we don’t make good use of things as much as we should. The first is the problem we’ve been discussing. More often than not, powerful elements from our environment remain invisible to us. Work procedures, job layouts, reporting structures, and so forth don’t exactly walk up and shout in our ear. The effect of distance is something we suffer but rarely see. The environment affects much of what we do, yet we often fail to notice its profound impact.

Second, even when we do think about the impact the environment is having on us, we rarely know what to do about it. It’s not as if we’re carrying around a head full of sociophysical theories. If someone were to tell us that we need to worry about Festinger, Schachter, and Lewin’s theory of propinquity (the impact of space on relationships), we’d think he or she was pulling our leg. Propinquity? Who’s ever heard of propinquity?

So this is our final test. To complete our influence repertoire, we must step up to the challenge and become environmentally competent. To the extent that we (1) remember to think about things and (2) are able to come up with theories of how changing things will change behavior, we’ll have access to one more powerful set of influence tools.

LEARN TO NOTICE

If it’s true that we rarely notice the impact of the physical environment that surrounds us because we simply don’t think to look at it, it’s time we change. The more we watch for silent forces in the space around us, the better prepared we’ll be to deal with them. Equally important, the more we note how we fall prey to simple, silent things that surround us, the more likely it is that we’ll extend our vigilance to other domains of our life.

To understand this concept more fully, let’s start by sampling just one domain: our personal life. More specifically, our eating habits. How might understanding the power that things hold over us help here? What might we do to warn our friend Henry, who continues to struggle with his weight loss problem?

To answer this, consider the work of the clever and mischievous social scientist Brian Wansink, who manipulates things to see how a small change in physical features affects a large change in human behavior. For instance, he once invited a crowd of people who had just finished lunch to watch a movie. As subjects filed into the theater, Wansink’s assistants handed them either a small, medium, or bigger-than-your-head bucket of very stale popcorn. The treat was so stale that it squeaked when eaten. One moviegoer described it as akin to eating Styrofoam packing peanuts.

Despite the facts that the popcorn tasted terrible and the crowd was still full from lunch, when Wansink’s crew gathered up the variously sized buckets at the end of the movie, it turned out almost everybody had mindlessly gobbled the chewy material. Even more interesting, the size of the container, not the size of the person or his or her appetite, predicted how much of the food had been consumed. Patrons with big buckets ate 53 percent more than those given the smaller portions. The distraction of the movie, the size of the bucket, and the sound of others eating around them all subtly influenced people to eat something they would otherwise have rejected.

Wansink has even more to teach Henry. For example, it turns out—contrary to what you and I might believe—that we don’t tend to stop eating when we’re full. We eat until small things from our environment make us think we’re full. Wansink demonstrated this by constructing a magic soup bowl. The bowl could be refilled from the bottom without diners catching on to the trick. While people eating from a normal bowl ate on average 9 ounces and then reported being full, those with the bottomless bowls ate 15 ounces. Some ate more than a quart before reporting they’d had enough. Imagine, the two groups were equally satisfied, and yet one group ate 73 percent more than the other because the diners were unconsciously waiting for their bowls to look more empty to cue them that they were full.

Wansink suggests that people make over 200 eating decisions every day without realizing it. This mindless eating adds hundreds of calories to our diets without adding at all to our satisfaction. If half of what Wansink suggests is true, we can profoundly influence our own eating behavior by simply finding ways to become more mindful of these “mindless” choices.

A mere glance at family, company, and community circumstances would reveal the same phenomenon. Much of what we do, for better or for worse, is influenced by dozens of silent environmental forces that drive our decisions and actions in ways that we rarely notice. So, to make the best use of your last source of influence, take your laserlike attention off people and take a closer look at their physical world. Step up to your persistent problem, identify vital behaviors, and then search for subtle features from the environment that are silently driving you and others to misbehave.

MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

Once you’ve identified environmental elements that are subtly driving your or others’ behavior, it’s time to take steps to make the elements more obvious. That is, you should make the invisible visible. Provide actual cues in the space around you to remind people of the behaviors you’re trying to influence. For example, consider another Wansink experiment in which he gave cans of stacked potato chips to various subjects. Control subjects were given normal cans with uniform chips piled one on top of the other and were allowed to snack casually as they engaged in various activities. Experimental subjects were given cans in which every tenth chip was an odd color. The next nine chips would be normal and were followed by another odd-colored chip. Again, subjects were allowed to engage in other activities while snacking on their chips. Experimental subjects consumed 37 percent fewer chips than control subjects who were given no indication of how many chips they’d eaten.

What was going on here? By coloring every tenth chip, Wansink helped make the invisible visible. Nobody said anything about the chips or the colors. Nobody encouraged people to control their eating. Nevertheless, instructed by the visual cue, suddenly eaters were conscious of the volume of chips they were eating, and that awareness alone helped them make a decision rather than follow an impulse.

Business leaders have long understood the importance of making the invisible visible. For example, Emery Air Freight pioneered the use of containerized shipping in the 1960s. The company came up with the idea of using sturdy, reusable, and uniformly sized containers—and the whole world changed. Uniform containers were so much more efficient than previous methods that international shipping prices plummeted. Along with the unprecedented drop in price, industries that had previously been protected from global competition because of high transportation costs (for example, steel and automobiles) suddenly found themselves competing with anyone, anywhere.

And yet, early on, Edward Feeney, the vice president of systems performance at the time, was frustrated because he couldn’t get the workforce to use the new containers to their capacity. Containers were being sealed and shipped without being properly filled. An audit team found they were being properly filled only 45 percent of the time. The workers were extensively trained and constantly reminded of the importance of completely filling the containers, but they were still forgetting to do it more than half of the time. After exhausting these attempts to motivate the workforce, Feeney stumbled on a method that made the invisible visible. He drew conscious attention to the objective by having a “fill to here” line drawn on the inside of every container. Immediately, the rate of completely filled containers went from 45 percent to 95 percent. The problem went away the moment Feeney made the invisible visible.

Hospitals have been making similar improvements by restructuring their physical world. Savvy administrators help people understand the financial implications of their nearly unconscious choices by making invisible costs much more visible. In one hospital, leaders encouraged clinicians to pay attention to even small products that eventually cost a great deal of money. For example, a type of powderless latex gloves cost over 10 times more than a pair of regular, less-comfortable disposable gloves. Yet in spite of regular pleas from senior management to reduce costs, almost everyone in the facility continued to use the pricey gloves for even short tasks. The powderless latex was more comfortable than the cheaper gloves, and besides, what were a few pennies here and there?

Then one day someone placed a “25 Image” sign on the box of inexpensive gloves and a “$3.00” sign on the box of pricier latex gloves. Problem solved. Now that the information was obvious at the moment people were making choices, the use of the expensive gloves dropped dramatically.

And speaking of hands in a hospital, we referred earlier to the appalling state of hand hygiene in U.S. hospitals. Remember Dr. Leon Bender and how he used Starbucks gift cards as an incentive to encourage doctors to use hand antiseptic? This influence method alone increased compliance from 65 to 80 percent. This wasn’t enough for the tenacious Dr. Bender. He wanted more. But what could he do next? After trying several other methods to motivate people to wash more thoroughly, he figured the hospital efforts had topped out until he too realized that he needed to make the invisible visible.

And what could be more invisible than the nasty little microorganisms that cause disease?

This particular problem of invisibility called for some minor theatrics. At a routine meeting of senior physicians, Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist, handed each physician a Petri dish coated with a spongy layer of agar. “I would love to culture your hand,” Murthy told them while inviting each to press his or her palm onto the squishy medium. Murthy then collected the dishes and sent them to the lab for culturing and photographing.

When the photos came back from the lab, the images were frightfully effective. Doctors who had thought their hands were pristine when they submitted to the agar test were provided photographic evidence of the horrific number of bacteria they routinely transported to their patients. Some of the more colorful photos of the bacterial colonies the lab had grown became popular screen savers in the hospital.

When it came to changing physicians’ behavior, photos created poignant vicarious experiences and visual cues that reminded them of the need to properly wash their hands. Doctors didn’t see their germs causing diseases, but they saw the next best thing. They saw whole colonies of the ugly micronatives they were hosting in their own fingerprints. After a few more opinion leaders were brought “face to colony” with the effects of their own inadequate hand hygiene, the hospital moved to nearly 100 percent compliance—and it stuck.

MIND THE DATA STREAM

The influencers we just cited had one strategy in common: they affected how information found its way from the dark nooks and crannies of the unknown into the light of day. By providing small cues in the environment, they drew attention to critical data points, and they changed how people thought and eventually how they behaved. In these cases, individuals weren’t resisting the ideas of washing thoroughly or wearing cheaper gloves or filling containers to the top, but they were not thinking of the behaviors in the moment. So, merely putting the data in front of them was sufficient to change behavior.

The point here is the same one Bandura helped make for us earlier. Information affects behavior. People make choices based on cognitive maps that explain which behavior leads to which outcomes. The problem we’re now exploring deals with our own lack of awareness of where we’re getting our data, as well as how the data are affecting our behavior. Despite the fact that we’re often exposed to incomplete or inaccurate data, if information is fed to us frequently and routinely enough, we begin to act on it as if it were an accurate sample of the greater reality, even when it often isn’t.

For example, try this experiment. As quickly as you can, name every place in the world where armed conflict is currently taking place. If you’re like most people, you can name an average of two to four places. Now ask yourself why you named these particular locales. Is it because these are the only places? Perhaps they’re locations where there is the most bloodshed? Or is it because these are the places of most political significance?

It’s probably because these are the sites that have received sustained media coverage. At any one time there are as many as two dozen armed conflicts taking place throughout the world, and it’s not uncommon that some of the most horrific battles go largely unnoticed by the international audience. What’s shocking about this is not that our mental agenda is so heavily influenced by a handful of news producers but that we are typically unaware that this is happening to us.

We frequently make this mental error because of a convenient heuristic we carry around in our head. It’s known by cognitive psychologists as the “representative heuristic.” To see how it works, take another quiz. What is the greater cause of deaths in the world each year? Suicide or homicide? Fire or drowning? Most people select homicides and fires because these are the catastrophes they see more often in the news.

Suicides are generally kept quiet for reasons of privacy, so we don’t learn of them as often; and fires make for dramatic live coverage. The evening news team can hardly wait to show a reporter standing in front of a fiery blaze. And since we see homicides and fires on the news more often than we see suicides and drownings, we assume that this sample represents the underlying whole, when in fact it grossly distorts it. Death by drowning and suicide are more common, but we apply a simple mental heuristic and fall victim to an inaccurate data stream, and rarely do we know that it’s happening.

Influencers understand the importance of an accurate data stream and do their best to ensure that their strategies focus on vital behaviors by serving up visible, timely, and accurate information that supports their goals. Instead of falling victim to data, they manage data religiously. For example, imagine what Dr. Donald Hopkins was up against when he kicked off the global campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease. To get the campaign started, his biggest challenge was to move the parasite to the top of the agenda of developing-world leaders who typically worried a heck of a lot more about bloody coups, economic disasters, and corrupt politicians than they worried about parasites.

If competing priorities weren’t enough to keep the worm problem out of the spotlight, the fact that most leaders had grown up in urban areas and were completely unaware of the pervasive effects of the Guinea worm in their own country didn’t help. For example, Jimmy Carter, former U.S. president and founder of the Carter Center, told us that the first challenge leaders faced when attacking the Guinea worm disease in Pakistan was that the president of Pakistan had never even heard of the parasite. In addition to the worm’s invisibility, even leaders who knew the plague was widespread paid little attention to the villages that were plagued because the leaders drew their political support from urban areas.

Consequently, Hopkins’s first challenge was to escalate the importance of the Guinea worm disease plight in the eyes of the ruling forces by changing their data stream. That’s why to this day the very first step any Guinea worm eradication team takes is to gather data.

“Data are extremely important in the campaign against Guinea worm disease,” reports Hopkins. “We start by getting baseline information about nationwide infections.” Actually, they’re looking for counterintuitive, eye-popping statistics to catch people’s attention. For instance, in Nigeria national leaders assumed that there were only a few thousand cases nationwide. In 1989, after village coordinators from around the country reported the number of infections in their region, leaders were horrified to discover that there were well over 650,000 cases. They had been off by as much as 3,000 percent! This made Nigeria the most endemic country in the world. With that new piece of information alone, support for eradicating the disease skyrocketed.

Since managing the data stream relies on numbers to change people’s cognitive maps (as opposed to personal experience), the data have to be fresh, consistent, and relevant if they’re going to have much of an impact. Hopkins is quick to point out that with such a small team working at the Carter Center, much of their influence comes from providing leaders with powerful information. Working closely with Dr. Hopkins is Dr. Ernesto Ruiz-Tiben, the technical director of the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. He oversees the Carter Center’s efforts and has been key in tracking and communicating the status of the global campaign. Dr. Ruiz-Tiben makes Guinea worm eradication data available through publications such as the Guinea Worm Wrap Up, which is published every month by the Carter Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This report summarizes the progress and setbacks in each country.

And here’s where Hopkins grins a bit. “We publish lots of graphs, charts, and tables. But none has been more influential than the Guinea worm race. We harness the natural competitive instincts of people by preparing a racetrack with the names of each country (or even the faces of the campaign leaders) on each runner. It’s amazing to see how people respond not just to how many infections they have but to how many more or less they have than a neighboring country.”

Do these data influence behavior?

“I was talking with the president of Burkina Faso,” Hopkins reports, “and sharing some concerns about the campaign. I had all kinds of graphs and charts, but the one he wanted to look at the most was the Guinea worm race. They can’t stand to be at the bottom. It gets their attention.”

At the corporate level, it’s easy to see how the flow of information affects behavior. The fact that different groups of employees are exposed to wildly different data streams helps explain why people often have such different priorities and passions. Different groups, departments, and levels of employees worry about very different aspects of the company’s success—not because they hold different values but because they’re exposed to different data. For example, the frontline employees who interface with complaining customers usually become the customer advocates. The top-level executives who are constantly poring over financial statements become the shareholder advocates. And sure enough, the folks who routinely take quality measures become the quality advocates. No surprise there.

The problem with passion for a single stakeholder group isn’t that employees care greatly about someone or something; it’s just that it’s hard to expect people to act in balanced ways when they have access to only one data stream. For instance, members of a group of senior executives we (the authors) worked with were positively driven by their production numbers, which they reviewed weekly. When issues of morale came up (usually with the issuance of a grievance), they’d become rightfully concerned about “people problems” but generally only after it was too late. The same was true for customer satisfaction. This was also listed as a high priority, but nobody ever actually talked about customers or did anything to improve customer relationships until the company lost a major client to a competitor.

To change the executives’ narrow focus, we changed the data stream. Alongside weekly production numbers, executives now enthusiastically pore over customer and employee data. If you watch their current behavior, you’ll note that they spread their attention across more stakeholders than ever before. We also provided employees who had long shown passion for customer satisfaction with weekly cost and profit data, and they too broadened their interests. For instance, when faced with a dissatisfied customer, instead of simply throwing money at the problem (often the easiest solution), employees began to seek other, more cost-effective fixes. Before the intervention started, leaders and employees alike had talked about the importance of all their stakeholders, but nothing changed their parochial behavior until their data stream expanded.

One warning about data. When it comes to data, there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing.” Corporate leaders often undermine the influence of the data they so carefully gather by overdoing it. The incessant flow of reports, printouts, and e-mails—one heaped upon the other—transforms into numbing and incoherent background noise. Influencers never make this mistake. They’re focused and deliberate about the data they share. They understand that the only reason for gathering or publishing any data is to reinforce vital behaviors.

SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER

As difficult as it can be to notice the effects of data on our behavior, it’s much more difficult to notice the effects of physical space. Architects create space, and then we live with its effects for years on end, mostly unnoticed. When social psychologist Leon Festinger and others first started examining the effects of space (and its two-dimensional cousin, distance) on relationships, they had no idea that they had stumbled onto one of the most profound social-psychological phenomena of all time—propinquity. Simply put, propinquity is physical proximity, and Festinger and others spent a good amount of time studying how it affects our behaviors and relationships.

For instance, look at who marries whom and how they meet. Look at who collaborates on spontaneous group efforts at work. Examine who has the most friends and acquaintances in an apartment complex. Explore which employees are satisfied with their relationship with their supervisor. Surely most of these complicated interpersonal scenarios are largely a function of personal interests and interpersonal chemistry. Right?

Not really. Festinger discovered that the frequency and quality of human interaction is largely a function of physical distance. Apartment dwellers who are located near stairwells are acquainted with more people than individuals who have fewer people walking by their front doors. People who live across from the mailboxes are acquainted with more of their neighbors than anyone else in the building. At the corporate level, bosses who interact the most frequently with their subordinates generally have the best relationships. And who interacts most often? Bosses who are located closest to their direct reports.

But the opposite isn’t necessarily true. That is, too much distance doesn’t merely lead to inconvenience and loss of friendship. At the corporate level, when employees don’t meet and chat (getting to know one another and jointly working on problems), bad things happen. Silos form and infighting reigns. Employees start labeling others with ugly terms such as “them” and “they”—meaning the bad people “out there” whom they rarely see and who are surely the cause of most of the problems they experience. If you want to predict who doesn’t trust or get along with whom in a company, take out a tape measure.

But not everyone suffers from the negative effects of space and distance. Some people use it as a powerful influence lever. And when it comes to exploiting the use of space as a means of fostering vital behaviors, Delancey Street once again sets the standard. Dr. Mimi Silbert’s goal, remember, is to foster two vital behaviors. She wants residents to be responsible for others rather than just themselves, and she wants to ensure that everyone confronts everyone with whom they have concerns. But how? These are people who are just as likely to punch each other out as anything else.

The first thing Silbert does is to stack previously mortal enemies on top of one another. She takes three guys—one new resident who’s a card-carrying member of the Mexican Mafia, another who six months earlier was a Crip, and another who just a year ago was a leader in the Aryan Brotherhood—and makes them roommates. Nine such diverse folks will share a dorm. Someone from another background will be the crew boss. Perhaps a member of yet another race will be the minyan leader. It’s like international spaghetti with every possible politically incorrect grouping tossed into the mix, and then they’re asked to help and confront each other—in healthy ways.

We (the authors) watched the effects of placing former enemies in close proximity while eating in Delancey’s restaurant. A fairly new employee named Kurt—a white man embroidered with tattoos from neck to fingertips—dropped a plate that smashed to pieces. Kurt had been at Delancey for just a couple of months and had been given the simple assignment of busing tables. Apparently he hadn’t mastered the job yet.

And why should he? Kurt had come from a high-crime, largely black area of Richmond, California, where he had been schooled since age six in the hateful propaganda of the white-gang culture, not the restaurant business. He had been homeless for five years before joining Delancey, and for the first 60 days after entering the program he thought he’d die as his body adjusted to a life without drugs. He was hardly in any shape to be impressing customers.

When Kurt’s plate shattered on the floor, he ducked his head in shame. A few dozen customers reflexively lifted their heads from their meals to look toward the source of the noise, only adding to his humiliation. Kurt was torn between wanting to curse at the onlookers and wanting to disappear entirely. What happened next was compelling evidence of the power of propinquity. The black maître d’—a former gang rival from Richmond and now a roommate—hurried over to where Kurt was kneeling over the broken plate and put his hand on Kurt’s back in a gesture of support. He then knelt down and helped Kurt pick up the broken plate. He smiled at him and shrugged his shoulders, offering a look that said, “It happens.” And with that, Kurt shook it off and returned to his duties.

While there’s a lot going on at Delancey to influence change, you can’t help but notice how propinquity is used to foster relationships. When you assign people interdependent roles and then put them in close proximity, you increase the chance that relationships that had once been the bane of their existence are now a big part of their personal transformation.

Families are also affected by how they make use of their space. For example, a recent study showed that the family dining table is vanishing from homes at a rapid rate. A parallel rise in family dysfunction and discontent suggests that familial unity is declining at a similar rate. Could there be a correlation here? The idea is not that a drop in furniture sales will harm family solidarity. It’s that the dining room table is a significant facilitator of family togetherness. Do away with the table, and family members lose a fairly large portion of their time together.

But why would families stop buying and using dining room tables? Behold the microwave. There was a time when the preparation of the evening meal was such a significant undertaking that everyone, of necessity, ate at the same time and in the same place. The microwave changed all that by making it easy to prepare single portions for whomever whenever. Suddenly there was no need to prepare one big meal at one time.

Dining tables disappeared, and so did a regular ritual that brought people into face-to-face communication. Nowadays teenagers are as likely to have dinner alone or with their pals as they are to eat with their parents. Couple this trend with the creation of massive homes and separate TV rooms, and you’ll see how space (the final frontier) has contributed to the average parent’s loss of influence.

Within corporations, where friendships are less important than collaboration, propinquity also plays an important role in daily effectiveness. Distance keeps people from routinely interacting, and as we’ve suggested, it often leads to animosity and loss of influence. But it also leads to a loss of informal contact.

Most people don’t lament this loss, but they should. When people casually bump into each other at work, they ask questions, share ideas, and surprisingly often come up with solutions to problems. The storied social scientist Bill Ouchi found that one practice at Hewlett-Packard (HP) greatly increased informal contact and collaboration. HP leaders demanded that employees keep, of all things, a messy desk. The goal wasn’t to attract roaches; it was to attract humans. By leaving work visible and accessible, they found that it was much more likely that others wandering by would see, take an interest, and get involved in the work of a colleague.

As people bump into one another, take in the contents of a messy desk, and share ideas, they’re also much more likely to work together on a formal project. Employees extend what starts out as a casual conversation into a shared task. In an area in which multiple heads are required to solve most problems, this can be a real benefit. And once again, distance kills the chance that people will run into each other and then work together on a shared project. In fact, in a study conducted at Bell Labs, researchers tested for factors that determine whether two scientists might collaborate. The best predictor was, you guessed it, the distance between their offices. Scientists who worked next to one another were three times more likely to discuss technical topics that led to collaboration than scientists who sat 30 feet from one another. Put them 90 feet apart, and they are as likely to collaborate as those who work several miles away! The probability of collaboration sharply decreases in a matter of a few feet.

Given the overwhelming impact of proximity on informal contact and eventual collaboration, savvy leaders rely on the use of physical space as a means of enhancing interaction. Instead of simply telling people to collaborate, they move employees next to one another or provide them a shared common area or eating facility. At Hewlett-Packard, executives take it a step further by mandating a daily break where everyone leaves his or her desk, retires to a common area, and drinks fruit juices while chatting with fellow employees about what’s happening at work.

Over the years, this forced elbow-bumping has cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in food and drink, but many will argue that the benefits that come from informally chatting, collaborating, and eventually synergizing are well worth the investment. When it comes to corporate effectiveness, you can have propinquity work against you, or, as in HP’s case, make it your ally.

Community leaders can benefit as well. For example, Muhammad Yunus discovered the importance of propinquity when working with poverty-stricken women in rural villages of Bangladesh. For generations women had been kept from venturing very far outside their own homes. When Dr. Yunus decided to give Bangladeshi women a hand-up by extending them microloans—in groups of five so they could support one another—he quickly learned that he would have to bring them together under the same roof, and frequently, or his plan would never work. Dr. Yunus wasn’t merely changing his customers’ financial circumstances when he started his banking business; he was turning the entire social community on end, and this had to be done in small, safe, social groups or not at all.

When we (the authors) were visiting a village called Gazipur in Bangladesh, here’s what we learned about what Dr. Yunus had done to enlist the power of propinquity to create a new social order. In addition to promoting economic well-being, Grameen Bank was asking that each borrower commit to “16 Decisions.” As we stood in the back of a small building containing a 30-member borrowing unit, we watched attentively as all 30 borrowers stood in unison and recited the 16 Decisions—one of which was: “I will neither give nor receive dowry.”

This particular commitment is of grave importance to the group’s economic well-being. The dowry—which parents are required to pay a man to marry their daughter—can cause both social strife and economic disaster. Families are brought to penury as they try to scrape together enough money to induce a man to take their daughter in wedlock. Daughters are routinely berated by fathers who lament the fact that they fathered a girl who would later cost them so much money. Now, here stood 30 women at attention, loudly proclaiming their commitment to abolish the “curse of the dowry.”

Later, as we chatted with the 30 women, we asked, “How many of you have had a son or daughter marry in the past year?” Five women proudly raised their hands. And then we sprung the follow-up question. “How many of you either gave or received dowry?” Three hands went sheepishly into the air. But two—Dipali and Shirina—didn’t raise theirs. Here was evidence that this millennium-old practice was giving way. So we asked the two women to tell us how they had resisted the practice. They smiled broadly, looked at each other, and then Dipali said, “I had my son marry her daughter.” With that the 30 women broke into spontaneous applause.

No longer did these women hide behind their own front door and simply take what fate had handed them. Now they met, talked, formed businesses, supported each other, signed for each other’s loans, and became a genuine community, all within the confines of their own building where they met weekly.

Several forces are at play every time these intrepid entrepreneurs meet and fight their way out of poverty. Surely the social supports they provide one another help them make it through tough times, and they have plenty of tough times. The fact that they sign for each other’s loans goes a long way toward ensuring that the businesses they create are well thought through. By forming 30-person units, they now offer as a group enough potential profit to command a bank’s attention—something they never commanded individually.

And now we add one more feature. Yunus and his team had the good sense to design a simple space where this all happens. It wasn’t easy. To come up with a building that was inexpensive enough to fit the budget of 30 poverty-stricken women called for a lot of work and careful planning. But they eventually did it, and the design ended up winning several international design awards.

So let’s hear it for the architects out there who provide them (and us) with space. Now let’s just hope we have the good sense to understand its effects.

MAKE IT EASY

For years there was a running debate concerning whether humans are the only animals that use tools. When scientists watched chimpanzees sit next to an anthill and place a stick in the entrance hole as a way of gathering ants—without having to dig—they decided that these creatures, with whom we share almost 95 percent of our DNA, were also using tools. So we now have our answer. Smart creatures, including Homo sapiens, use tools. Why? Because smart creatures do their best to find a way to make hard tasks easier.

Around a century ago, Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, decided that it was time that we tool users start using tools more wisely. After noticing that employees at Bethlehem Steel used only one shovel size for every task, he determined that the most effective load was 21.5 pounds, and he set about designing and purchasing shovels of different sizes to ensure that no matter the medium, the weight employees hefted would always be the same. Never again would employees shovel slag and snow with the same instrument.

Nowadays you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who does similar time-study work. These folks don’t merely study best practices; they study common practices and then through careful analysis make them better. Unfortunately, the principles of this discipline haven’t always found their way into complex human problems such as safety, productivity, time to market, crime rates, and so forth. Dr. Whyte (the innovator behind the restaurant spindle) brought an engineering solution to a social issue, but most people don’t naturally think of industrial engineering as a resource for overcoming human challenges.

Influencers don’t make this mistake. They apply efficiency principles at the very highest level. Rather than constantly finding ways to motivate people to continue with their boring, painful, dangerous, or otherwise loathsome activities, they find a way to change things. Like an ape fashioning a stick to its needs, the influencer changes things in order to make the right behaviors easier to enact. And depending on whether the glass is half empty or half full, influencers also use things to make the wrong behaviors more difficult to enact.

For example, one of the main reasons the Guinea worm disease was eradicated so effectively across the sprawling subcontinent of India was that influencers took steps to make it far easier to drink good water than to drink bad water. Here’s the strategy they implemented.

In developing-world villages, women often spend several hours each day traveling to and from the local water source. Hours that could have been spent in more fruitful or even enjoyable activities are expended walking back and forth to a pool while hauling a heavy pot. If this isn’t bad enough, the pools these dedicated women hike to and from are often teeming with water fleas that are, in turn, filled with Guinea worm larvae.

Change agents from the Carter Center had learned that villagers who filtered the water through their skirts had diminished the Guinea worm disease problem. Let’s add some more detail to that project. In order to make it easier to filter the water effectively (many skirts didn’t filter the water very well), the Carter Center set out on a campaign to develop an affordable and long-lasting cloth filter. People at the center knew that if they could find a way to get an effective, efficient, and durable filter into the hands of everyone who drew water, the parasite could be eliminated.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, in his work with the center, explained how this all-important filter came about:

I went to see Edgar Bronfman, whose family owned about 20 percent of E.I. DuPont Company. I asked Edgar if he would donate $250,000 over a five-year period, which in those days was a lot of money. He asked me, “What are you going to use the money for?” And I answered: “The best way to do away with the Guinea worm is to pour water through a very fine filter cloth.” And he said, “Like this napkin on the table?” And I said, “Yes.” “Then why don’t you use napkins?” he asked. I explained, “Well, because if you take this napkin and wet and dry it 8 or 10 times a day, in the tropics it’ll rot in a couple of weeks.” And he responded, “Well, maybe we could help.”

Bronfman took the case to the DuPont board of directors, which knew of a company in Switzerland that produced a nylon fiber that would likely serve this purpose—a fiber that wouldn’t rot in the tropics. DuPont provided these fibers to a company that does precision weaving, and that company created the material for the filters. DuPont then donated 2 million square yards of this cloth to the Carter Center.

“This was the main resource we used to get rid of the Guinea worm,” President Carter concluded.

Once the specialized cloth had been produced, the task of getting people to filter their water was made a great deal easier, and with the help of that simple invention, the parasite began disappearing in hundreds of villages.

In India, there was an even more elegant engineering solution available than simply making it easy to filter the water effectively. Unlike sub-Saharan Africa, in India clear, clean water runs close to the surface of the earth. So engineers drilled and capped bore-hole wells in hundreds of villages across the country. This simple one-time strategy made safe water far more accessible and bad water much harder to get to. Guinea worm in India, robbed of its hosts, died off rapidly.

Much of Delancey’s success also depends on making the right behavior easier while making the wrong behavior more difficult. This is particularly true when it comes to drug abuse. Imagine the challenge of ensuring that new residents succeed during their first few drug-free weeks. Withdrawing from heroin is described as one of the most excruciatingly painful trials you can experience. Addicts who come to loathe the drug, and who experience little benefit from the high after years of abuse, continue to use the drug just to avoid the pain of withdrawing.

Yet almost every heroin addict who comes to Delancey makes it through this agonizing period. Why? In part because they’ve changed their zip code. Minutes before walking through the front gate, new residents’ environments had been filled with people who used, supplied, or supported their addictive behavior. Now they’re in a dorm with eight other people who don’t. And outside the dorm are another 50 residents on their floor who don’t. And in their building are another 200 who don’t. In order to get to drugs, residents would now have to go to much greater lengths and distances than ever before. And all of this happens because Dr. Silbert understands the importance of making the wrong behavior hard, and the right behavior easy—or at least easier.

If you’re not a drug addict and don’t have worms, what can this simple principle do for you? Or maybe for our friend Henry? Here’s some more good news on the diet front. Brian Wansink has shown that if you make good eating choices a little easier and bad ones a little harder, you can make a substantial dent in your waistline.

For example, Brian Wansink found that plate size affects the amount of food a person will eat during a meal before deciding that he or she is satisfied. Smaller plates left people satisfied with smaller portions. If you want to eat fewer calories, change the dishes sitting in your cupboard. He also learned that the positioning of snacks and whether packaging is clear or opaque can increase or decrease consumption by 50 percent or more. A candy jar placed on a desk rather than a few feet away on a bookshelf can double the amount of candy consumed—once again, propinquity at work. Ice cream with a clear top in the freezer is much more likely to be eaten than the same treat in a cardboard box.

And when it comes to using your exercise equipment, you can bet that distance also takes its toll. Move your exercise bike from your TV room to your basement, and you’ve just dramatically cut your chances of using it. Travel to a gym for your routine cardiovascular exercise (as opposed to using a piece of home equipment), and this too will lessen your chances substantially.

So, if you’re one who struggles to maintain a healthy lifestyle, do a quick inventory of things that affect your behavior. Take a count of how many bad food choices are within your reach at each hour of a typical day. Then take a count of how many good choices are within the same distance. Look at how difficult it is for you to exercise. Do you have to walk to a distant and socially isolated room to get to your equipment? Do you have to unpack something from a closet before you can get started?

Discover how many items in your home you can simply move to make the right behavior easier and the wrong behavior more difficult. Sure, you can always hunker down, gut it out, and suffer as a way of ensuring that you eat right and exercise regularly. You can always plug in a motivational tape to keep your spirits high in order to climb that mountain. Or you can just make the right things easier to do and the wrong things more difficult to do. It’s your call.

Healthcare institutions have also learned the importance of making the correct behavior easier. Consider what many institutions are doing to reduce medication errors. In the past, pills came in only a reddish-brown bottle that offered no information about its content and looked just like the reddish-brown bottle next to it. Oops. Couple this challenge with the fact that many people who fill medical orders do so after pulling back-to-back shifts while squinting to read that poor handwriting that passes as a prescription, and it’s easy to see why medication errors cause tens of thousands of deaths annually.

Nowadays progressive pharmaceutical companies and hospitals are teaming up to make the right choices obvious. By deft use of colored bottles and better labels, many hospitals have significantly reduced medication errors and subsequently needless deaths. It seems odd that something as important as not killing patients could be affected as recently as a few years ago with an intervention as simple as, well, making the right behavior simple. But, then again, when it comes to changing human behavior, most people would rather motivate the guilty—for instance, suing the blighters who spoon out the wrong drugs—than help them change the behavior. And when it comes to enabling others, we often turn to training before we look for ways to make the task easier to perform.

At the corporate level, companies are becoming more attuned to the concept of making the right behavior, such as buying their product, easier. For instance, consumer guru Paco Underhill helped increase the sales of doggie treats by making it just a little easier to take them off a shelf. Underhill found that young and middle-aged adults were more likely to buy animal treats than were the elderly and children. This piqued his curiosity. He videotaped customers on the pet aisle and quickly discovered what was keeping treat sales low among certain age groups. Typically the staple items like pet food were on the eye-and waist-level shelves, while treats were placed on higher shelves.

It turns out that the young and old find it significantly more difficult to reach items on a higher shelf. One video clip showed an elderly woman attempting to use a carton of aluminum foil to knock down a package of treats. Another revealed a child dangerously climbing shelves to try to reach the package. Moving the treats down one shelf made the behavior just easy enough to boost sales immediately.

But not everyone is listening. In fact, Bill Friedman, one of the biggest gurus on the effects of the environment on human behavior, is being systematically ignored. He studies gambling casinos. By watching thousands of hours of video of people gambling, he has discovered an interesting fact. The features that make a hotel attractive make gamblers miserable.

Las Vegas hotels compete on the basis of their size and splendor. The higher the ceilings and the longer the vistas, the more valued the hotel. Gamblers, in contrast, seek small, intimate places. When you think about it, sitting in front of a one-armed bandit and pulling a lever is actually quite boring. You’d have to pay production-line workers good money to do such things. What people find interesting at a casino is not the task of gambling but the interactions they have with other people. The job of gambling is made more fun (a surrogate for easy) when other people are around. Consequently, when Friedman helps owners transform large unfriendly venues into cozy ones, profits soar.

But big Vegas hotels nowadays are competing as big hotels, so they ignore Friedman’s advice and make massive, unfriendly casinos. Consequently, many modern hotels barely break even on their gambling (blasphemous in years past) and rely on entertainment, room costs, and restaurants to make money. Nevertheless, the principle is still the same. If you follow the guru’s advice and make gambling more pleasant (that is, easy) by making it cozy and friendly, you’ll make money hand over fist. But then again, maybe that’s just too easy.

MAKE IT UNAVOIDABLE

Making use of things to enable behavior works best when you can alter the physical world in a way that eliminates human choice entirely. You don’t merely make good behavior desirable. You make it inevitable. This is where structure, process, and procedures come into play, and once again, the corporate world leads the way. Engineers, tiring of reminding employees not to stick their fingers in certain machines, build in mechanical features that prevent people from putting their hands at risk. Pilots follow lockstep procedures and rigid checklists that require them to double and triple check their takeoff and landing procedures.

When it comes to the fast-food industry, we’ve hardwired those tasks that used to call for talent and that often used to put customer satisfaction and profits at risk. For example, when it comes to taking an order, employees can simply push picture buttons, and of course, nobody has to know how to make change because the register does it automatically. It’s all been routinized. When it comes to taking an order and making change, it’s not only easy to do the right thing. It’s now almost impossible to do the wrong thing.

However, when it comes to the profound and complex social problems we’ve been addressing, we’re not as good at hardwiring successes through the manipulation of the physical environment. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to change. Often all that’s required to make good behavior inevitable is to structure it into your daily routine. If we’ve learned only one thing about today’s overscheduled world, it’s that structure drives out lack of structure. Meetings happen. On the other hand, “I’ll get back to you sometime later”—maybe that won’t happen. So, if you want to guarantee a positive behavior, build it into a special meeting or hardwire it into an existing meeting agenda.

For example, the CEO of a large defense contracting company the authors worked with saw a massive increase in innovative breakthroughs when he and his senior leadership team scheduled and met regularly with groups of employees to solicit ideas. This calendared practice created a forum that encouraged and enabled new behaviors, thereby making the right behavior inevitable. At Delancey, Silbert makes use of calendared events by taking them one step further and transforming them into rituals. These ordered procedures consist of hardwired meetings that are never missed and that are highly symbolic, quite volatile, and enormously effective at making the right behavior inevitable. Consider the Delancey ritual referred to simply as “Games.” This particular ritual is not always fun, but it’s always done.

Say you’re a resident at Delancey. Three times a week you and members of your minyan get together to dump on each other. A disinterested person ensures that nothing gets physical, but beyond that it’s pretty unstructured. During the Games people learn the egalitarian approach to feedback that Delancey wants. Anyone can challenge anyone. If you think your crew boss is a jerk, you give him a slip of paper inviting him to a Game. He must show up. And when he’s there, you can unload on him to your heart’s content. Anyone from Silbert on down can be invited to a Game by anyone else.

Over time, the quality of the Games increases as the volume decreases. Residents become better at sharing feedback. What doesn’t change is that this long-standing ritual makes the right behavior inevitable. People don’t like to confront others—particularly scary and powerful others. Left to their own proclivities, residents would do what anyone else would do: toggle from silence (holding our complaints inside) to violence (blowing up in a verbal tirade). So Silbert turns feedback into a ritual, calls it “Games,” and then lets the Games begin. Three times a week without fail.

SUMMARY: STRUCTURAL ABILITY

When you first read that sociophysical guru Fred Steele thinks that most of us are environmentally incompetent, it’s only natural to become defensive. That’s a harsh term. Who died and left him in charge of measuring our competency? But then when you read of the dozens of environment-based strategies influencers routinely employ as a means of bringing about change, you realize that most of us really don’t turn to the power of propinquity or the data stream or any other physical factor as a means of supporting our influence efforts.

When it comes to developing an influence strategy, we just don’t think about things as our first line of influence. Given that things are far easier to change than people and that these things can then have a permanent impact on how people behave, it’s high time we pick up on the lead of Whyte, Steele, Wansink, and others and add the power of the space we inhabit to our influence repertoire. And who knows? Someday an everyday person may even be able to say the word propinquity in public without drawing snickers.

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