Made to Stick (27 page)

And, while we should always think about “what’s in it” for our audience, we should remember to stay clear of Maslow’s Basement. “What’s in it” for our audience might be aesthetic motivation or the desire for transcendence rather than a $250 bonus. Floyd Lee said, “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.” Who wouldn’t want a leader like Floyd Lee?

STORIES

T
he nurse was working in the neonatal intensive-care unit, where newborns with serious health problems are treated and monitored. She’d been watching one baby in particular for several hours, and she didn’t like what she was seeing. His color, a key indicator of potential problems, had been fluctuating—wavering between a healthy shade of pink and a duller, more troublesome hue.

Suddenly, within a matter of seconds, the baby turned a deep blue-black. The nurse’s stomach fell. Others in the ICU yelled for an X-ray technician and a doctor.

The gathering medical team was operating on the assumption that the baby’s lung had collapsed, a common problem for babies on ventilators. The team prepared for the typical response to a collapsed lung, which involves piercing the chest and inserting a tube to suck the air from around the collapsed lung, allowing it to reinflate.

But the nurse thought it was a heart problem. As soon as she saw the baby’s color—that awful blue-black—she suspected a pneumopericardium, a condition in which air fills the sac surrounding the heart, pressing inward and preventing the heart from beating. The nurse was terrified, because the last time she witnessed a pneumopericardium the baby died before the problem could even be diagnosed.

The nurse tried to stop the frantic preparations to treat the lung. “It’s the heart!” she said. But in response the other medical personnel pointed to the heart monitor, which showed that the baby’s heart was fine; his heart rate was bouncing along steadily, at the normal newborn rate of 130 beats per minute. The nurse, still insistent, pushed their hands away and screamed for quiet as she lowered a stethoscope to check for a heartbeat.

There was no sound—the heart was
not
beating.

She started doing compressions on the baby’s chest. The chief neonatologist burst into the room and the nurse slapped a syringe in his hand. “It’s a pneumopericardium,” she said. “Stick the heart.”

The X-ray technician, who was finally receiving results from his scan, confirmed the nurse’s diagnosis. The neonatologist guided the syringe into the heart and slowly released the air that had been strangling the baby’s heart. The baby’s life was saved. His color slowly returned to normal.

Later, the group realized why the heart monitor misled them. It is designed to measure electrical activity, not actual heartbeats. The baby’s heart nerves were firing—telling the heart to beat at the appropriate rate—but the air in the sac around the heart prevented the heart from actually beating. Only when the nurse used the stethoscope—so she could hear whether the heart was pumping correctly—did it become clear that his heart had stopped.

T
his story was collected by Gary Klein, a psychologist who studies how people make decisions in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. He spends time with firefighters, air-traffic controllers, powerplant operators, and intensive-care workers. The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in Klein’s book
Sources of Power
.

Klein says that, in the environments he studies, stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching
tools. They show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions. Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn’t recognized before and highlight unexpected, resourceful ways in which people have solved problems.

Medically, the story related above teaches important lessons. It instructs people in how to spot and treat the specific condition pneumopericardium. More broadly, it warns medical personnel about relying too much on machines. The heart monitor was functioning perfectly well, but it couldn’t substitute for the insight of a human being with a simple stethoscope.

These medical lessons are not particularly useful to people who don’t work in health care. But the story is
inspiring
to everyone. It’s a story about a woman who stuck to her guns, despite implicit pressure to conform to the group’s opinion. It’s an underdog story—in the hierarchical hospital environment, it was the
nurse
who told the
chief neonatologist
the right diagnosis. A life hinged on her willingness to step out of her “proper place.”

The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared to generating
action
. In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a
credible
idea makes people believe. An
emotional
idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

Photocopiers are perhaps the most complex machines that most of us will ever use. What other everyday machine combines optical, mechanical, chemical, and electrical technologies? It’s a wonder copiers work at all. And often they don’t. When there’s a problem—and it’s not one that a cubicle-dweller can fix by opening and shutting the paper tray a few times—it takes a very sophisticated repair person to troubleshoot the situation.

Researcher Julian Orr spent a lot of time among Xerox copier repairmen and found that they spent a lot of time swapping stories. Take the story below, which was told by a Xerox copier salesperson over a game of cribbage at lunch. (We’ve provided some explanatory comments in brackets.) The salesperson starts with a reference to a recent mechanical change made by copier designers in an attempt to prevent an ordinary power surge from frying multiple components:

T
hese cribbage-playing guys in the lunchroom are simply talking shop, as we all do. A misleading E053 error may not constitute drama in your world, but no doubt we all have our equivalents.

Why do people talk shop? Part of the reason is simply Humanity 101—we want to talk to other people about the things that we have in common. Xerox repairmen work with photocopiers, so they talk about them. But that’s not the only factor at play here. For example, the storyteller above could have shared the general arc of the story without the details: “I had a real bear of a problem today—it took me four hours to get to the bottom of it. I’m glad that one’s over.” Or he
could have leapt straight to the punch line: “After hours of hassle, I traced the problem back to a measly burned-out dicorotron. How was
your
morning?”

Instead, he tells a story that’s much more interesting to his lunch partners. It has built-in drama—a misleading code leads two men on a wild goose chase until they uncover, through lots of work and thought, that the problem is simpler than they initially thought. Why is this story format more interesting? Because it allows his lunch partners to play along. He’s giving them enough information so that they can mentally test out how they would have handled the situation. The people in the room who weren’t aware of the misleading E053 code have now had their “E053 schema” fixed. Before, there was only one way to respond to an E053 code. Now, repairmen know to be aware of the “misleading E053” scenario.

In other words, this story is part entertainment and part instruction. Shop talk conveys important clues about how to respond to the world. It teaches nurses not to have blind faith in heart monitors. It teaches copy repairmen to beware of the misleading E053 code.

But the stories above aren’t simply transferring nuggets of information. The Xerox story is
not
functionally equivalent to an e-mail sent around the company that contains the line “Watch out for false E053 codes related to burned-out dicorotrons.” Something more profound is happening here. It will take a bit of unpacking to reveal the additional value that these stories bring.

Stories are strongly associated with entertainment—movies and books and TV shows and magazines. When children say “Tell me a story,” they’re begging for entertainment, not instruction.

Being the “audience” for a story seems like a passive role—audiences who get their stories from television are called “couch potatoes,”
after all. But “passive” may be overstating the case. When we read books, we have the sensation of being drawn into the author’s world. When friends tell us stories, we instinctively empathize. When we watch movies, we identify with the protagonists.

But what if stories involve us in less intuitive, more dramatic ways? One team of researchers has produced some exciting evidence suggesting that the line between a story’s “audience” and a story’s “protagonist” may be a bit blurry.

T
hree psychologists interested in how people come to understand stories created a few for their study participants to read on a computer. They divided the participants into two groups. The first group read a story in which a critical object was
associated
with the main character in the story—for instance, “John
put on
his sweatshirt before he went jogging.” The second group read a story in which the same critical object was
separated
from the main character: “John
took off
his sweatshirt before jogging.”

Two sentences later, the story threw in a reference to the sweatshirt, and the computer was able to track how long it took people to read that sentence. Something strange happened: The people who thought John had taken off his sweatshirt before the jog
took more time to read the sentence
than the people who thought John had it on.

This result is subtle but fascinating. It implies that we create a kind of geographic simulation of the stories we hear. It’s one thing to say “Reading stories makes us see pictures in our head.” We’d all find that statement intuitive. It’s quite another thing to say that when John left his sweatshirt behind, he left it back at the house in a more remote place in our heads. For that to be true, we cannot simply
visualize
the story on a movie screen in our heads; we must somehow
simulate
it, complete with some analogue (however loose) to the spatial relationships described in the story. These studies suggest that
there’s no such thing as a passive audience. When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it. But what good is simulation?

A
group of UCLA students were asked to think about a current problem in their lives, one that was “stressing them out” but was potentially solvable in the future, such as a problem with schoolwork or with a relationship.

The students were told that the goal of the experiment was to help them deal with the problem effectively, and they got some brief instructions on problem-solving: “It is important to think about the problem, learn more about it, think about what you can do, take steps to deal with it…. Resolving it could reduce your stress, make you feel pleased with how you dealt with it, and help you grow from the experience.” After receiving these instructions, this “control group” was sent home and asked to report back to the lab a week later.

A second group of students, the “event-simulation” group, were kept in the lab. They were asked to mentally simulate how the problem had unfolded:

The event-simulation participants had to retrace, step by step, the events that led to their problem. Presumably, reviewing the chain of causation might help the students think about how to fix the problem, like programmers engaged in systematic debugging.

A third group, the “outcome-simulation” group, was asked to mentally simulate a positive outcome emerging from the problem: