小眼睛的健康世界

A legacy of Mandela

Others can better write about Nelson Mandela's impact on the world stage, on how he stood up for the dignity of all people and on how he changed our world.

For those that seek to make a change in the world, whether global or local, one lesson of his life is this:

You can.

You can make a difference.

You can stand up to insurmountable forces.

You can put up with far more than you think you can.

Your lever is far longer than you imagine it is, if you choose to use it.

If you don't require the journey to be easy or comfortable or safe, you can change the world.

Big promises can lead to better experiences

A $75 bottle of wine tastes better than a $14 bottle of wine. Even if you switch the wines. The promise implied in the price actually changes the way we experience the product.

Two things to keep in mind:

a. Giant promises lead to poor experiences. When you strain credulity and then fail to deliver on the miracle, we won't enjoy it, nor will we trust you again any time soon.

b. The reason we hesitate to make big promises is that we are afraid. Afraid to own it, afraid to be vulnerable in the face of possible disappointment.

Once you make a big promise, you have to work harder to keep it. Easier, it seems, to merely make tiny promises instead.

But the fact remains: Human beings have better experiences when they expect to have a better experience. To hold back on your promise is to deprive your customer of something valuable.

A promise doesn't have to be a grandiose statement, with or without fine print. It can be something as subtle as the music you hear when you walk into a restaurant or the respect a salesperson offers you when you first interact...

[I'm going to disagree with myself about a different sort of case--it is the promise that starts an ongoing experience. A promise just big enough to get me started on something that gets better all the time is the best way to engage, because that ever-improving experience will continue to delight and surprise, increasing my word of mouth and satisfaction. Alas, these sorts of experiences are hard to build and hard to find.]

Looking for patterns (where they don't exist)

What do Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter all have in common?

That's right: They have brand names that revolve around repeating a letter. Two "o"s in the first three and a double "t" in the last.

Human beings are pattern-making machines. That's a key to our survival instinct--we seek out patterns and use them to predict the future.

Which is great, except when the pattern isn't there, when our pattern-making machinery is busy picking things out that truly don't matter.

One of the problems of using the past to predict the future is that we sometimes fall in love with the inevitable coincidental patterns that can't help but exist in any set. But that doesn't mean that they work for predicting the future. Past performance is often no predictor of future results.

And yet you wouldn't know that from all the meetings we have arguing about things that can be clearly proven to be random artifacts.

The real danger of false pattern matching is that it helps us avoid the real work of digging deep for a genuine understanding of human behavior and the organizations that succeed.

Resting smiley face

When no one is looking and you're not trying, what shows on your face?

We have a default setting, an arrangement of muscles that gives our mouth and eyes a look. Some have, as a friend of mine says, "resting bitchy face." People rely so much on reading faces that even though you might not intend it, people are making an assumption about your mood and your approachability.

Interesting question: What's the 'resting face' of your brand, your business, your website? In the ordinary course of business, when no one is really focused on trying, what do your emails, signage and word choices telegraph about you?

Over time, many businesses devolve into an efficient yet foreboding default. It takes effort to move uphill, to put a smile into your voice and your typical interactions.

What could be worth more effort than that, though?

Extinguishing the tantrum cycle

Tantrums are frightening. Whether it's an employee, a customer or a dog out of control, tantrum behavior is so visceral, self-defeating and unpredictable, rational participants want nothing more than to make it go away.

And so the customer service rep or boss works to placate the tantrum thrower, which does nothing but reinforce the behavior, setting the stage for ever more tantrums.

Consider three ideas:

Listen to the person, not the tantrum
Tantrums want to deal with tantrums
Create systems to avoid it in the first place
When an employee calls you up, furious, in mid-tantrum, it's tempting to placate or to argue back. That's the tantrum pressing your buttons. Instead, ask him to write down every thing that's bothering him, along with what he hopes you'll do, and then call you back. Or even better, meet with you tomorrow.

Email tantrums are similar. If someone sends you an email tantrum, don't respond, point by point, proving that you are correct. Instead, consider ways to de-escalate, not by giving in to the argument, but by refusing to have the argument.

Engaging in the middle of a tantrum does two things: it rewards the tantrum by giving it your attention, and it makes it likely that you'll get caught up, and say or do something that, in the mind of the tantrum-thrower, justifies the tantrum. That's the fuel the tantrum is looking for--we throw tantrums, hoping people will throw them back.

When you have valuable employees or customers (or kids) who throw tantrums, that might be a sign that there's something wrong with your systems. The most basic way to decrease tantrums is to find the trigger moments and catch the tantrum before it starts. By creating a way for people to raise their hand, send a note, light a signal flare or otherwise highlight the problem (internal or external) before it leads to a tantrum, you can shortcircuit the meltdown without rewarding it.

If your dog is going crazy, straining at the leash and barking, it turns out that yelling, "sit," is going to do no good at all, no matter how loudly you yell. No, the secret is to not take your dog to this park, not at this time of day, at least not until you figure out how to create more positive cycles for him. Eliminate the trigger, you start to eliminate the tantrum.

Unfortunately, just about all big customer service organizations do this precisely backward. They don't escalate to a supervisor or roll out the kindness carpet until after someone has gone to Defcon 4. They decide that it's too expensive to be flexible, to listen or to treat people fairly, and they wait until the costs to both sides are really high, and then they give an empowered person a chance to solve the problem. There's huge waste here, as the problem costs more to solve at this point, and the unseen challenge is that they've established a cycle in which umbrage is the rewarded behavior.

And the last (but essential) thing to keep in mind is this: tantrums are really expensive, and if you can't extinguish the ongoing problem, fire it. Fire the customer, fire the employee. Establish a standard that says that people around here don't act like that. Expose the tantrum for what it is, and if necessary, do it in front of the tantrum-thrower's peers. It will free up your resources for those that are able to earn them.

When the cost of throwing a tantrum is high and when the systems are in place to eliminate the triggers, tantrum behavior goes down.