Page 254 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Environment 243

Around a century ago, Frederick Taylor, the father of sci-
entific management, decided that it was time that we tool users
start using tools more wisely. After noticing that employees at
Bethlehem Steel used but one shovel size for every task, he
determined that the most effective load was 21 ⁄2 pounds and
1
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 employ-
ees 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 aren’t merely
studying 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 divorce, obesity, drug abuse,
credit card addiction, and AIDS transmission. Dr. Whyte (the
innovator behind the restaurant spindle) brought an engineer-
ing solution to a social issue, but most people don’t naturally
think of industrial engineering as a resource for overcoming
human challenges.
Influence whizzes don’t make this mistake. They apply effi-
ciency principles at the very highest level. Rather than con-
stantly 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, they change things in order to make the right
behaviors easier to enact. And depending on whether the glass
is half empty or half full, they also use things to make the wrong
behaviors more difficult to enact.
For example, one of the main reasons the Guinea worm dis-
ease was eradicated so effectively across the sprawling subcon-
tinent of India was that influence masters 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.