Page 258 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Environment 247

tant 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 behav-
ior 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.
Health-care institutions have also learned the importance of
making the correct behavior easier. Consider what many insti-
tutions are doing to reduce medication errors. In the past, pills
came in only a reddish brown bottle that offered no informa-
tion about its content and looked just like the reddish brown bot-
tle 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 pharma-chicken-
scratch 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 hos-
pitals are teaming up to make the right choices obvious. By deft
use of colored bottles and better labels, many hospitals have sig-
nificantly reduced medication errors and subsequently need-
less 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 behav-
ior 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 enable them. 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