The Myth of the Garage by Dan Heath Chip Heath

Author:Dan Heath, Chip Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

ANCHOR & TWIST: HOW TO EXPLAIN AN INNOVATION

First published June 23, 2008

When an adult suddenly collapses in public, cardiac arrest is the likely culprit, and with any luck, there will be someone on the scene who can deliver CPR until help arrives. CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The “cardio” part—pumping on the chest—manually forces blood to circulate. The “pulmonary” part—mouth-to-mouth breathing—gets oxygen to the lungs.

CPR has been ingrained in mass culture for the past 35 years, but what if a new innovation came along that supplanted it? That’s precisely what happened in March 2007 when a team of Japanese researchers published a surprising paper in the prestigious Lancet medical journal. It tracked 4,068 adults who’d gone into cardiac arrest with bystanders present (outside of a hospital). The shocker: Victims who received only the chest-pumping part of CPR had slightly better health outcomes than those who received full CPR, including mouth-to-mouth. For most victims, then, mouth-to-mouth was pointless.

This was great news, because it meant that people could save lives without knowing CPR, which is complicated to learn. It takes hours of training to master, and even people with CPR certification often freeze when a real person collapses, afraid they’ll screw up: How many times do I pump before doing a breath? The study suggested that all you need to do is call 911, then push hard and fast on the person’s chest until the ambulance arrives. That’s it. You’ve saved a life without getting your lips involved.

Freeze here. The American Heart Association (AHA) had a brilliant innovation on its hands that could help a lot of people. But the information wasn’t helping anyone, because only the AHA knew about it. Businesspeople routinely deal with this issue, even though we may not all save lives. How do you spread a new idea—fast—and get people to pay attention?

Innovations require lots of explaining. (We just spent one-third of this column laying out the CPR case.) Explanations require lots of attention, but attention is scarce. So don’t explain. Instead, anchor your communication in what people already know. Some people within the AHA thought it wise to use CPR as an anchor for the new technique, because the public already understood what CPR was and when it should be used. From an explanation perspective, that’s a big leap forward. Perhaps, they suggested, the new technique could be called “Mouth-Free CPR” or “CPR Lite.”

Others, though, rejected the CPR analogy as inaccurate—the whole point of the new technique, after all, is that there’s no more “pulmonary” action, so the “P” in “CPR” is wrong. They lobbied for a more precise term, such as “cardiac-only resuscitation.” After much debate, the CPR analogy prevailed.

And thank goodness it did, because anchoring is easier than explaining from scratch a term like “cardiac-only resuscitation.” Here’s an example: Wikipedia says an alpaca is “a domesticated species of the South American camelid.” That’s the explanation. As an alternative, you could say an alpaca is like a small llama. Which one is easier to understand?

Breakthrough technologies often need an anchor so customers can grasp them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.