The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

by Chip Heath

You can’t rewind your memory to six months prior and observe how clearly your dribbling has improved. But you can rewind a video. What if every boy on a basketball team received

a simple before-and-after video comparing his performance at the beginning and end of the season? The improvements would be so obvious, so visible:

To identify milestones like these, ask yourself: What’s inherently motivating? (Getting a glowing thank-you.) What would be worth celebrating that might only take a few weeks or months of work? (Solving the number one complaint.) What’s a hidden accomplishment that is worth surfacing and celebrating? (Making it a full week without any 1s.)

The desire to hit milestones elicits a concerted final push of effort. To finish the marathon under 4 hours, you sprint the final quarter mile. To hit your 10,000 steps for the day, you obsessively pace the bedroom.

We’re not stuck with just one finish line. By multiplying milestones, we transform a long, amorphous race into one with many intermediate “finish lines.” As we push through each one, we experience a burst of pride as well as a jolt of energy to charge toward the next one.

Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”

courage isn’t just suppressed fear. It’s also the knowledge of how to act in the moment.

when people make advance mental commitments—if X happens, then I will do Y—they are substantially more likely to act in support of their goals than people who lack those mental plans.

Gollwitzer calls these plans “implementation intentions,”4 and often the trigger for the plan is as simple as a time and place: When I leave work today, I’m going to drive straight to the gym. The success rate is striking.

ethics education should focus not on WHAT is the right thing to do? but rather on HOW can I get the right thing done? She created a curriculum called Giving Voice to Values,5 which has been used in more than 1,000 schools and organizations. The heart of her strategy is practice. You identify situations where an ethical issue might arise. You anticipate the rationalizations you’ll hear for the behavior. Then you literally script out your possible response or action. And finally you practice that response with peers.

A crucial feature of practicing courage, then, is making sure the practice requires courage!

Practice quiets the anxiety that can cloud our mind in a tough moment. When we lack practice, our good intentions often falter.

“When we have meetings, I typically have a ‘plant’ in the audience and give them a tough question to ask,” he said.8 “It’s always a question we know people are asking and talking about but afraid to actually bring to leadership. I do this to ‘pop the cork’ and show that it’s safe.”

“exposure to a dissenting minority view, even when that view is in error, contributes to independence.”

if even one person is brave enough to defy the majority, we are emboldened. We’re not alone anymore. We’re not crazy. And we feel we can call red “red.” In short, courage is contagious.

There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves.

Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic.

To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.”

Final reflections: The key insight here is that an unpopular leader needs to create a moment. As Goldsmith says, even if a leader successfully changes his behavior, it might not fix his relationship problems, because his colleagues might not notice. The moment creates a reset point.

When members of groups grow closer, it’s because of moments that create shared meaning

One consistent theme from the visits surprised them: You can’t deliver a great patient experience without first delivering a great employee experience. And Sharp’s “employee engagement” scores were weak compared with the likes of Ritz and Southwest.

How do you design moments that knit groups together? Sharp’s leaders used three strategies: creating a synchronized moment, inviting shared struggle, and connecting to meaning.

“Reasonable” voices in your organization will argue against synchronizing moments. It’s too expensive to get everyone together. Too complicated. Couldn’t we just jump on a webinar? Couldn’t we just send the highlights via email?

The presence of others turns abstract ideas into social reality.

The researchers concluded that perceived pain increases “prosociality,” or voluntary behavior to benefit others. They argued that extreme rituals—and specifically the shared experience of pain—can be seen as “social technology to bind in-groups together.”

people will choose to struggle—not avoid it or resist it—if the right conditions are present. The conditions are: The work means something to them; they have some autonomy in carrying it out; and it’s their choice to participate or not.

If you want to be part of a group that bonds like cement, take on a really demanding task that’s deeply meaningful. All of you will remember it for the rest of your lives.

Purpose trumps passion. Graduation speakers take note: The best advice is not “Pursue your passion!”

It’s “Pursue your purpose!” (Even better, try to combine both.)

Passion is individualistic. It can energize us but also isolate us, because my passion isn’t yours. By contrast, purpose is something people ...

Who is the beneficiary of your work, and how are you contributing to them?

Our relationships are stronger when we perceive that our partners are responsive to us. (The term used frequently is “perceived partner responsiveness.”)2 Responsiveness encompasses three things: Understanding: My partner knows how I see myself and what is important to me. Validation: My partner respects who I am and what I want. Caring: My partner takes active and supportive steps in helping me meet my needs. Notice how much of the recipe is about attunement.

Gallup discovered that the six most revealing questions are the ones below.4 Notice that the final three of them might as well have been penned by Reis himself: 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work? (Validation.) 5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? (Caring.) 6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? (Understanding. Caring.)

“Clinicians, in turn, need to relinquish their role as the single, paternalistic authority and train to become more effective coaches or partners—learning, in other words, how to ask, ‘What matters to you?’ as well as ‘What is the matter?’ ”

Analysts at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) studied customer service calls and the ratings that customers provided afterward. To the researchers’ surprise, only half of the customers’ ratings were attributable to the particular call they had just experienced. The other half reflected the way they had been treated previously.

Most call center reps had the instinct to avoid the customer’s baggage. If they saw in the records that the customer had been passed around a lot, they wouldn’t mention it. Why bring it up? It’s like pouring salt on the wound, they figured. Better just to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Baggage handling is responsive: It demonstrates understanding and validation of a customer’s frustrating past experience. And the effect it had on calls was stunning: Customers rated the quality of their experience with Rep No. 2 almost twice as highly as the other, and their perceptions of the effort they had to invest to resolve the problem plummeted by 84%.

2: Trip over the truth and stretch for insight. Prior to the off-site, two marketers and two salespeople were “embedded” with the other team for a week. Then, at the off-site meeting, they share what they learned: The marketers embedded in sales present, “What marketing doesn’t understand about sales,” and their counterparts present, “What sales doesn’t understand about marketing.”

Creating a moment is critical in a complex, political situation like this. The moment is a demarcation point where you announce: Before this retreat, we were siloed. After this retreat, we commit to working together.

You cannot bring two teams together by simply talking about unity. They must experience unity. That’s what makes it a defining moment.

Target a specific moment and then challenge yourself: How can I elevate it? Spark insight? Boost the sense of connection? Life is full of “form letter in an envelope” moments, waiting to be transformed into something special.

Our good intentions to create these moments are often frustrated by urgent-seeming problems and pressures.

In the short term, we prioritize fixing problems over making moments, and that choice usually feels like a smart trade-off. But over time, it backfires.

five most common regrets of the people she had come to know: 1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. (“Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.”) 2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. 3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. (“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others.”) 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. (“Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.”)

It is striking how many of the principles we’ve encountered would serve as antidotes to those common regrets: 1. Stretching ourselves to discover our reach; 2. Being intentional about creating peaks (or Perfect Moments, in Eugene O’Kelly’s phrasing) in our personal lives; 3. Practicing courage by speaking honestly—and seeking partners who are responsive to us in the first place; 4. The value of connection (and the difficulty of creating peaks); 5. Creating moments of elevation and breaking the script to move beyond old patterns and habits.

When we began to read these powerful stories, we thought we were reading about epiphanies. “Eureka!” moments. But what dawned on us, as we read more of them, is that these were not stories about sudden realizations. These were stories about action.

Often, what looks like a moment of serendipity is actually a moment of intentionality.