The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has studied the way this preloading affects our behavior. His research shows that 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. Someone who has committed to drink less alcohol, for instance, might resolve, “Whenever a waiter asks if I want a second drink, I’ll ask for sparkling water.” And that person is far more likely to turn down the drink than someone else who shares the same goal but has no preloaded plan. Gollwitzer calls these plans “implementation intentions,” 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. Setting implementation intentions more than doubled the number of students who turned in a certain assignment on time; doubled the number of women who performed breast self-exams in a certain month; and cut by half the recovery time required by patients who had received hip or knee replacement (among many other examples). There is power in preloading a response. This preloading is what’s often missing in organizational situations that require courage. A colleague or client belittles someone, or makes an off-color remark, or suggests something unethical, and we’re so taken aback that we do nothing. Ten minutes later, we curse ourselves for not acting. We missed our chance. These missed opportunities made Mary Gentile reconsider the way we teach ethics in schools. Gentile, a a professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, realized that ethics education was dominated by the question, “What is the right thing to do?” But people often know what the right thing to do is. The hard part is acting on that judgment. “We can all generate a list of what makes this hard to do,” Gentile said. “We feel alone; we wonder if we’re being naïve; we wonder if we’re misinformed (or we want to believe that perhaps we are); we wonder if our boss will be receptive; we anticipate that we will encounter ‘push back’ if we raise the issue and we don’t know what we’ll say when that happens; we worry about being ostracized or worse if we appear not to be a ‘team player.’ ” She became convinced that 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, 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. Leaders who want to instill an ethical business culture—and not just mouth the words of a toothless “statement of values”—will take inspiration from Gentile and make practice a priority. Because the situations that lead to unethical behavior are predictable: A relentless pressure for results, coupled with avert-the-eyes management, will lead to cut corners or outright fraud (think banking scandals). Blurry lines of accountability, plus get-things-done urgency, will lead to accidents (think cataclysmic oil spills). A leader’s bias or bigotry or sexism, taking root in a permissive environment, will inevitably lead to abuse. These are not anomalies. They are probabilities. They can be foreseen and fought.
Preloading. It also explains why most people will put with things that go badly in an organization. Thats why scenario training, no matter how needless they might seem on the surface, can actually help in preparing people to actively confront and handle things that might go wrong (such as harassment, offensive remarks etc).
