The Power of Habit (Part Two)

The Power of Habit (Part Two)

How do you change the culture in a company? By attacking one habit and then watching the changes ripple through the organization. How did O'Neill change the culture within his company? By targeting Alcoa's keystone habit.

"I knew I had to transform Alcoa," O'Neill told me. "But you can't order people to change."

"That's not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company."

O'Neill's success at Alcoa is just one example of a keystone habit, a pattern that has the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as it moves through an organization. Keystone habits can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate.

Keystone habits explain how Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion and why some college students outperform their peers. They describe why some people, after years of trying, suddenly lose 40 pounds while becoming more productive at work and still getting home in time for dinner with their kids. And keystone habits explain how Alcoa became one of the best performing stocks in the Dow Jones index, while also becoming one of the safest places on earth.

For instance, consider one event about six months into O'Neill's tenure, when he got a telephone call in the middle of the night. A plant manager in Arizona was on the line, panicked, talking about how a piece of machinery had stopped operating and one of the workers - a young man who had joined the company a few weeks earlier, eager for the job because it offered health care for his pregnant wife - had tried a repair. He had jumped over a yellow safety wall surrounding the press and walked across the pit. There was a piece of aluminum jammed into the hinge on a swinging six-foot arm. The young man pulled on the aluminum scrap, removing it. The machine was fixed. Behind him, the arm restarted its arc, swinging toward his head. When it hit, the arm crushed his skull. He was killed instantly.

Fourteen hours later, O'Neill ordered all the plant's executives into an emergency meeting. For much of the day, they painstakingly re-created the accident with diagrams and by watching videotapes again and again. They identified dozens of errors that had contributed to the death, including two managers who had seen the man jump over the barrier but failed to stop him, a training program that hadn't emphasized to the man that he wouldn't be blamed for a breakdown, lack of instructions that he should find a manager before attempting a repair, and the absence of sensors to automatically shut down the machine when someone stepped into the pit.

"We killed this man," a grim-faced O'Neill told the group. "It's my failure of leadership. I caused his death. And it's the failure of all of you in the chain of command."

The executives in the room were taken aback. Sure, a tragic accident had occurred, but tragic accidents were part of life at Alcoa.

Within a week of that meeting, however, all the safety railings at Alcoa's plants were repainted bright yellow, and new policies were written up. Employees were told not to be afraid to suggest proactive maintenance. And O'Neill sent a note to every worker telling them call him at home if managers didn't follow up on their safety suggestions.

"Workers started calling, but they didn't want to talk about accidents," O'Neill told me. "They wanted to talk about all these other great ideas."

The Alcoa plant that manufactured aluminum siding for houses, for instance, had been struggling for years because executives would try to anticipate popular colors and inevitably guess wrong. One day, a low-level employee made a suggestion that quickly worked its way to the general manager: If they grouped all the painting machines together, they could switch out the pigments faster and become more nimble in responding to shifts in customer demand.

Within a year, profits on aluminum siding doubled. "It turns out this guy had been suggesting this painting idea for a decade, but hadn't told anyone in management," an Alcoa executive told me. "Then he figures, since we keep on asking for safety recommendations, why not tell them about this other idea? It was like he gave us the winning lottery numbers."

Establishing an organizational habit of suggesting safety improvements had created other habits, as well: recommending business improvements that otherwise would have remained out of sight. By shifting worker safety habits, O'Neill had created patterns of better communication. A chain reaction started that lifted profits.