Ep.10: From Sex to Workplace Safety
Remember, you can always listen here or follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Either way, thanks for supporting us.
About this episode. Shaping culture can be a daunting task. Because change doesn’t happen overnight. But our world is filled with examples of shifting norms in both the social and organizational contexts. Just think about how much has changed in the last fifty years—or even, the last five!
In this episode of The Better Way?, Hui and Zach, as they often do, find inspiration in unexpected places; with examples from politics, pop culture, business, and education, they remind each other that big change is possible, and can happen swiftly. From representations of sex and gender norms on television; to the cultural transformation Paul O’Neill led at Alcoa; to the campaign to promote designated drivers (and more!)—they’ll share nuggets of inspiration that can enrich the work we all do every day.
Who? Zach Coseglia + Hui Chen, CDE Advisors
Full Transcript:
ZACH: Welcome back to the Better Way Podcast brought to you by CDE Advisors. Culture. Data. Ethics. This is a curiosity podcast for those who ask. “There has to be a better way, right? There just has to be.” I'm Zach Coseglia and I am joined as always by the one and only Hui Chen. Hi, Hui.
HUI: Hi Zach. Hello, everyone. Welcome back.
ZACH: So, it's just us today. No guest. And as much as I love having guests, I think sometimes the most fun that I have with the podcast is when it's just you and me and a topic. So that's what we're going to do today.
HUI: Yep! A lot of times Zach and I have conversations, and then halfway through we'll be like, “oh, you know, we should be recording this for the podcast.”
ZACH: Indeed. It would be more efficient if we thought to do that. It really would be. But today's topic is a really fun one. A really interesting one. And it's all about the pace of culture change. And in some ways, I was inspired and drawn to this topic by something that you talked about in one of our recent episodes—where you talked about aviation safety and the culture change that was facilitated by CRM. And so, what we're going to talk about today is—notwithstanding how hard it is to shape and change culture—we're going to talk about how, in the real world, in our society, we're going to provide some examples of how the culture has actually shifted fairly quickly . . . in ways that, at least for me, were surprising and, in some ways, really troubling (as you'll see when you hear some of my example). But also, in ways that are kind of weirdly inspirational, because it says that the task that we have, though hard, within the organizational context, is not in fact impossible.
HUI: Agreed. Although I'm gonna say . . . I'm gonna put a caveat on the word “quickly,” certainly for some of the examples I would give. I think how quickly a culture changes is in a large part defined by not just the size of the organization that we're talking about, but also, the complexity of the change that's involved. So today I know I'm gonna share three stories: one about a company, one about a school, and one about a society. And they're all different sizes, different type of challenges, and none of those changes I'm going to talk about happened in an instant or even in a month. But in light of the challenges or the changes that did happen, they were quick, certainly, in my book.
ZACH: Yeah, 100%. All three of mine are societal—like big societal. And so, when I'm thinking of decades long change, that actually feels fairly swift in the broad scope of human existence.
HUI: Indeed.
ZACH: Yeah. All right. So, I know last time I put you on the spot and had you go first, so I figured I'd take it for the team today and go first with mine. How's that sound?
HUI: Thank you.
ZACH: Perfect. We've each prepared three. So here's my first one. I guess the broader theme on my first one is how swiftly, in my view, there has been change around what is disqualifying for an individual in public service.
HUI: Oh my gosh.
ZACH: And yeah, right. Oh boy, has the needle really moved here! And look, I want to be clear. There's definitely an element of this that I think fairly is political—it is a sort of a political phenomenon; but I actually am not drawn to this because of its political nature or the broader political implications that we may be able to draw from it. But this is how it actually came to me: I can't remember how or why, but recently, I came across the story of Douglas Ginsburg. Now this is probably a name that's familiar to a lot of folks. Maybe of a certain age? But . . . but it wasn't to me—at least not until recently. So, Justice Ginsburg is still a senior US Circuit Court judge on the DC circuit. He's been on the appeals court since 1986. He was a chief judge from 2001 to 2008. He also, throughout his career, has been a professor of law in different institutions.
In 1987, many will remember, in 1987, Ronald Reagan nominated him to serve on the United States Supreme Court. This was upon the retirement of Justice Lewis Powell. And interestingly, he was actually the second choice; but as we'll talk about, and as history has shown, he wasn't the last choice for that position. The one that stuck, for those who are keeping score, was Justice Kennedy. So why didn't Justice Ginsburg make it through the confirmation process? In fact, why did they ultimately have to withdraw his name just two weeks after President Reagan announced his nomination? It was because news reports revealed that he had smoked marijuana in the past. Now to be clear, it wasn't because he had publicly supported decriminalization of marijuana or any other illegal drug. It wasn't because he had supported legalization of marijuana or any other illegal drug. It was because a man who was in his 20s in the 1960s and 1970s had been revealed to have smoked marijuana in the past. Here are some contemporary quotes from some notable figures:
The first is from Senator Chuck Grassley, who back then was a Republican from Iowa and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said at the time “you like to think people who are who are appointed to the Supreme Court respect the law.” That was one of the quotes that he gave back then.
In a statement of support, a representative from the White House at the time said quote “. . . he understands it was something done in the past. And he understands that people can make mistakes.”
And, in fact, a fellow Harvard professor at the time, who described himself as Justice Ginsburg's best friend, actually threw him under the bus to the New York Times, saying that he felt “upset by this revelation.” And in fact, when he saw him smoking marijuana at a party at Harvard in the 1970s, he left in disappointment and told him that it was “wrong” and that—in fact—the justice agreed with him.
So, this was not even 40 years ago. We've gone from this. A man being withdrawn from consideration to the United States Supreme Court for purportedly, or admittedly, in fact, having smoked marijuana some number of times. To in the 90s, Bill Clinton . . .
HUI: Exactly.
ZACH: . . . insisting that he didn't inhale. To Barack Obama in his book, some folks may remember this or be aware of this in his book Dreams From my Father, President Obama said around the strained relationship with his father, he said “pot had helped and booze . . . maybe a little blow when you could afford it.” That was, that's a quote from President Obama's book. So, we've gone from all of that to, I don't know, whatever world we live in today.
HUI: Yep.
ZACH: But whatever world we live in today is a world that is very far removed from an individual being disqualified from public service for having once, twice, three times any number of times tried marijuana.
HUI: Yeah. I do think that is, you know, so interesting we think back to all of this. I, you know, I also remember, of course, Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas when he was being nominated. That, of course, did not stop him from becoming a Supreme Court Justice. I thought of Gary Hart, who was a presidential candidate who dropped out because he was found to have had an affair. So, I think there was a time in the not-so-distant past that the public was very, very interested in seeing a certain type of moral example from its public servants—certainly, its national leaders. I think that expectation has changed dramatically; and I would say, really within the last 10 years, is when most of that change has happened. And I wonder about, you know what are the contributing factors to these changes? I think one of the factors which is going to, I think, come up later when we talk about other national examples is: before the age of Internet, you really have sort of these official channels of public portrayal. You know, we have the television networks. We have the big studios for movies. We have publishing houses for books. Nobody can just record something at home and become an Internet star with millions of followers. Nobody can self-publish a book and have it, you know . . . see runaway sales for that. And because of the multiple channels now being introduced to everybody, I think that unified sense of “what is moral and what is acceptable” has been fractured. Now, is that good or is that bad? I think there are good and bad points you can argue to this development, but I think of that as a contributing factor.
ZACH: I fully agree and I'm really excited that you've pinpointed that so early on in our discussion because it is going to come up again when I share my second and my third examples.
HUI: Yes. It's gonna come up when I talk about, you know, my societal example as well.
ZACH: Amazing. Before we move on to yours, I want to share something else that I learned just doing a little bit of research here around Justice Ginsburg and this whole sort of episode that I just thought was so fascinating; and also could be, in and of itself, sort of an example of kind of the shift in societal norms. So, Justice Ginsburg, back in 1965, was one of the founders of a company that actually pioneered online or computer—better word computer—dating!
HUI: No way.
ZACH: It was like the Tinder before there was Tinder. The match.com before there was even a “dot com.”
HUI: No way.
ZACH: This company, yes, this company was called Operation Match. And they created a computerized matchmaking service that was intended to pair Ivy League men with women from the Seven Sisters. And they did it through a 75-question survey questionnaire that asked about hobbies; and someone's physical appearance and their values; and their, you know, attitudes toward relationships and sex. And they mailed in these responses for a fee and then they used computer technology of the time to actually pair people that would seemingly be compatible matches. And then I guess, as I understand it, because this is 1965, they would then mail back out to these people the names and contact information of the people who they were deemed to be compatible with. So, this was just fascinating to me that this was a man who went on to become a nominee for the United States Supreme Court, 20 plus years later—but that this was something that was on people's minds in the 1960s.
HUI: That really is fascinating. That really is fascinating. Love it.
ZACH: Yeah. It's amazing where curiosity will take you when you just get on for the ride.
HUI: Yes indeed, indeed.
ZACH: So, what's your—what's your first one?
HUI: OK, I'm gonna start with actually one of my favorite stories . . . and some of the listeners might have heard it in my presentations because I do love this story so much. So, my first one is about Alcoa. So, for those of you who might have heard of it, Alcoa is an old American company that was founded in 1888. And when the Fortune 500 list was introduced in the 1950s, it got on it and stayed on it. It's a Fortune 500 company that started off doing aluminum processing, so they made aluminum and all aluminum related products; and today, it's really more a broader focus on light metal. But the story that I want to talk about happened in the 80s.
So in the 80s, the company was having some missteps: one after another; and it was losing profits and customers. So, the board started looking for a new leader. And in October 1987, the board introduced Paul O'Neill to the investors, who had been grumbling about how the company was being managed. And at this introduction on Wall Street (this was a big deal when the board introduces a new CEO), Paul O'Neill got up on the stage and the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “I want to talk to you about worker safety. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America.” The investors were very confused. They started asking questions, the kind of questions that normally would be addressed at these kind of meetings: business strategies, inventories, capital ratio, they start shooting off these questions. And O'Neill said, “I'm not sure you heard me, if you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. If we bring our injury rates down, it won't be because of cheerleading or the nonsense that you sometimes hear from CEOs. It will be because the individuals at the company have agreed to become part of something important, they have devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. Safety will be an indicator that we're making progress in changing our habits across the entire institution.” At that point, the investors stampeded out the door. One of them ran to the pay phone—remember this was 1987, nobody had cell phones; ran to the pay phone to call his twenty largest clients and told them the board had put a crazy hippie in charge of the company and he's gonna kill the company. He advised them to sell their stocks in Alcoa immediately. And he did this in a rush so that he could be, you know, beat the other investors to the phone in doing this. And this one guy said it was literally “the worst piece of advice I gave in my entire career.”
By the time O'Neill retired 13 years later, in 2000, Alcoa's annual net income was five times larger than before he arrived, and the market cap had risen by $27 billion. Someone who had invested a million at the time Paul O’Neil was announced as CEO would have made a million in dividend and see their stock value multiplied by five. And this happened when Alcoa did become one of the safest companies in the world. Before O'Neill came, almost every plant had at least one accident per week; after his safety plan was implemented, some facilities would go for years without an accident. The company's worker injury rate fell to 1/20th of the US average. And what O'Neal was doing there, and if you heard it in his speech was, he was trying to find one habit and watch that habit change all the habits throughout the organization—like the ripple effect. So, the first thing he did was to institute a new habit: he required that whenever an employee gets injured at work, the unit president must notify O'Neill in 24 hours and present a remediation plan to make sure it never happens again. Now think about all the things that has to happen for a unit president, who's a direct report to O'Neill, in order to find out about an accident, figure out how it happened, [and] come up with remediation plans . . . in 24 hours, right? So. So that means they have to have an open communications line from the unit president down to the Vice President to the plant manager to the floor manager, to the workers. When something happens, it has to go on that chain immediately. He has to be able to (mostly he) solicit opinions from people on the ground who know better about how to how to fix these things—so that when he meets with O'Neill in 24 hours, he would have actual plans to present to O'Neill. So, then O'Neill took it further; he told hourly workers that if their management doesn't follow up on safety issues, they can call him at home. He gave out his home phone number; so, they started calling. But once they started calling and the communication started, it's no longer about just safety. People start calling about ideas that no one has heard over the years. People started communicating with each other.
So, 10 years into his leadership at Alcoa, O'Neill was now being studied by Harvard Business School and everything . . . I mean the, you know, stock prices are doing great; profits are doing great; and so, he can really sort of sit on his laurels. At this point, he was at a shareholder meeting one day and you know, discussing profits and all of this stuff, safety; and a nun stood up in the shareholder meeting and accused him of lying. She said the Alcoa plant in Mexico had employees getting sick because of dangerous fumes. The nun was there at the meeting because her order owned 50 shares of Alcoa. So, O'Neill did not dismiss her. He met with her after the shareholder meeting; and then he sent his head of HR and General counsel to Mexico. They found that a few months earlier there had been a fume build up and some workers did get sick; and it was fixed and people recovered quickly and fully—and really, it was no big deal. It just it was something that happened for a few days and was fixed. But they were able to determine the unit president, who was considered one of the most valuable executives in the company, knew about this incident and never reported. He was fired two days later.
ZACH: Wow.
HUI: Now the industry was shocked by the firing, but no one at Alcoa was. Because the culture didn't tolerate this anymore. They all said, you know, he left and, you know, with no choice, I mean, he did this, and he had to go. I just . . . I always found this such an inspiring story because this is someone who really took on what seemed like an irrelevant little thing. And created a habit that rippled through the organization and changed the culture of the organization.
ZACH: Yeah.
HUI: I love that story.
ZACH: I love that story too. And what I'm really curious about, I don't know if you know the answer to this, but I'm really curious about is the sort of distinction and blurring of the lines between what is culture and what is leadership? And how . . . whether, maybe, that culture lived on in the 25 years since he retired.
HUI: Yeah, I'm sorry to say, I recently did read something about it, about it much more recently—and I can't give you a firm answer other than: it certainly did live on for a time. Whether it's still that way today, I don't know.
ZACH: Yeah. Well, if anybody listening knows . . . if anybody listening works there, reach out to us. We'd love to hear more stories about, sort of, how this has evolved or how this has persisted in the in the 25 years since. It's fascinating. I love that story.
HUI: Yes, yes.
ZACH: It's a really good one. All right, my second one is, I mean, maybe a little controversial because I'm going to probably use the word sex multiple times in describing it, but the broader theme is changes in views on sex and relationships in our society.
HUI: Mm.
ZACH: So, I think we all know . . . I think it's well documented that I watch quite a bit of television. I draw quite a bit of inspiration from television. You don't watch a lot.
HUI: I do.
ZACH: Yeah. Do you?
HUI: I do watch a lot. Yes.
ZACH: Maybe it's just that we don't watch a lot of the same stuff.
HUI: We definitely don't. I'm not nearly as hip as you.
ZACH: But. Well, but one of the shows that I know we both watch is Grey's Anatomy.
HUI: Yes.
ZACH: And so it makes it a great reference point for us to be able to be on the same page—to be operating on the same plane—for purposes of this, for this discussion.
HUI: Yes, yes, yes.
ZACH: So here's the thing, Grey's Anatomy is not on cable. It's not even on basic cable. It's not on a streaming service. It is the very definition of linear television. It is on the public airwaves. On network television.
HUI: Yep.
ZACH: And like most other shows, actually, by Shonda Rhimes, there are a lot of, we'll call them . . . there are a lot of intimate scenes. Between men and women. Between men and men. Between women and women. Nonbinary characters. Sometimes people are married to each other; sometimes they're not married at all; sometimes they're married, but they're not married to the people who they're in the scene with; sometimes they're married to other people.
HUI: Yes. Yes.
ZACH: And I just think it's so fascinating when you watch a show like that, or gosh, so many other shows on television today, both network television and cable and on streaming services . . . to use that as a reference point . . . and then to think back about how—during our parents’ lifetime—TV shows used to not even be able to show married couples sharing a bed.
HUI: [Not just our patents lifetime]. Murphy Brown, which was in the—what?—late 80s, early 90s?—and you know, when she decided to be a single parent, a single mother by choice, it was so controversial that even, I think, Bush . . . was the—Bush 1 was the president at the time. Even the President commented on this immoral choice of, you know, someone choosing to be a single mother, so that . . .
ZACH: Yeah.
HUI: That is, I mean, that was not even in my childhood. That was . . . I was certainly either in college or law school by then so . . .
ZACH: Indeed, it was my childhood, for those who are keeping track. But yeah, I mean right? It's just . . . it's just fascinating how, actually, very quickly in the grand scheme of things, how quickly some of those things have changed. You know, I always think . . . the example that I always come up with is obviously much farther back than Murphy Brown; but the example that always comes to me is I Love Lucy, where I think during the entire run of that show . . . I don't think Lucy and Desi actually ever shared a bed. And this was driven, as a lot of folks know, by something that was called the Hayes Code, which, very interestingly, was a self-imposed censorship system in Hollywood. Self-imposed from like the 1930s until the late 1960s; sort of setting morality standards and trying to promote what were considered traditional values around violence and nudity and sexual content. This was a self-imposed system by Hollywood. Hollywood isn't exactly known today, at least, to be a particularly prude or conservative facet of our society.
HUI: Yes.
ZACH: But again, this code lived on well into the 1960s. But look, what I what I thought was really interesting about this example was what it actually kind of represents—and what a lot of these societal examples represent—around what it takes to drive change and how we can actually take some learnings from these examples to the organizational context. And it reminded me of a really wonderful article, one that I connected with quite a bit from a few years back in Harvard Business Review. We'll link to it in the transcript. This was an article written by Brian Walker and Sarah Sol. Brian's a partner at IDEO and Sarah's a professor of behavioral science at Stanford; and their article was called Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate. They talk about how leaders within an organization can learn a lot, actually, from the practices of skillful movement makers.
And I think when we look at something like the transformation of representations of sex or relationships in popular culture, we can't forget that a huge part of that is actually not changes in the law or just changes by happenstance within people's social values. A lot of it is driven by movements like the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement. And what we can learn from these movements, actually, can very much apply in the organizational context. So for example, they talk about how movement makers are very skilled at framing the issue, and they do so by stirring emotions and inciting actions. And in the organizational context, that means talking about something much bigger than generating profit or making a living.
And I think you're Alcoa example is a really good example of that. What he did in that first meeting was framed the issue in a way that stirred emotion and incited action.
HUI: Exactly. Yes. Not from investors, though, apparently.
ZACH: Well, it did incite action. It just incited . . . it incited a different type of action. They also talk about, you know, the importance of demonstrating and celebrating small wins. They talk about harnessing networks; [and] about building coalitions and bridging disparate groups in order to form the larger, more diverse networks that are kind of rallying around a common purpose. They talk about creating safe havens—things like, within an organization, you know, innovation labs or unique groups that are sort of dedicated to piloting new ways of doing things so that we're starting small and creating safe spaces for these things to happen and then pushing them out more broadly, once their value and purpose has been proven and demonstrated. They talk about the importance of embracing symbols—you know, the artifacts that show solidarity and a shared purpose. And so, you know, while I started with this you know very, you know, sort of simple and very far-removed idea around representations of sex and relationships on television, it really is about how movements shift our perceptions, our norms, our values, and how we can actually bring that to the organizational context.
HUI: Yes. Yes.
ZACH: All right. What do you got? What's your second one?
HUI: All right. So, I'm gonna actually mention the source of my first story is from a book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. It's written by Charles Duhigg. It's one of the books that I always recommend to people, so I'm recommending it here. The second story that I have comes from his second book called. Smarter Faster Better [The Transformative Power of Real Productivity]. And there are actually two stories in there that were competing for my attention. I ended up choosing this one because I think it's not as well-known as the other one that I was thinking of. And also, this one specifically has to do with the power of data. So I think you'll like it, Zach. So, this has to do with the South Avondale Elementary School in Cincinnati, OH. In 2007 South Avondale Elementary School was ranked among one of the worst schools in the State of Ohio. The students did so poorly on assessment exams that officials declared the school to be an academic emergency.
It was in a neighborhood surrounded by poverty and crime. A student had been murdered with a bullet to the head right next to the school during a football tournament. They were—the officials were thinking about closing down school, but the nearby schools were only slightly better; and they would be dragged down if they were forced to absorb additional students. This was a school that people would only go to when they had absolutely no other choices. The one thing the school didn't lack was, surprisingly, resources. The City of Cincinnati and local companies like Procter and Gamble poured money into the school for years. They built computers and they bought software and there was a website for every student (mind you, this is 2007, so this is pretty advanced) with dashboards for the kids, attendance test scores, homework, classroom participation. These dashboards are available to the teachers and parents. They didn't do anything. Six years after the online dashboard were introduced, more than 90% of the teachers admitted that they hardly ever even looked at them. In 2008, 63% of the school's third graders failed to meet the state's basic educational benchmarks.
So, in a last-ditch effort, they decided to do something different with no additional funds or supplemental teachers. No new programs, no new tutoring sessions. They had a theory They believed data can be transformative if and only if the teachers can turn the spreadsheets and numbers into insights and plans that change how they teach and behave in the classroom. So, they decided to force teachers to engage with the data. Two years later. The test scores went up so much that the school earned an excellent rating from the state. 80% of third graders were reading at grade level and 84% passed the state math exam. The school district report says, quote, “South Avondale drastically improved student academic performance and changed the culture of the school.” Researchers started studying this transformation. When they talked to the teachers, they found out the most important ingredient of the turnaround was the data—the very data that the school had been collecting for years. Teachers said that they now had a data-driven culture that changed how they made decisions in the classroom. What they did was actually kind of primitive. They ditched the dashboards; the school set up a data room, a physical room where they put the students test scores on index cards and drew graphs on butcher papers. The teachers were required to spend at least two afternoons per month in a data room transcribing stuff that was already on the dashboard. They thought it was boring and pointless. And they started doing this, you know, day after day. And then one teacher, one day, had an idea. He said, “since I'm transcribing these scores anyway, why don't I put on the card—each student's card—a specific assessment question that they got wrong?” So, he convinced another teacher to do it as well. They started making piles based on the type of mistakes and discovered a pattern.
One teacher had students in the class who were doing better on grammar, but they were stumbling on math. The other had the opposite. They traded curricula and both classes’ scores went up. Another teacher had an idea to make piles based on where the students lived. The teacher then started to give everyone in the same neighborhood similar reading assignments. The reading scores went up because the students were doing homework together on the bus ride home. They ran experiments. Instead of passively receiving data, they were now engaging with the data. Just eight months after this initiative was launched, the teachers were going to the data room all the time now and creating piles and piles of index cards, testing different lesson plans, and tracking and comparing results. The students sat for their annual assessment exams; eight months after this started, the school's overall score more than doubled from the previous year. By 2012, 91% of the students at the school had tested above the state standard. Now remember, 63% of them could not make the standard. Now, 91% were testing above it and there's a wait list to transfer into South Avondale Elementary School.
ZACH: It's an amazing story.
HUI: Isn't it?
ZACH: It's such an amazing story. I mean, and it's so directly applicable to the things that we're always talking about here and the things that we're always talking about with our clients. I mean, first and foremost, you know, I cringe when I hear the word dashboard. It's become this word that is used as if it is the goal—and all it is, is a tool. It's a program. It's like Word or PowerPoint or Excel. It's just . . . it's just a thing. And I can't tell you how many folks focus on creating the dashboard without actually—I mean, forget about the quality of the information in the dashboard and whether we're really tracking things that are reflecting outcomes or that are providing meaningful insights—they don't actually do the most basic thing, which is often the first question I ask: “is anyone looking at it?” “What does the data tell you about how many people are accessing it?” “How often they're accessing it?” And oftentimes when we look at that, we wind up seeing that people. . . they're just, they're not using it at all. So the first take away there just the meeting people where they are, as ridiculous as it sounds to actually put a room, put people in a room with index cards—as ridiculous as that sounds.
HUI: Right.
ZACH: The idea that they actually were meeting people where they were and that it could then spark something that would be meaningful for them is so powerful for me. I think that the other thing is, you know, there was an actual outcome measurement involved in all of this.
HUI: Yes, yes.
ZACH: Meet people where they are and measure outcomes. Huge.
HUI: And running experiments. They . . . using the data in a way that changes how they behaved, and they're having theories about, “oh, what if we put them, you know, give similar assignments to students who live in the same neighborhood”—and then they measure the results with the data.
ZACH: And running experiments. Yeah. Yeah.
HUI: It's this constant, you know, having a theory, running a test, having the data to examine if your theory worked, and using that to bring insight into what you would do next. I mean this this whole, I mean . . . I just, I loved this story.
ZACH: I do too. You know, it reminds me. I think of the the episode that we did with May on organizational psychology about a month ago, maybe a little bit more. And you know, we just asked her to define behavioral science, psychology—these basic terms. And what she said (and I'm obviously paraphrasing) was, you know, it's the application of the scientific method to the study of human behavior. And I think that what's lost in a lot of the discussion around the use of behavioral science in compliance is the scientific method part of it. You know, it's like it . . .
HUI: Very much so.
ZACH: It's like “let's look and see what the research says” or “let's hear how the research is sort of bastardized, you know, at a conference” . . . and then start just doing those things, rather than actually treating the research as inspiration for a hypothesis, which we then test through some variation of the scientific method to actually see whether it's working. The experimentation that you just described. And I just, like, I can't say enough how much I wish there was more of that in the work that we do.
HUI: There needs to be more.
ZACH: Yeah. Yeah. All right.
HUI: All right. We have to pick up the pace.
ZACH: Yes. Shall I do my third?
HUI: Yes.
ZACH: Okay. So, this is one really worries me . . . much more than the other two. I'm actually not worried by the other two at all. But I guess the broader theme here is maybe living in a post trust / post truth world. I could have looked at this from a lot of different angles. But as I said, the broader theme is sort of the disintegration of trust and truth. And so, not to go too far back in history, but, you know, in the 1960s and 1970s, Walter Cronkite was often cited as the most trusted man in America. He was the host of the CBS Evening News, and he was widely thought of as the most trusted man in America. Now we can talk about how the pace of change is driven by technology; you know, it wasn't that long ago that radio and TV were where we were getting information; and it's kind of hard to believe, today, that we would have actually put a lot of trust in people who are on television. But these were people who we welcomed into our homes and a lot of the information that we got, most of the information that we got about what was happening in the world, we got from people like Walter Cronkite—in some of the most challenging times in our history and at some of the most emotional moments in our kind of shared society / community. But we trusted these people. We trusted folks like Walter Cronkite. And . . . who do we trust now is sort of the question that I had.
HUI: Hmm.
ZACH: Who? Who do we trust now? And I can't help but feel like the idea, the concept of, trust has sort of disintegrated—and that truth has sort of disintegrated; and it's been replaced, in a lot of places, by cynicism and skepticism. And so, I think about where you kind of picked up very early in our discussion [about how many options we have for getting information and how anyone can have a massive reach through the internet and social media], and I think that that's kind of what we’re experiencing today . . . is . . . we've been kind of bifurcated or divided so much as a society and where we get information and you know what our community looks like. And who we reach out to or who we look to . . . that to find consensus today around anything is just so very challenging.
HUI: Yeah, I mean, I just don't even see us going back to close to a time where we have anything remotely resembling that kind of consensus—and so much of it is, you know, an issue of trust. And the availability of information out there, the fact that you just have to verify everything these days and there's a reason why I still do go to the major networks to verify things because I still do believe in that mechanism. Now I hope that mechanism doesn't also break down, but you know . . . these are the reasons we still go to certain brands and go to certain institutions, because we still believe that some of them have the framework for maintaining that trust. But it's going to get harder; and AI, by the way, is not going to help because we used to say seeing is believing—but can't say that anymore, right?
ZACH: All right. What do you got? What's your last one?
HUI: My last one is a societal one and I'm thinking about drunk driving. So drunk driving was something when I think back to my youth.
ZACH: Interesting.
HUI: In the 80s, it was not nearly as big a deal as it is today; and I'm . . . this is a situation where I'm happy where things have moved . . . in the with the direction in which things have moved. I remembered distinctly the one time—I think I was in college already—I had gone back to my to my hometown in New Jersey, and I was going to a party with a bunch of my high school friends. And the reason why I remember this so clearly was this was the first, and I believe only time in my life, when somebody took my key away. And I still remember this was, in a large part, in response to new laws that held party hosts or bars and restaurants responsible if they let people go from their party or their establishment out driving drunk. And you know, I may not have known the law . . . . I might have heard of the law, but that was the first time I felt the impact. It was when my key got taken away and I couldn't go home, and I had to sleep on their sofa. And I remember that people did frequently get into cars after partying and drinking. And that is just not how it is today.
So I'm thinking . . . I was trying to do some research on, you know, what are the factors that contributed to this change of attitude? And there were many. There were, of course enforcement. There were laws. There was the . . . essentially a federalized version of blood alcohol minimum that the federal government encouraged the states to adopt by linking it to highway funding. There was very significantly the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving mad in 1980. So just to give you a sense of how much things have shifted in 1980, there were 28,000 drunk driving deaths in the United States, 28,000. In 2024, it's 13,000. So it's half of what it was, and if you look at how it came down, it really did come down significantly with something like 20-30% year over year reduction—a lot of it happening in the 80s. So, one particular aspect that I found was interesting, and it goes back, it ties very nicely into the popular culture theme that we're talking about, is this campaign around designated driver. And by the way, today with the rideshare application is—that further helps, of course.
ZACH: For sure.
HUI: But before that came along in 1988, Harvard's Center for Health Communications decided that it was going to make a serious effort on targeting drunk driving, and it focused specifically on promoting the concept of designated drivers. And so, what it did was it entered . . . it basically entered into agreement with—and this was a campaign, and this was covering the front page of New York Times—in August of 1988, all three major television networks and the Hollywood studios that produced most of their programming had agreed that they would write these messages into their plots. So, this would be very popular shows like Cheers, like LA Law, and Dallas—these were popular shows at that time; and they agreed to insert these little messages in their characters interactions with others. And this was interesting because they believe that entertainment not only mirrored social reality but also helped shape it by depicting what constituted popular opinion, by influencing people's perception of the roles and behaviors that are appropriate for members of a culture, and by modeling specific behaviors. So, the project strategy was actually endorsed, in a unanimous resolution, by the directors of the Writers Guild of America.
So, this was one of the most coordinated efforts, certainly Hollywood had ever seen. And so, this kind of messaging was incorporated into over 160 primetime programs—and their plots. And I, you know, again, this is this is such a powerful message about how you can use much more subtle type of messaging. So, this is not the just “don't drink and drive” message. This is characters in your favorite show talking about, “oh, I gotta get a designated driver.” Or “aren't you gonna be a designated driver?”
ZACH: Yeah.
HUI: It's modeling those behaviors. It's making it the norm of behaviors. And I looked at an article that looked at why the, you know, campaign was successful—in addition to this whole adoption by popular culture—was that the message was very narrow, focused, and highly specific and easy to communicate. It's not about all the different ways you could not drink, and you know, mix drinking with driving, but it's “get a designated driver.” And it was only a modest shift in the behavior. They're not telling you not to drink. They're not telling you not to drive. So one of the key pieces in tying together the shift in culture around drunk driving.
ZACH: There's just so much that you can take away from that in the work that we do because so much of the messaging winds up being messaging. It's like we tell people don't bribe. But we all know . . . we all know that just saying it isn't going to make it a reality. It's seeing it. It's not the tone from the top, as we all always talk about, it's the conduct from the top—and so to be able to, I mean that's what this is demonstrating is that they were saying it, but what they were really doing was fictionalized versions of modeling behavior that we are constantly talking about in the context of our work.
HUI: Exactly. Yes.
ZACH: Amazing. I learn so much when we do this.
HUI: Me too.
ZACH: This was a wonderful discussion. And I really do hope that people enjoy when we have these sorts of discussions, but I also really love it when people reach out to us after they've listened to an episode like this. So, we would love to hear from you. What are the examples that you have in your life and your work in our society around shifts in cultural change for good or not? And what are some of your reactions to the ones that we share today?
HUI: Yes, very much so. We want to hear from you.
ZACH: All right. Thanks, Hui. It's been fun as always, and thanks everybody for listening.
HUI: Thank you everyone.
ZACH: And thank you all for tuning in to The Better Way? Podcast. For more information about this or anything else that’s happening with CDE Advisors, visit our website at www.CDEAdvisors.com, where you can also check out the Better Way blog. And please like and subscribe to this series on Apply or Spotify. And, finally, if you have thoughts about what we talked about today, the work we do here at CDE, or just have ideas for Better Ways we should explore, please don’t hesitate to reach out—we’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening.