1: The retired chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles was on a cruise in the South Seas.
“He noticed something surprising during the trip,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their terrific book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.
Every time passengers left the boat to visit a port, the crew made sure everyone washed their hands with antibacterial soap before coming back on board.
“And then, when you were on the boat,” Erik and Tim note, “while you waited in line for the buffets, again the crew would pass around the antibacterial soap.”
The former chief of staff began to wonder, “Is it possible that this cruise ship is actually more sanitary than my own hospital?”
When he got back to Los Angeles, he decided to look into how well the hospital was doing with hand washing.
What he found was not encouraging.
“Doctors were washing their hands only 65 percent of the time they were supposed to,” the authors write.
That means roughly one out of every three times they were supposed to wash their hands, they didn’t.
Ouch.
Imagine going somewhere to get better and being exposed to something that could make you sicker.
“This is one of the prime reasons why it happens,” Erik and Tim note.
2: So why were doctors not washing their hands as often as they should?
Was it because they didn’t understand the importance of hand washing?
Hardly. As Erik and Tim point out, even kindergarteners understand the importance of washing germs from their hands.
One possible reason?
“‘Bacteria on your hands’ is an abstract idea,” Erik and Tim explain.
“You can’t feel it, taste it, smell it, see it, or hear it,” they note. “And so it becomes easy to rationalize away the risk and tell yourself that you don’t have bacteria on your hands.”
As one doctor said, “You say: ‘Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.’”
Other explanations include that hand-washing stations are not always conveniently located. Some doctors also say that washing your hands constantly hurts.
“So, you’ve got this problem that you can’t see, and fixing the problem is going to cause you some pain and inconvenience,” the authors observe.
What can happen? “You either ignore the problem or try to rationalize why it isn’t really a problem for you,” they note.
So, what did hospital leadership do?
They began with education and incentives. “Emails were sent and posters were put up around the hospital explaining why doctors needed to wash their hands when they were supposed to,” the authors share.
They offered $10 Starbucks gift cards to those who were seen doing the right thing.
As a result, compliance went up from 65% to 80%.
That’s an improvement, but it still means that one out of five times, doctors weren’t washing their hands when they should have.
It was time to get creative.
The hospital hosted a lunch for all of the doctors. “At the end of the lunch, they gave each person a petri dish,” Erik and Tim recount.
“The dishes had agar in them, a material that can be used to show whether bacteria are on the skin of someone who touches it.”
Everyone was asked to press their hands onto the petri dishes.
The dishes were then sent to the lab to be cultured, and photos were taken.
“You could see a perfect hand shape formed from the bacteria that was cultured in the petri dishes—the hands they’d just finished eating lunch with,” the authors share.
It was hard to stomach. Literally.
Next, they used one of the images as a screen saver on every computer in the hospital.
So, what happened after that?
Hand-washing compliance immediately rose to 100 percent.
The hospital leaders had taken an abstract idea of bacteria on your hands and made it concrete.
“They made it something that the doctors could see,” Erik and Tim note. “And once the doctors could see that the problem was real, they could no longer rationalize it away. They had to fix it.”
Emails helped. Posters helped. Incentives helped. But seeing the bacteria changed everything.
3: “Does this sound like any of your prospects?” Erik and Tim ask. “Do they have problems that aren’t always easy to see, and would fixing those problems cause them some inconvenience and pain?
“It’s one of the core challenges facing most sales efforts today.”
The question is: “How can you make your prospects see their own bacteria-covered hands?” Erik and Tim ask.
One answer is to use the Big Pictures we explored last week—simple visuals that make abstract ideas concrete.
Sometimes, the best Big Pictures are ones you can draw yourself during a sales presentation.
“The good news,” the authors say, “is that creating Big Pictures doesn’t have to be difficult.”
Which is what we’ll explore next in RiseWithDrew.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What problem are you trying to solve that people understand intellectually but can’t actually see?
Action: Find one way to make that problem visible—with an image, demonstration, object, or simple drawing—so people can experience it rather than simply hear about it.
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