Planned obsolescence and LED lighting

LED lights are about more than just energy efficiency. The new bulbs are meant to last for a very long time--25,000 hours. The average light bulb is estimated to be used about 1.6 hours per day. At that rate, LED bulbs can last up to 42 years!

This story from the New Yorker discusses an incandescent light bulb that dates to 1901 that is still burning today (it is left on at all times). It goes through the history of light bulbs and how this was the first time that an industry went through deliberate efforts to "break" their products prematurely in order to create turnover in their markets.

New Yorker: The LED Quandary

The secret to innovation? Winning hearts and minds....

Original post:  Nov 14, 2013

This post is linked to part one.

As the article goes on, Dr. Gawande discusses simple innovations to combat infant mortality in rural hospitals. One of the simplest methods is to keep newborn infants warm. While high-tech incubators exist, the most effective tactic is using the mother's own body warmth. Yet even this simple advice is consistently ignored.

The author goes on to discuss why people struggle to adopt new ideas. He writes:

The most common approach to changing behavior is to say to people, “Please do X.” Please warm the newborn. Please wash your hands. Please follow through on the twenty-seven other childbirth practices that you’re not doing. This is what we say in the classroom, in instructional videos, and in public-service campaigns, and it works, but only up to a point.

Then, there’s the law-and-order approach: “You must do X.” We establish standards and regulations, and threaten to punish failures with fines, suspensions, the revocation of licenses. Punishment can work. Behavioral economists have even quantified how averse people are to penalties. In experimental games, they will often quit playing rather than risk facing negative consequences. And that is the problem with threatening to discipline birth attendants who are taking difficult-to-fill jobs under intensely trying conditions. They’ll quit.

The kinder version of “You must do X” is to offer incentives rather than penalties. Maybe we could pay birth attendants a bonus for every healthy child who makes it past a week of life. But then you think about how hard it would be to make a scheme like that work, especially in poor settings....

Besides, neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. And that’s what we want: for skin-to-skin warming, hand washing, and all the other lifesaving practices of childbirth to be, quite simply, the norm.

In his eyes, here is the solution:

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

This is something that salespeople understand well. I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors—who are notoriously stubborn—to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.

As we develop our own innovations, it will be important to keep this in mind. We must never forget the human factor in change management.

You've got a great idea. Now how do you get it adopted?

Original post:  Nov 13, 2013

I like to think that the world is logical. In this idealized version of reality, simply making the case for a good idea is enough. Everyone agrees that this new method is the right thing to do and it gains adoption. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. Most of the time, the good idea itself is only the first step. Then comes the long slog of convincing those who are vested in the status quo that the change will be worth all of the disruption it takes to get there.

If you've ever sat in a monster traffic jam as they work to expand a freeway, you will know exactly what I am talking about.

Atul Gawande has another great article on this very subject in the New Yorker. "Slow Ideas" discusses how some (medical) innovations spread more rapidly than others. He opens with two clear-cut examples of revolutionary innovations in medicine:  anesthesia and infection control in surgery.

Anesthesia spread more quickly. Prior to its invention, surgeons were judged for their speed. Even minor procedures like tooth removal still required restraints and struggle. Once William Morton demonstrated the idea and Henry Jacob Bigelow published an account in a medical journal, the idea spread like wildfire. Within two months, the idea had already spread to London and Paris.

Despite this rapid uptake, there were still skeptics:

There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs. James Miller, a nineteenth-century Scottish surgeon who chronicled the advent of anesthesia, observed the opposition of elderly surgeons: “They closed their ears, shut their eyes, and folded their hands. . . . They had quite made up their minds that pain was a necessary evil, and must be endured.” Yet soon even the obstructors, “with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.

Infection control took a more torturous path. It was the leading killer of surgical patients. It was so common that oozing pus was considered a sign of healing! Dr. Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur about how microorganisms could cause fermentation and spoilage. He had an idea to use small amounts of carbolic acid to improve surgical infection rates. By 1867, he published the results of years of study showing that the common use of his method dramatically reduced the rates of sepsis and death. Despite these findings, his ideas faced a much colder reception than anesthesia. Gawande reports:

....The surgeon J. M. T. Finney recalled that, when he was a trainee at Massachusetts General Hospital two decades later, hand washing was still perfunctory. Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice. Instead of using fresh gauze as sponges, they reused sea sponges without sterilizing them. It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the surgical field, using heat-sterilized instruments and surgical teams clad in sterile gowns and gloves.

Why did one innovation have such an immediate impact while the other took decades to take root?

We'll discuss Gawande's insight into the answer tomorrow.
Here is a link to part two.

The link to the full article is in the title above and here:  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_gawande