The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact

So, who's this book for? There are powerful lessons here for teachers, leaders and change-management specialists. Customer-service leaders will also naturally be interested in how to create great experiences. But because of the range and relatability of the examples in the book, there's insight here for anyone who's interested in transforming their own lives, or those of others.

Chip and Dan Heath are brothers, both professional academics. Chip is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches business strategy and organization. Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship. "The Power of Moments" is their fourth book as writing partners. The previous three, "Decisive," "Switch," and "Made to Stick," have all been New York Times bestsellers, and you can hear Book Insight podcasts on all three of them on the Mind Tools site.

So, keep listening to discover the four components of powerful moments, how you can create more of your own, and how to take full advantage of them.

"The Power of Moments" is divided into five main sections, each of which is subdivided two or three times. It has an opening section, which we'll discuss in a moment, but the real meat of the book is in the next four, which focus on the defining elements of powerful, life-changing moments: elevation, insight, pride and connection.

At the end of each section there's a recap, called a Whirlwind Review. This summarizes the content the reader has just covered. It's followed by a practical application of that content, called a Clinic. These Clinics offer case studies based on the section, and questions that challenge the reader to apply the content to real-life situations.

These Reviews and Clinics transform the book. Without them, "The Power of Moments" would have been a compelling study of inspiration and how to act on it. With them, it becomes a handbook for making these moments happen.

The opening section sets the context for the rest of the book. It begins with the story of how two teachers found a way to give their disadvantaged students a one-off experience to inspire them. They called it Senior Signing Day.

On this day, final-year students stood up in front of their peers, teachers and family members to announce the name of the college they'd be attending the following fall. Many of the students were the first in their families to go to college, so this public recognition of that achievement was unusual and exciting.

The teachers modeled the event on a college sports draft, with the students decked out in college T-shirts and scarves. After the announcements, the students formally signed their college undertakings, surrounded by their families. With this event, the two teachers created a moment that was both memorable to those taking part, and inspirational to those watching.

The authors use this anecdote to describe the four elements of a defining moment.

First, elevation is how a powerful moment rises above the everyday. Insight is how important experiences reinvent our understanding of a situation. Pride involves commemorating our achievements, and those of others. And connection concerns the bond that certain experiences help us forge with other people.

The authors show that defining moments need to have at least one of these four elements, and most involve two or three. Senior Signing Day had all four. For the students involved it was a singular, elevating event. Younger students watching gained the insight that in a few years it would be their turn. Pride came from the sense of having made it to college, and connection was central to the social experience of signing up to college surrounded by family and friends.

As you heard earlier, the authors devote a section of the book to each of these four elements. So let's take a closer look at elevation, which they say happens through two key processes: building peaks and breaking the script.

Most people remember only two parts of any life-changing experience. First, there's the "peak," the best part of the experience. The second memorable part is the end. Anything else that happens during the experience is secondary.

This means that peaks have enormous power, particularly in areas such as customer service. Offer someone something that stands out in their minds, and they'll forget the more disappointing and humdrum aspects of the exchange. If it's a bad experience, incidentally, the equivalent of the peak is the "pit." But the book concentrates on the positive.

As well as providing a peak, an elevated moment also needs to disrupt expectations. As the authors put it, it needs to "break the script."

For example, an otherwise modest hotel offering a popsicle telephone delivery service scores more highly in customer reviews than its five-star competitors. The service offers both a peak of enjoyment and a strong element of surprise. This idea of breaking the script, in particular, has important applications for anyone working in product development or customer service.

The next section of the book explores the second element of powerful moments – insight, which involves discovery, realization, and change. So an insightful moment needs to offer clarity, and to happen quickly. It can also only be experienced by the person benefiting from it. Insight may seem to arrive as a bolt from the blue, but the authors argue that it's possible to engineer moments of insight, for ourselves and on behalf of others.

To benefit from personal insights we may need to put ourselves in awkward or uncomfortable situations. The authors call this "stretching." They use the example of a keen amateur baker who decides to open a cake-making business. She eventually finds that the demands of running the business are too much for her, and in a moment of insight, she decides to give it up. Although her experience is negative, her moment of insight gives her a valuable understanding of herself.

More positive are the stories of people who gain insight into what they can do, particularly with the help of mentors. These mentors are the architects of moments of insight. Their high standards, reassurance and support are vital in enabling their mentees to achieve self-insight. There's important material in this section for team leaders and coaches.

The next part of the book covers pride. It deals with moments that provide a strong sense of achievement.

In delivering moments of pride to others, it's vital to recognize what they've achieved. It's even more important to then signal that recognition, and to make it personal. The authors discuss why "Employee of the Month" programs often fail. They're set up with good intentions, but nonetheless they often become routine and meaningless. Effective recognition must show that the person recognizing the achievement has thought about it, and cares.

This section also covers how people create moments of pride for themselves. The most important tip here is to set milestones on the way to a goal that has meaning. So, for example, someone learning to play the fiddle will set intermediate milestones on the way to his ultimate goal, which might be to sit in a pub in Ireland playing to the locals.

This example also highlights the importance of courage – and especially, practicing courage, so that when a person's final goal requires him or her to do something brave, he's ready. The authors draw a moving example from an act of disobedience during the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The protesters didn't decide to protest on a whim. They practiced the situations they expected to find themselves in, gradually developing the courage to go through with the protest.

The authors could also have used the example of the Civil Rights protests to illustrate the fourth and final element of a powerful moment, namely connection. This describes the bonds people have with each other, built upon shared commitment, empathy, and a sense of identity amongst a group.

Moments of connection should have three elements, the authors say. First, they need a shared experience, when everyone in the group is together and engaged with the same issue. Second, they need a commitment to common action. Third, they should involve genuine meaning and purpose.

The authors cite the U.S. healthcare company Sharp as an example of this. In 2001, the organization set out to revolutionize the way it behaved toward patients, prompted by the personal experience of one of its senior executives, Sonia Rhodes. Her father had been treated in Sharp's facility, and she was less than impressed with the way health professionals interacted with him. This compelled her to try to make some changes – radical ones.

Senior leaders gathered the company's 12,000-strong workforce together in one place. They outlined the changes they were proposing, and asked the staff to commit to bringing them about. The response turned the company's reputation for patient care around. With commitment, and a shared purpose and experience, people can achieve great moments of connection.

These moments can happen on a much smaller scale, too. The book explores the importance of connection during one-on-one interactions, and in particular, the power of responding effectively to someone's individual needs. The question at the heart of customer service, for example, should not be, "What's the matter?" It should be, "What matters to you?"

The main part of the book concludes with a discussion about action.

The authors emphasize that everyone should be alive to the possibility and promise of moments, and do things to change their situations. Opportunities to create a defining moment can happen daily, in any situation. We just need to seize them.

After such an uplifting call to action, there's an appendix about the downside of defining moments. Some can be traumatic, and while the authors acknowledge this, they don't dwell on it. Instead, they provide brief, practical advice on building strength and resilience in adversity.

The book's imbalance between good experiences and bad ones is telling. "The Power of Moments" is a deeply optimistic book. Many of the people featured struggle with adversity, but the emphasis is always on the possibility of change. And it's always change for the better.

Perhaps the book's greatest strength is the quality of the stories it uses to make its key points. The authors give the reader some really vivid illustrations of their arguments, and some of these are found in surprising places. In the section on insight, for example, there's a stomach-churning case study on public sanitation issues in Bangladesh. In the authors' own words, "the story ahead is full of disgusting images," but it's a memorable way to make their point.

The book is written in a conversational, engaging style with plenty of humor. Early in the book, in a footnote, the authors acknowledge that by switching the initial letters of the four main principles slightly, you get the acronym EPIC. But they decide not to pursue this, as they can only imagine the word being spoken by a "surfer dude." There are many similar wry comments throughout.

But the authors also know when to be serious. The story of a psychiatrist who loses a patient to suicide is a fine and moving example. And when CEO Eugene O'Kelly decides to turn his last few months with terminal illness into a succession of meaningful moments, the story is told with compassion. It's the personal nature of many of the stories that makes this book so engaging. And they're so well told that they stick in the reader's mind, rather like the moments they describe.

But the book is much more than a series of cool stories. There's plenty of academic rigor, too. The authors openly discuss the scientific ideas behind their arguments, but not so they distract from the flow of the argument. The notes section at the back provides more detail on the research, for those who want to follow up on the sources.

"The Power of Moments" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath is published by Bantam Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.