By Claire Louge, Executive Director
I was in the TSA screening line at Sky Harbor, bracing myself for the scramble of hoisting my overstuffed luggage onto the conveyor belt and removing various items of clothing without taking up too much space or time from the hurried travelers behind me. You know the feeling. It’s not a calming experience.
As usual, the agents managing each lane shouted instructions to people moving through, getting louder as they competed with chatter, intermittent announcements from the airport loudspeaker, dull thuds of bins being stacked, and the whir of industrial fans.
But not the agent in my lane. She did something completely different.
She leaned over to a section of her line, made eye contact with a few of us, and explained the instructions in a conversational voice.
“Alright all, here’s how this works,’ she said. “You’ll leave your shoes on, but electronics bigger than a phone need to go in their own bin…”
Calmly. Like we were having a friendly chat.
The tension in my shoulders dropped. Everyone proceeded to follow her instructions as she gathered the next part of the line to give them her spiel.
As I pushed my suitcase onto the belt, I told her I appreciated her approach. She said she had tried the ‘usual way’, but that she just couldn’t do it. It hurt her voice, and it didn’t feel right to her to yell at people. This way worked best for her, and she saw it also worked well for travelers.
It made me wonder how many routine things we could do better with just a little change. So many things are done because they’ve ‘always been done this way’. Things we might not even think to question.
We may assume that there’s a good reason the way things are the way they are. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes there’s a written rule guiding people’s behavior, or best practices born of research and experience of what works best.
But often it’s just norms that guide our actions. Norms that persist because everyone assumes they’re the right way or the only way because they are the most common way. Norms that we stop questioning. And when we stop questioning why we do what we do, we lose our ability to change for the better.
It takes someone stepping out of the norm to make us realize the norm might not be working for most of us, or any of us. That the norm might actually be a bit ridiculous. That there might be a better way.
That agent’s shift was so small but so significant in lifting stress from a commonly stressful experience. Instead of getting louder, she got calmer. And it worked. All it took was questioning the norm and making a little change. And little changes can change outcomes. Little changes can change the world.