The Long Journey of the Early Adopter

George Owen was pretty smart. Not because he went to Harvard, but because as a hockey player for the Boston Bruins. He realized something about hockey.

Two things actually.

In hockey, you’re skating between 30 and 50 kilometers an hour, surrounded by other people going the same speed, carrying pointed sticks, and surrounded by boards and glass.

And number two, people are shooting a hard rubber disk at speeds up to 80 or 110 kilometers an hour, right at your face.

George Owen figured out something really smart.

He wore a helmet.

He was the first NHL player to regularly wear a helmet while playing hockey.

After that first season of George Owen wearing a helmet, Barney Stanley, a player-coach (not related to the Stanley of the Stanley Cup) presented a helmet design to the Board of Governors of the NHL.

It was instantly rejected.

It’s worth noting that George Owen played hockey in 1928. And it wasn’t until more than 40 years later, that another Boston Bruins, Ted Green, started wearing a helmet regularly.

40 years went by.

40 years of concussions, of head injuries, of goalies like Gump Worsley not even wearing a facemask as hockey pucks were drilled right at their face.

Nobody wore a helmet.

Détente

In 1968, Bill Masterson was killed in a hockey game from a brain injury. And suddenly, 40 years later, hockey players started to pay attention to the fact that they were taking really significant risks with their life by not wearing one.

So, what happened?

Almost no one wore a helmet.

Then in 1972, something extraordinary happened.

A few years after Masterson's death, the Soviet Union, in a sign of détente with North America, sent over its hockey team. A team of Soviet players came to Canada to play a seven-game series against Canadian all-stars from the NHL.

One thing you would have noticed even if you weren’t a hockey fan, was this… every single one of the players for the Soviet Union was wearing a helmet. On the NHL side, there were only three or four players wearing a helmet.

The vivid contrast between the Soviets all wearing helmets, looking out for their own personal safety, compared to the macho, still, great hockey players, not wearing helmets was pretty profound.

Within seven years, the rules of the NHL had changed.

Still, however, in the 70s, if a player was wearing a helmet, they often failed to buckle the strap.

Not buckling the strap was a way of saying to fellow players “Hey guys, my wife is making me wear the helmet, but I’m as brave as you are.”

Analogies

Harvard George Owen (yes, his first name was actually Harvard and yes, he went to Harvard) lived long enough to see Ted Green, and all the others begin to wear helmets.

That must’ve been bittersweet for him. On one hand, he did the right thing, playing for years and years, ignoring the taunts of his fellow players, preserving his health, and setting an example, even though it was ignored by every other player in the entire league.

Often sports analogies are insufficient to help us figure out what to do in the real world, but in this case, I think the message is pretty profound.

Why exactly does someone play hockey?

Even today, hockey players are underpaid compared to other sports like basketball, and you lose your teeth, etc, etc.

I think playing hockey is a statement.

A statement about who you are, who you want to be, and how you are seen by others. And they do this on television. They are making a statement about living a certain kind of life in front of a whole bunch of people.

But it’s their peers that they are mostly striving to be accepted by because it’s a team sport.

Life is also a team sport, and each of us is on a team.

So the questions are, how are we choosing to play whatever game we are playing whether it’s investing, whether it’s the way we come to work, whether it’s how we comport ourselves in the outside world?

What does it mean to insist that your kids wear a helmet when they go sledding, even if their friends aren’t?

What does social pressure do to us as we make choices?

What should industry institutions in government do to normalize certain sorts of behavior?

It wasn’t until the NHL mandated that helmets were required that helmets became widely worn. Because then the players could now grumble and say well, “I don’t want to wear a helmet, but they’re making me.”

It’s worth noting that the NHL made an exception for players who were already in the league when they made the rule, and plenty of veterans persisted in not wearing a helmet.

Then they made a rule that referees had to wear a helmet and amazingly, several of them refused to wear a helmet for the rest of their careers.

Culture

Back to this idea of how it affects our culture.

If the government hadn’t mandated that seatbelts be required in every car, it is really unlikely that seatbelts would be in every car.

It was only because they had to be there that we all had to pay for them… that you could expect that seatbelts would be in your car.

If they were an extra-cost option, many people would’ve chosen not to install them, because your car, like your hockey helmet, or lack thereof, says a lot about who you are.

When we think about the dark patterns that social media sites put in place, the things that are default, the things that are shown, the things that are not shown, many of these defaults determine whether or not we’re going to “wear a helmet.”

You’ve probably heard this story about what happens when they take a 401k or retirement plan, and instead of making it opt-in, where you have to voluntarily fill out a piece of paper to put your savings into a 401k, they make it opt-out, giving everyone the same amount of freedom to do it or not do it.

But once the pattern is in place, compliance can as much as double, because people, while they want to fit in, are also lazy, and when you put those two pieces together, when you establish a standard, and when the easiest path is to follow the standard, then more people will follow the standard.

So think about all of the things that we do growing up. Going to a cake party or deciding to make a choice about going to a famous college and going into debt to do so.

Almost all of these decisions, made by 17-year-olds who have no business making almost any decision, are made because people are looking around and asking “what’s everyone else doing?”

Freedom

Freedom is an interesting concept because most of us would agree that long-term decision-making, made by rational people who have an understanding of what it means to be in society, is probably something we want to let consenting adults do on their own.

That level of freedom in our society gives us the chance to become who we want to become.

But that is really different than saying to somebody, “Oh, you want to text while driving? Go ahead. It’s up to you.”

Because no, it’s actually not up to you.

Because if you’re texting while driving, you might crash into me, and I wasn’t texting while driving, but I’m still dead.

So when we let the phone companies put these devices into the world without a simple bit of software that would’ve made it impossible to text while driving, we as a community made a mistake, a fatal mistake, a mistake that has killed hundreds of 1000s of people, because we mistakenly believe that people would choose to not text while driving, the same way George Owen had a hunch that people would choose to wear a helmet.

Normalizing rational behavior

Super important.

We’d like to believe it comes from the grassroots.

That if you give people the grassroots enough chance to figure out how the world works, they’ll figure out how the world works and it will become normal.

But in fact, that’s almost never the case.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post in 2004 that is really interesting. It’s called the Provincetown Helmet Insight, and it goes like this.

In 2004, he was in Provincetown with his wife for a wedding.

While they were there, they decided to go for a bike ride. On their way to the bike rental store, they saw plenty of people on the bike path and what he noticed was an amazing coincidence. Couples would either both wear a helmet, or neither would wear a helmet.

He figured something was happening in the bike store that was leading the decision to be made in a group. So he waited in line and observed.

What he saw, couple after couple, is that exactly the same thing would happen over and over. The proprietor would take a credit card, wheel out the bikes, and then say to the couple: “Would you like to rent helmets? They’re $1, each.” And the two people would look at each other, and whoever spoke first, won. So, if one person said, Yes, then they both took helmets, and if one person said No, neither took a helmet.

And so the power went to the person who spoke first. It wasn’t a conversation. It wasn’t a meeting. It was whoever, either cared the most or was simply the dominant spokesperson in the couple at that moment, decided for both of them.

So the insight from this wonderful observation, is that we can change the system itself.

We can change the culture

If it’s important for us as a culture —for the people who pay for the ambulance and the medical bills, for the people who don’t want to be surrounded by folks who are either in the cemetery or dealing with a lifelong head injury — the owner of the bike store could say the following: “Would you like to take helmets? Everyone does! There are $1 each,” and then put two helmets in the hands of the couple that’s standing at the counter.

Now, the social pressure is really profound.

We’re not forcing you to wear a helmet. But, what we’ve just done is made it so that with a helmet in your hand or with your partner with a helmet in their hand, if you don’t want to wear helmets, you’ve got to say “No” and put the helmet back.

That is different.

The presumption was that people like us, wear helmets. Are you people like us? In or out?

And that is the opportunity that we have as we try to change the culture. To normalize behaviors that will benefit all of us.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it.