One way to overcome information blindness is to force ourselves to grapple with the data in front of us, to manipulate information by transforming it into a sequence of questions to be answered or choices to be made. This is sometimes referred to as “creating disfluency” because it relies on doing a little bit of work: Instead of simply choosing the house wine, you have to ask yourself a series of questions (White or red? Expensive or cheap?). Instead of sticking all the 401(k) brochures into a drawer, you have to contrast the plans’ various benefits and make a choice. It might seem like a small effort at the time, but those tiny bits of labor are critical to avoiding information blindness. The process of creating disfluency can be as minor as forcing ourselves to compare a few pages on a menu, or as big as building a spreadsheet to calculate 401(k) payouts. But regardless of the intensity of the effort, the underlying cognitive activity is the same: We are taking a mass of information and forcing it through a procedure that makes it easier to digest.
“The important step seems to be performing some kind of operation,” said Adam Alter, a professor at NYU who has studied disfluency. “If you make people use a new word in a sentence, they’ll remember it longer. If you make them write down a sentence with the word, they’ll start using it in conversations.” When Alter conducts experiments, he sometimes gives people instructions in a hard-to-read font because, as they struggle to make out the words, they read the text more carefully. “The initial difficulty in processing the text leads you to think more deeply about what you’re reading, so you spend more time and energy making sense of it,” he said. When you ask yourself a few questions about wine, or compare the fees on various 401(k) plans, the data becomes less monolithic and more like a series of decisions. When information is made disfluent, we learn more.
In 1997, executives running the debt collection division of Chase Manhattan Bank began wondering why a particular group of employees in Tampa, Florida, were so much more successful than their peers at convincing people to pay their credit card bills. Chase, at the time, was one of the largest credit card issuers in the nation. As a result, it was also one of the largest debt collectors. It employed thousands of people, in offices all over the country, who sat in cubicles all day and called debtor after debtor, to harass them about overdue credit card bills.
Chase knew from internal surveys that debt collectors didn’t especially like their jobs, and executives had grown accustomed to lackluster performance. The company had tried to make the work easier by giving collectors tools to help them convince debtors to pay. As each call occurred, for instance, the computer in front of the debt collector served up information that would assist in tailoring their pitch: It told them the debtor’s age, how frequently he or she had paid off their balances, how many other credit cards they owned, what conversational tactics had proven successful in the past. Employees were sent to training sessions and given daily memos with charts and graphs showing the success of various collection tactics.
But almost none of the employees, Chase found, paid much attention to the information they received. No matter how many classes Chase provided or memos they sent, collection rates never seemed to improve much. So executives were pleasantly surprised when one team in Tampa started collecting larger-than-usual amounts.
That group was overseen by a manager named Charlotte Fludd, an evangelical minister in training with a passion for long skirts and Hooters chicken wings, who had started out as a debt collector herself and had worked her way through the ranks until she was overseeing a group responsible for some of the hardest accounts, debtors who were 120 to 150 days overdue. Cardholders that far in arrears almost never paid off their balances. However, Fludd’s group was collecting $1 million more per month than any other collection team, even as they were going after some of the most reticent debtors. What’s more, Fludd’s group reported some of Chase’s highest employee satisfaction scores. Even the debtors they collected from, in follow-up surveys, said they had appreciated how they had been treated.
Chase’s executives hoped Fludd might share her tactics with other managers, and so they asked her to speak at the company’s regional meeting at the Innisbrook Resort near Tampa. The title of her talk was “Optimizing the Mosaix/Voicelink Autodialer System.” The room was packed.
“Can you tell us how you schedule your autodialer?” one manager asked.
“Carefully,” Fludd said. From 9:15 A.M. to 11:50 A.M., she explained, the collectors called people’s home numbers because they were more likely to reach a wife taking care of the kids. Women were more likely to send in a check, Fludd said.
“Then, from noon to one thirty, we call debtors’ work numbers,” Fludd explained, “and we get a lot more men, but you can start the conversation by saying, ‘Oh, I’m so glad I caught you on your way to lunch,’ like he’s real important and his schedule is busy, because that way, he’ll want to live up to your expectations and he’ll promise to pay.
“Then at dinnertime, we call people we think are unmarried because they’re more likely to be lonely and will want to talk, and then right after dinner, we call people whose balances have ballooned up and down, because if they’ve already had a glass of wine and they’re relaxed, we can remind them how good it feels to start paying the card off.”
Fludd had dozens of tips like these. She had advice on when to use a comforting tone (if you hear soap operas in the background), when collectors should reveal personal details (if the debtor mentions kids), and when to deploy a stern approach (to anyone invoking religion).
The other managers didn’t know what to make of these suggestions. All of them sounded perfectly logical—but they didn’t think their employees would be able to use any of them. The average debt collector had just a high school diploma. For many collectors, this was their first full-time job. Managers mostly spent their time reminding employees to avoid sounding so wooden on the phone. Their debt collectors weren’t going to be able to pay attention to what television shows were playing in the background or listen for religious references. No one was adept enough at analyzing debtors’ records to figure out how to reach a housewife versus her husband. They just talked to whoever picked up the phone. Chase might send the collectors memos each morning, the company might give them computer screens of information and provide them with classes—but managers knew almost no one actually read those memos or looked at the screens or used what they learned in class. Simply having a phone conversation with a stranger about a sensitive issue like an overdue bill was overwhelming enough on its own. The average collector couldn’t process additional information while conducting a call.
But when Fludd was asked why her employees were so effective at processing more information than the average collector, she didn’t have any great answers. She couldn’t explain why her workers seemed to absorb so much more. So after the conference, Chase hired the consulting firm Mitchell Madison Group to examine her methods.
“How did you figure out that it’s better to call women in the morning?” a consultant named Traci Entel asked her when Fludd was back in the office.
“Do you want me to show you my calendar?” said Fludd. The consultants weren’t certain why she needed a calendar to explain her methods, but sure, they said, let’s see the calendar. They expected Fludd to pull out a datebook or journal. Instead, she dropped a binder onto the table. Then she wheeled over a cart containing several more binders just like it.
“Okay,” Fludd said, leafing through pages filled with numbers and scribbled notes. She found the sheet she was looking for. “One day, I came up with this idea that it would be easier to collect from younger people, because I figured they’re more eager to keep a good credit score,” she said.