Military Review English Edition September-October 2014 | Página 62

appealing or relevant. This shift meets leadership expectations of “millennials.”13 Research has shown, “one
of the best ways to keep them [millennials] engaged is
to communicate a large vision, worthy of their devotion, and then set high expectations.”14 Communicating
a PME, instead of a series of rules for your weekend,
would appeal to millennials.
The weekend safety brief is a valid forum for discussions about the PME. Shifting to that topic is likely to
have a positive impact on the good order and discipline
of the organizations that make such a change. We also
need a better method of delivery to make such a safety
briefing stick with the target audience.

The New Weekend Safety Brief
This conversation begins by describing what we
have been doing and why that is generally an ineffective method. The next objective is to identify exactly
what we want to accomplish through the weekend
safety brief. To close, we will examine a new method
for making soldiers more likely to do the right thing. In
their 2007 book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive
and Others Die, authors Chip and Dan Heath offer a
helpful model with which we will be able to improve
our organizations.15
To be intellectually honest, proving that the current
mode of weekend safety brief is a failed method runs
into a small challenge since there is no body of literature documenting the topics and formats of weekend
safety briefs or any scientific data available with which
to measure their effectiveness. That said, most leaders
in the Army can turn to their own anecdotal evidence
and experience to inform a discussion about the value
of current techniques. Essentially, the reader is asked
to accept this argument even though a lack of available records places it in the category of a planning
assumption.
Chip and Dan Heath, in a later book, Switch: How
to Change Things When Change is Hard, describe a
common human situation where the obstacle to change
can best be described by the confession, “I know what
I should be doing, but I’m not doing it.”16 The Heaths,
two brothers, consider this a problem that deals with
conscious awareness, but a lack of drive on the emotional side. Our subordinates often know what to
do and may even believe that they should do it. The
problem is that they are not motivated enough to do it.
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The weekend safety brief that consists of a list of do’s
and don’ts speaks only to the part of the human brain
that already knows not to drink and drive or commit
domestic violence. The problem is that it fails to address the part of the brain that is going to do something
about it. In