Skip to main content

Peaks and Pits Playbook 🏔 🕳️️

2 Introduction to Peaks and Pits

Peaks and pits are impactful experiences in our lives, described by Chip and Dan Heath in their book “The Power of Moments”.

Broadly, peak moments are experiences that stand out memorably in our lives in a positive sense, whereas pit moments are impactful negative experiences.

The Heaths emphasise that both peak and pit moments are crucial in shaping our lives. They argue that by understanding and intentionally creating peak moments, organizations, and individuals can improve experiences in various domains like education, customer experience, and personal relationships. Likewise, recognizing and properly managing pit moments can lead to personal development and resilience.

A key aspect of peaks and pits are that they are memorable experiences, that emotionally resonate with the person experiencing them. Dan Heath explains this extremely well (in my opinion) through what he calls the Disney paradox.

The Disney Paradox

There is a puzzle about our memories of experiences. Imagine going to a Disney theme park; if one was to sample their happiness level over a bunch of different moments throughout the day, the majority of these moments one would probably be happier sitting at home- it’s less crowded, food isn’t overpriced etc. However, reflecting on the Disney trip it’s likely to be one of the highlights of the year. Why is that? Our memories of experiences are not fair, and we don’t just take and average of our moment-by-moment sensations when we reflect on our experience. Rather, we remember snippets, scenes, and moments. In particular there are two moments we disproportionately remember- the peak (or pit) of the experience (the best or worst moment), and the ending. So, looking back on the Disney trip it’s the rollercoaster moment, family time, and surprises that are remembered, we don’t remember the moment-to-moment frustrations and irritability.

By applying the learnings of the Disney paradox to creating better experiences for customers, it boils down to creating better ‘moments’.

Great experiences hinge on peak moments.

We are trained to fix problems rather than build moments, but fixing problems doesn’t make people happy, it whelms people- not overwhelms or underwhelms, simply whelms. Consider driving down a road with no potholes, you’re not ecstatic, you’re simply whelmed.

Whilst this implementation is what the client will do with the results and insights from our projects, having an appreciation of this is key to understand how such a phenomenon can be translated to the business world.

2.1 Components of a memorable moment

The Heath brothers provide four not-mutually exclusive components/aspects that contribute to these memorable moments:

  • Elevation: Moments that rise above the-every-day. They involve elements of joy, surprise, and are often sensory-rich experiences that lift us emotionally.
  • Pride: Profound insights or realisations that can change our understanding of ourselves or the world around us.
  • Insight: Sudden realisations that change our understanding of ourselves or the world around us- the Eureka moment.
  • Connection: Moments of shared experience, such as shared joy or accomplishment that deepens our bonds with others.

Whilst these are clearly applicable for peak moments, by reversing these components (i.e. a moment removing joy from an experience) helps us align these to pit moments.

Note that the classification of EPIC is not required for the classification of peaks and pits, but rather peaks and pits is required if we wanted to classify anything to the EPIC framework

Because of this, whilst initial peaks and pits projects were interested in understanding how these components appear within identified memorable moments, this framework has been superseded by Microsoft’s own ‘Brand Love’ framework, which will appear later in the document.