Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters included a “No brown M&Ms” clause.
It was a genius move to ensure safety.
David Lee Roth (the lead singer of Van Halen) insisted on adding a clause that stated that a bowl of M&Ms should be provided in the backstage area but that every single brown M&M should be removed.
The penalty for leaving one in was unforgiving: cancellation of the show and full payment to the band.
The reason for that clause was to make sure that people read the contract carefully.
Van Halen’s productions were massive, and they included very complex requirements that could easily lead to technical and often catastrophic errors.
For example, applying the wrong specs to the girders could lead to the stage falling apart.
Finding a brown M&M meant that the band was guaranteed to run into a production problem and had to recheck everything in detail.
How to use this mental model
This is a smart lesson on writing business contracts in general, but it also applies to communicating anything sensitive. Use your version of a “No Brown M&Ms” clause when you want to make sure that people read an instruction carefully. For example, if you’re writing an important email, add a weird question or an incorrect date that would prove to you that the recipient read the whole message.
Note: The anecdote is from Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto, about the importance of using checklists to get things right.
This post is an excerpt from “Mental Models for Effective Managers.”
