2
Find Vital Behaviors

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.

—W. Edwards Deming

Before you can influence change, you have to decide what you’re trying to change. Influence geniuses focus on behaviors. They’re universally firm on this point. They don’t dive into developing influence strategies until they’ve carefully identified the behaviors they want to influence.

And now for the big idea: A few behaviors can drive a lot of change.

The breakthrough discovery of most influence geniuses is that enormous influence comes from focusing on just a few vital behaviors. Even the most pervasive problems will often yield to changes in a handful of high-leverage behaviors. Find these, and you’ve found the beginning of influence.

THE KING’S BIRTHDAY PRESENT

To see how tenaciously searching for vital behaviors can make an important difference, meet Dr. Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn (or, as he is known around the world, Dr. Wiwat). He learned the value of searching until you find the right behaviors the hard way.

In 1988, King Rama IX of Thailand turned 60. To honor the event, he gave the country a gift. Unfortunately, the king’s well-intended present actually unleashed a horrendous plague on his people. Prior to the king’s birthday, AIDS in Thailand had been restricted to prisoners who passed the disease from one to the other by sharing used needles. For several years the disease stayed incarcerated with its hosts. But in 1988, in a birthday-inspired act of compassion (in keeping with a national tradition for momentous occasions), the king granted amnesty to over 30,000 prisoners. Released from its confinement, the AIDS virus celebrated its new freedom by rampaging through a much larger intravenous drug-user community. In just a few months almost half the users nationwide were infected.

The country’s infectious disease experts watched in horror as month by month the disease spread from one community to another. Close on the heels of IV drug users, sex workers fell prey. Within only a year, as many as one-third of the sex workers in some provinces tested HIV positive. Next, married men carried the scourge home to their unsuspecting wives, who frequently passed it to newborn babies. By 1993 an estimated 1 million Thais were infected with HIV. Health experts worldwide predicted that in just a few years Thailand would lead the world in infections per capita—with as many as one in four adults carrying the virus.

But it never happened. Within two years the virus hit a wall, and then it retreated. By the late 1990s—largely because of a remarkable influence strategy implemented by Dr. Wiwat—new infections had been cut by 80 percent. The Thai government estimates that as of 2004, over 5 million people who should have been infected weren’t.

But the solution didn’t come easily, and it certainly didn’t come after the first attempt. While AIDS was taking Thailand by storm, Dr. Wiwat battled the plague alongside a handful of his colleagues in the Ratchaburi province. His training had taught him that the key to fighting the spread of any disease lay in making the public aware of the threat. The experts who were advising Wiwat (people who had thought about the transmission problem but who hadn’t actually solved it) argued that diseases thrive in ignorance; therefore, you have to spread the word.

With this idea in mind, when Dr. Wiwat accepted a position with Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, specializing in venereal diseases, he approached the task of informing an ignorant public in much the same way corporate executives try to improve quality, customer service, or teamwork. Wiwat’s team distributed posters. They held education sessions. They convinced celebrities to broadcast television and radio spots.

Despite their best efforts, Wiwat and his teammates failed. After a couple of exhausting, hectic, and expensive years, Thai researchers found that they had accomplished nothing. The problem had actually grown far worse. That’s when Wiwat threw out the handbook. Rather than accepting the word of people who had never actually succeeded in eliminating the rapid transmission of the disease, Dr. Wiwat decided to conduct a more intensive search for a strategy. He started by poring over data about the transmission cycle of AIDS through Thailand.

It didn’t take Wiwat long to realize that 97 percent of all new HIV infections came from heterosexual contact with sex workers. This statistic might seem a bit odd until you learn that Thailand has over 150,000 sex workers—about one for every 150 adult men. Induced by low prices and a permissive culture, the vast majority of Thai men periodically visit brothels.

This statistic gave Dr. Wiwat the focus he needed. If contact with sex workers was causing the pandemic, he had no choice but to focus his attention there—despite the fact that the government refused to admit that the massive sex-trade industry even existed. With over a million HIV infections in Thailand, Wiwat decided the time for political sensitivity and social niceties was long past. If the problem was born in a brothel, the solution would be found there as well.

After continuing his search for a solution, Wiwat surmised that if he could persuade 100 percent of the country’s sex workers to demand that their clients use condoms, he could nearly stop the spread of HIV in Thailand. That became his primary strategy. He’d find a way to get every single sex worker to comply with the condom code. And much to the surprise of the world’s epidemiologists, Wiwat’s plan worked.

Later we explore how Dr. Wiwat successfully influenced sex workers to follow the plan (no easy task). The takeaway we want to focus on now is the fact that by carefully searching for and targeting a vital behavior, Wiwat was able to break from traditional untested methods and find something that actually succeeded.

SEARCH FOR BEHAVIORS

Wiwat’s work teaches our first search principle: When faced with a number of possible options, take care to search for strategies that focus on specific behaviors. Once Wiwat settled on the exact behavior he wanted to influence (condom use), he knew precisely what he needed to motivate and enable others to do.

It turns out that all influence geniuses focus on behaviors. They’re inflexible on this point. They don’t develop an influence strategy until they’ve carefully identified the specific behaviors they want to change. They start by asking: In order to improve our existing situation, what must people actually do ?

It’s important to note that this concept is lost on individuals who misunderstand the meaning of the word behavior. Consider Henry Denton, who is currently trying to lose weight. He decided to lose a few pounds after overhearing his grandchildren speculate about his demise. One of them said: “He’s so fat, he’ll probably die of a heart attack pretty soon.”

This terse comment gave birth to his strategy: “Eat fewer calories than I burn.” His plan, while effective at explaining how weight is lost, doesn’t exactly inform his daily actions. In fact, his strategy focuses on an outcome, not on behaviors. What he’s really saying is that if he does something right, as a result of his efforts he’ll burn more calories than he eats. What he has to do is still unknown.

Confusing outcomes with behaviors is no small issue. In fact, when you look at most failed influence strategies, you’re likely to find at least one example of means/ends confusion. For instance, your neighbor attends a seminar on problem solving with teenagers. She’s told that in order to commence the high-risk conversation on the right foot, she needs to “establish a good relationship.” That’s it. That’s what she’s supposed to do. She’s given this counsel by a coach who actually believes that he’s providing her with behavioral advice. In truth, your neighbor is actually being told what to achieve, not what to do. What the advice is really suggesting is: “Do something; we’re not sure what it is, but do something that results in a good relationship.”

In a sense, this was the problem Wiwat faced when he first started his campaign. He was told by the specialists he consulted to make sure that people understood the problem they were facing. Disease breeds in ignorance, so he set off on an information-sharing campaign.

“The dreaded disease is coming. Beware, the disease is coming. Soon one in four of us will be infected!”

What the enormously important campaign didn’t clarify was what people were actually supposed to do. Without specific behaviors, Wiwat and his team were also unable to take steps to ensure that the public did whatever it was that they were supposed to do. It turns out that without a behavioral focus, people didn’t choose to enact the right behaviors, and the spread of the disease only worsened. Based on the chilling information that was being blasted from every street corner, Thai citizens were indeed more worried; but the disease transmission rate actually escalated. It’s no wonder that influence masters, no matter what challenge they face, always focus on behaviors.

SEARCH FOR VITAL BEHAVIORS

Perhaps the most important discovery from Wiwat’s work is the notion that in addition to focusing on behavior, you should give special attention to a handful of high-leverage behaviors. Principle number two: Discover a few vital behaviors, change those, and problems—no matter their size—topple like a house of cards.

For example, relationship scholar Howard Markman took us into his Relationship Lab to show us how he learned that by focusing on only a few behaviors, he could predict with startling accuracy whether a given married couple is headed for divorce. More importantly, he found that if he could help couples practice a few similarly critical behaviors, he could reduce their chances of divorce or unhappiness by over one-third. You don’t have to study what interests the couples share in common or how they were raised or any of a thousand different ways they treat each other. Merely watch how they argue. If Markman and his colleagues can watch a couple for just 15 minutes, they can predict with 90 percent accuracy who will and who won’t be together and happy five years later! During those 15 minutes, Markman will invite a couple to discuss some topic about which they disagree. If the argument involves a significant amount of blaming, escalation, invalidation, or withdrawal, the future is bleak. If, on the other hand, the same couple opens tough conversations with statements that communicate respect and a shared purpose, and halts emotional escalation in a respectful way to take a time out, the future will be entirely different.

To see exactly how only a few behaviors can play an enormous role in both causing and solving profound problems, let’s look in on Dr. Mimi Silbert, the influence wizard who heads up Delancey. She learned early on that if you’re going to work with subjects who lack just about every skill imaginable, you have to limit your scope of influence by identifying only a couple of vital behaviors and then work on them. Otherwise you dilute your efforts and eventually fail.

As you chat with Dr. Silbert, she’s quick to point out that if you want to change ex-cons’ lives, you need to focus on behavior, not values, homilies, or emotional appeals. Just imagine Mimi Silbert giving a value-laden lesson to James on his first day at Delancey. James vividly describes what she’d be up against.

“When residents wake up in their dorm the first morning and you say, ‘Good morning’ to them, they assault you with profanity in return.” A pep talk on courtesy just isn’t going to cut it in this venue.

So Dr. Silbert focuses on changing behavior, not on preaching homilies. And, once again, a few behaviors, not dozens. During one interview, Silbert explained with a wry smile: “You can’t succeed by trying to change 20 things at the same time!” So Silbert made a study of the behaviors that needed changing, hoping to find a few that would provide focus and leverage in transforming criminals into citizens. After working with over 14,000 hardened criminals, Silbert is now convinced that just a couple of behaviors open the floodgates of change. If you focus on these two, a whole host of other behaviors, values, attitudes, and outcomes follow. Silbert explains how it works.

“The hardest thing we do here is try to get rid of the code of the street. It says: ‘Care only about yourself, and don’t rat on anyone.’ However,” Silbert continues, “If you reverse those two behaviors, you can change everything else.”

James elaborates: “Helping residents learn to confront problems is essential. We’ve got Crips, Bloods, white supremacists boarding with us, and they’re all bunking together. As you might imagine, the tension runs high. Everything we try to change in here is about getting rid of the gang culture. So we talk a lot.”

With this in mind, Silbert targets two high-leverage behaviors that help residents talk in ways that eventually destroy the gang culture. First, she requires each person to take responsibility for someone else’s success. Second, she demands that everyone confront everyone else about every single violation.

To transform these ideals into realities, each resident is placed in charge of someone else the very first week. For instance, say you’re a resident who was homeless and strung out on crack a week ago. During the seven days since coming to Delancey, someone who had been a resident for only a little longer than you would take you under his or her wing and teach you to set a table in the restaurant. A week later when someone even newer than you comes in, you’re in charge of teaching that person to set the table. From that moment forward, people no longer talk to you about how you’re doing. They ask you how your crew is doing.

Next, residents learn the second vital behavior: to speak up to people who are breaking rules, drifting off, becoming verbally aggressive, and otherwise behaving badly. For most ex-criminals, talking about these types of problems is like speaking a foreign language. Ultimately, Silbert helps residents change their values and attitudes—even their hearts—but she does so by focusing on two vital behaviors.

STUDY THE BEST

Silbert and Wiwat (in fact, all the influence masters we studied) make judicious use of vital behaviors. It’s their trademark. Before they run off willy-nilly implementing the first influence strategy that comes to mind, they search for behaviors —vital behaviors.

How do legitimate researchers actually discover the handful of behaviors that typically lead to success? People will tell you that they’ve discovered the behaviors that lead to weight loss or increased productivity or whatever it is that you want to change, but how do you know if they’ve really found the high-leverage actions that lead to the results you care about? Fortunately, the science of identifying which actions lead to key outcomes—no matter the domain—has already been carefully developed by those who study “best practices.” To learn what to watch for as you study the best practices others have uncovered, consider the following case.

MEET ETHNA REID

To see how one of these best-practice studies is completed, we’ll visit Dr. Ethna Reid in Salt Lake City. She’ll teach us how to identify which behaviors, from a list of hundreds, separate successful people from everyone else. The technique she routinely applies to schoolteachers sets the standard for how to search for vital behaviors.

Forty years before we met Dr. Reid, soon after she had completed her doctoral work and was teaching prospective educators how to improve students’ poor reading habits, she turned to her academic mentor and asked, “Does any of what you’re teaching me actually work?”

Her mentor explained that he didn’t know for sure. He suspected it did. It certainly made sense. But nobody had actually studied the effects of the accepted methods.

Dr. Reid decided it was time to find out.

She began by calling a local school district and asking if anyone had records tracking, say, reading comprehension. The district experts actually had 20 years of data. Better still, they had conducted studies that were quite informative—and tragic. Based only on the first year’s testing, researchers could predict how well students would do in the third year, the seventh, and so on.

“The model is highly predictive,” explained the voice on the other end of the phone. Reid was thunderstruck. With cold, scientific precision, the researcher explained to her that the current education system essentially set kids on a course of success or failure beginning in the first grade—independent of what anyone did afterward.

Stunned and indignant, Reid was determined to find out if there was something teachers could do to make a difference. Weren’t there teachers out there who started with children the model predicted would lag behind, but who helped the students beat the model? And, if so, what was the difference between those who were successful and everyone else?

Here’s where Dr. Reid’s mix of genius and dogged determination came into play. She pored over the data until she found teachers whose students did better in later years than before being taught by those teachers. Some did considerably better.

“These were the teachers who beat the projections,” Dr. Reid explained. “For whatever reason, their students beat the model. We also were able to find teachers whose students did far worse than predicted after spending a year under their tutelage.

“I was curious as to what was going on with both groups,” Reid continued, “so I gathered a dozen teachers whose students were achieving better results than the model predicted and asked them what methods they used to cause their students to read at a higher level than expected. They didn’t know what had led to success. Later I gathered teachers whose students had done worse than predicted and bluntly asked: ‘What are you doing that prevents the children from learning?’ After an extended awkward silence, they confessed that they didn’t know.”

And now for the determination. For the next five years Reid watched both top and bottom performers in action in order to divine the vital behaviors that separated the best teachers from the rest. She codified, gathered, and studied data on virtually every type of teaching behavior she and a team of doctoral students could identify.

With still vibrant enthusiasm, Reid announced to us the findings. They had found certain behaviors that separate top performers from everyone else. They’ve proven to be the same behaviors across ages, gender, geography, topic, and anything else the researchers could imagine.

One of the vital behaviors consists of the use of praise versus the use of punishment. Top performers reward positive performance far more frequently than their counterparts. Bottom performers quickly become discouraged and mutter things such as, “Didn’t I just teach you that two minutes ago?” The best consistently reinforce even moderately good performance, and learning flourishes.

Another vital behavior they found is that top performers rapidly alternate between teaching and questioning or otherwise testing. Then, when required, they make immediate corrections. Poor performers drone on for a long time and then let the students struggle, often leaving students to repeat the same errors.

After explaining the vital behaviors, Dr. Reid remarked, “You’re probably wondering how we know for a certainty that these are the vital behaviors—the ones that separate the best from the rest.” She then turned to a plain wooden cupboard attached to the wall behind her, opened it, and pointed to dozens of doctoral dissertations.

For over three decades, Reid and a constant stream of doctoral students had tracked the same topic: What vital behaviors set top teachers apart from the masses? She would pick the learning target she cared about—say, vocabulary. Then she’d find a data set and identify teachers who beat the predictive model along with those who trailed it. Finally, she would watch both groups in action, codify their actions, and tease out which behaviors worked and which ones didn’t.

Dr. Reid now knows with a scientific certainty the specific behaviors that lead to the best results. This means that she now knows which vital behaviors to influence if she wants to improve the outcomes she desires.

The good news behind this story is that this type of best-practice research can be conducted in any organization. We (the authors) used similar techniques when trying to determine the behaviors that lead to high productivity in companies. We watched top performers at work, compared them with others who were decent but not quite as good, and identified two sets of behaviors that set apart the best from the rest—both of which we’ve written about in detail in our books Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations.*

In each case, researchers compared the best to the rest and then discovered the unique and powerful behaviors that led to success. They didn’t think up their ideas on the way to the mall. They didn’t sit down and brainstorm techniques with their best friends. They didn’t even ask top performers what they believed set them apart from their peers. Instead, they closely watched people with proven track records and discovered what caused them to succeed.

Of course, the real test of this and other forms of best-practice research comes when scholars take newly discovered vital behaviors and teach them to experimental groups. If they have indeed found the right behaviors, experimental subjects show far greater improvement in both the vital behaviors and the desired outcome than do control subjects. Consider Ethna Reid’s success. Studies in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Nebraska, Washington, Virginia, Hawaii, Alabama, and California have shown that, independent of the topic, pupils, school size, budget, or demography, changes in the vital behaviors Reid discovered improve performance outcomes that influence the entire lifetime of a child.

From this best-practice research we learn two important concepts. First, there is a process for discovering what successful people actually do. We know what to look for when examining others’ claims that they’ve found vital behaviors. If the individuals who are offering up best practices haven’t scientifically compared the best to the rest, found the differentiating behaviors, taught these behaviors to new subjects, and then demonstrated changes in the outcomes they care about, they’re not the people we want to learn from.

Second, in many of the areas where you’d like to exert influence, the vital behaviors research has already been done. For example, if you want to learn how to live healthfully with type one diabetes, two vital behaviors have already been found: Test your blood sugar four times a day and adjust your insulin appropriately to keep your blood glucose in control. These two behaviors substantially increase the likelihood of a normal, healthy life. If you search carefully, you’ll find that good scholars have found the vital behaviors that solve most challenges that affect a large number of people.

STUDY POSITIVE DEVIANCE

Let’s add another tool that can help us in our search for vital behaviors. It draws from a long-tested methodology often used in social research and is known as positive deviance. To see how this method works, we look more closely at the Guinea worm efforts conducted in Africa and Asia.

The destructive pest has been largely eradicated by a strategy devised by a small team at The Carter Center and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Leaders from The Carter Center didn’t have the luxury Ethna Reid had of conducting controlled laboratory experiments. It was simply not practical to study hundreds of villagers and perform statistical analyses on behavioral differences to arrive at the vital few they would then attempt to influence across the continent. They had to find a different strategy.

“Positive deviance” can be extremely helpful in discovering the handful of vital behaviors that will help solve the problem you’re attacking. That is, first dive into the center of the actual community, family, or organization you want to change. Second, discover and study settings where the targeted problem should exist but doesn’t. Third, identify the unique behaviors of the group that succeeds.

When members of The Carter Center team began their assault on Guinea worm disease, they used this exact methodology. They flew into sub-Saharan Africa and searched for villages that should have Guinea worm disease but didn’t. They were particularly interested in studying villages that were immediate neighbors to locations that were rife with Guinea worm disease. Eventually the team discovered its deviant village. It was a place where people rarely suffered from the awful scourge despite the fact that the villagers drank from the same water supply as a nearby highly infected village.

It didn’t take long to discover the vital behaviors. Members of the team knew that behaviors related to the fetching and handling of water would be particularly crucial, so they zeroed in on those. In the worm-free village, the women fetched water exactly as their neighbors did, but they did something different when they returned home. They took a second water pot, covered it with their skirts, and poured the water through their skirt into the pot, effectively straining out the problem-causing larvae. Voilà! That was a vital behavior. The successful villagers had invented their own eminently practical solution.

The team took copious notes about this and a handful of other vital behaviors. By studying the successful villagers, the team learned that water could easily be filtered without importing prohibitively expensive Western solutions.

To bring this a bit closer to home, let’s briefly look at something many people have experienced—what seems like uncaring or insensitive medical care. In this case, a large regional medical center’s service quality scores had been decreasing slowly and consistently for 13 consecutive months. Clinical quality was very good, but the scores showed that patients and their families didn’t feel like they were being treated with care, dignity, and respect.

The chief administrator called the executive team together. He shared the data and made a proposal. The question he posed was this: “What do we have to do, all 4,000 of us, to fix this?” Two teams of respected employees, six to a team, were formed. Each team represented half the functions in the hospital. The teams were chartered with finding positive deviance. Locate those health-care professionals who routinely scored high on customer satisfaction in areas where others did poorly. They were not to worry about systems, pay, or carpet in the employee lounge, but behaviors they could teach others—behaviors that were both recognizable and replicable.

Each team interviewed dozens of patients and family members and sought ideas from colleagues in their hospital. They searched the Web and called colleagues in other hospitals. But mostly they watched exactly what top performers did to see what made them different from everyone else.

Eventually the teams identified the vital behaviors they believed led to higher customer satisfaction scores. They found five: Smile, make eye contact, identify yourself, let people know what you’re doing and why, and end every interaction by asking, “Is there anything else that you need?”

The executives created a robust strategy to influence these behaviors. The result? As 4,000 employees started enacting these five vital behaviors, service-quality scores quit decreasing and improved dramatically for 12 months in a row. The regional medical center became best-in-class among its peers within a year of the executives’ focus on these five vital behaviors.

SEARCH FOR RECOVERY BEHAVIORS

To explain the next search principle, we return to the Guinea worm problem The Carter Center tackled. In addition to discovering what the successful villagers had done to avoid contracting the parasite, the team also studied what the villagers did when an occasional worm did pop up in the village. Here team members exemplify our third search principle: Search for recovery behaviors. People are going to make mistakes, so you have to develop a recovery plan.

For instance, people in the healthier villages knew that they were most vulnerable to the spread of the parasite when a worm started to emerge from a person’s body. As was stated before, the infected villager’s only source of relief from the excruciating pain is to soak the limb in water. If the villager used the local water supply, it would be contaminated for yet another year.

The Carter Center team found that within the positive deviant villages, the locals took two recovery steps to cut off the disease cycle. First, villagers had to be willing to speak up when they knew their neighbor was infected. Once villagers realized that the worm came from unfiltered water, those who got the worm sometimes felt ashamed to admit their error. The vital recovery behavior, then, was that friends and neighbors had to speak up when the Guinea worm sufferer was unwilling to do so. Only when the community took responsibility for compliance could the entire village protect itself from the failure of a single villager. This crucial conversation triggered a response from village volunteers that enabled the second vital behavior: During the weeks or months it takes the worm to exit the victim’s body, villagers had to ensure that he or she went nowhere near the water supply.

It turned out that if everyone in a village enacted these two recovery behaviors—speaking up and keeping infected people away from the water supply—for one full year, the worm would be gone forever. No new larvae would enter the water, and the Guinea worm would be extinct.

These same methods for discovering positive deviance can be applied almost anywhere. We (the authors) used the techniques to invigorate a massive quality effort in a large manufacturing organization in the United States. A few hundred employees had been through several weeks of Six Sigma training (a quality improvement program aimed at eliminating defects as completely as possible), but the company was seeing almost no benefit. For reasons that were hard to comprehend, Six Sigma graduates didn’t appear to be applying any of the new tools they had spent weeks learning. To learn what was going on, two of the authors and a handful of managers went on a search for positive deviance. We were looking for the answer to two important questions: Had anyone in the company found a way to put the tools to work? And if so, could other teams apply the same techniques? It wasn’t long until we found four teams that had enjoyed several Six Sigma successes despite the fact that most other teams were cynical about the effort and had given up on employing any of the new techniques.

What had the deviants done to avoid failure and the resultant cynicism? When the researchers interviewed unsuccessful team members, they learned that their cynicism stemmed from three experiences. First, when they offered innovative ideas, their supervisor usually shot them down. Second, they had irresponsible teammates no one ever dealt with, and therefore they concluded that improvement ideas were a crock. And finally, they felt powerless to question management policies or decisions that appeared to obstruct their improvement efforts.

The successful teams were opposite in every respect. In these three dicey situations, they behaved in ways that kept them from becoming cynical. Their “recovery behaviors” involved stepping up to conversations their peers avoided. Team members vigorously but skillfully challenged their supervisor. They were candid with peers who weren’t carrying their weight. And finally, they were capable of talking to senior management—the same senior managers more cynical peers avoided—about policies or practices that they believed impeded improvements.

We concluded that the teams that had successfully implemented Six Sigma techniques did so not because they learned the methods better or had received more support from their bosses, but because they knew how to step up to crucial conversations.

The good news with positive deviance techniques is that these methods for uncovering vital behaviors are available to everyone. Start by examining the exact population and the setting you are interested in changing. Next, look for people who should be experiencing the problem but aren’t. Then discover the unique behaviors that separate them from the rest. When applying positive deviance techniques to yourself, compare yourself to you. Think back to a time when you were successful, and figure out what you did that caused your success. Finally, take care to identify recovery behaviors as well.

TEST YOUR RESULTS

Let’s add a word of caution. With standard research methods—such as the work done by Ethna Reid—scholars compare top performers to poor performers, codify and record behaviors, and then have the computer tease out the answer to what causes what. With positive deviance you typically don’t have this luxury. Practitioners interview and watch successful subjects on site until they think they’ve discovered how top performers differ from their less successful counterparts. Then they draw conclusions about what causes success—in their heads.

There’s the rub. Allowing one’s brain to complete the final calculations can be dangerous. One can easily draw bogus conclusions. With Guinea worm disease, modern medicine explains the worm’s entire life cycle, so when practitioners observed villagers filtering out larvae in their skirts or avoiding contact with their water source when the worm was emerging, they immediately and correctly concluded that these specific techniques eliminated the noxious worm.

With something as fuzzy as the ability to talk to others about high-stakes issues, it’s less clear that this precariously “soft” interpersonal skill is the primary contributor to the Six Sigma training taking effect. Successful teams did report progress in this area as opposed to the cynical teams, but did the ability to talk openly actually cause the difference?

When you move from computer analysis to taking a guess on your own, you walk precariously close to the line that separates science from everything else. Crazy superstitions live off bogus conclusions. Whole companies can be brought to ruin when leaders respond to hunches.

Given the inherent dangers of watching and concluding on your own, it’s essential to immediately follow up your conclusions about cause and effect with a test. Then you must teach your newly discovered vital behaviors to the failed groups and see if the behaviors you chose actually do cause the results you’re trying to achieve. In the Six Sigma case, we (the authors) taught the three vital behaviors across the 4,000-person factory and saw immediate gains in the company’s Six Sigma investments. With the Guinea worm, The Carter Center and CDC team has now eliminated the plague from 11 of the 20 countries that were afflicted when they began the campaign. Worldwide infections have dropped by over 99 percent because of an influence strategy that focused on three vital behaviors. Evidently, they were the right ones.

TRY THIS AT HOME

How about the home version of the search game? When you’re not dealing with Guinea worms in sub-Saharan Africa or failed Six Sigma projects at a factory, you might wonder which search techniques, if any, could work for you personally. Henry Denton—our friend who is trying to lose weight—would certainly be interested in finding a handful of vital behaviors that would make it easier for him take the weight off.

A good starting point for Henry would be to search for experts who have already learned which actions are best for helping people lose weight and keep it off. He’d reject plans that focus on outcomes—that is, burn more calories than you eat—and he’d demand behaviors: vital behaviors.

If Henry did poke around, he’d discover that the National Weight Control Registry has identified vital behaviors for weight loss, using a method that compares the best to the rest. This institution tracks people who lose at least 30 pounds and keep it off for a minimum of six years. Their data reveal three vital behaviors. Successful people exercise on home equipment, eat breakfast, and weigh themselves daily.

These vital behaviors would give Henry a good start, but only a start. From there he’d need to ascertain which strategies work best for him given his unique circumstances. He could learn this by conducting his own version of a positive deviance study. That is, he would compare himself to himself by asking what makes a good weight day a “good weight day.”

For example, as Henry considers times in his life when he’s maintained a healthy diet, he realizes that lunchtime puts him in harm’s way. When he goes out to a restaurant, if he thinks in advance about what he should order, he orders healthy food. If he doesn’t, he splurges and eats all the wrong things. Shopping time is equally dangerous. He realizes that when he buys fatty foods, he eats fatty foods. It’s far easier for him to resist buying unhealthy items than it is to resist eating them once they’re in his home.

When Henry does indulge, he tends to feel depressed and to reason that since he’s blown his plan, he might as well enjoy it. His one-time indulgence then expands to a week-long binge, and he packs on another five pounds. As he thinks about his vulnerabilities, Henry realizes that he needs to create a recovery plan when he does fall off the wagon or he’ll continue to fall farther than if he had caught himself early. Next time he deviates, he’ll reset his goals to accommodate his latest indulgence, and he won’t try to play catch-up by eating too little or exercising too much. Instead he’ll return immediately to his updated health plan and follow it carefully.

Finally, Henry will conduct dozens of mini experiments to learn what actually works for him. Rather than try any one thing and bet on it, he’ll play with different exercise techniques, recipes, shopping patterns, restaurants, and so forth until he finds what suits him best.

SUMMARY: SEARCH FOR VITAL BEHAVIORS

Search for Behaviors. Take care to ensure that you’re searching for strategies that focus on behavior. Don’t let experts pass off outcomes as behaviors. You already know what you want to achieve; now you want to learn what to do. Be leery of vague advice. If you can’t immediately figure out what the expert is telling you to do, then the advice is too abstract and could imply a number of possible behaviors—many of them wrong.

Search for Vital Behaviors. Master influencers know that a few behaviors can drive big change. They look carefully for the vital behaviors that create a cascade of change. No matter the size of the problem, if you dilute your efforts across dozens of behaviors, you’ll never reach critical mass. If your problem is common, odds are the research has already been done for you.

When behaviors must be customized to your personal or local circumstance, look for vital behaviors by studying positive deviance. Look for people, times, or places where you or others don’t experience the same problems and try to determine the unique behaviors that make the difference.

Search for Recovery Behaviors. People make mistakes, and yet some find a way to quickly get back on track rather than sink further into despair. Henry, for example, learned that failing to follow his dietary plan one day should cue him to look for where he went wrong and then to take corrective action— and not to take the one-time failure as a sign that he won’t be able to succeed and that therefore he should give in to his cravings.

Until Henry identified this and similar recovery behaviors, he was constantly taking two steps forward, followed by three steps back. Now when he runs into a problem, he stops his backward fall by using his mistake as a data point for learning and not as an indicator that he ought to give up. Recovery behaviors make up an important part of every change master’s influence strategy.

Test Your Results. Finally, if you’ve conducted your own research and found candidates for what you think are high-leverage vital behaviors, test your ideas. Implement the proposed actions and see if they yield the results you want. Don’t merely measure the presence or absence of the vital behaviors; also check to see whether the results you want are happening.

To make it easy to both surface and test vital behaviors, conduct short-cycle-time experiments. Don’t hypothesize forever or put massive studies into place. Instead, develop the habit of conducting rapid, low-risk mini experiments.

Whether you conduct best-practices studies on your own, search for positive deviance, conduct mini experiments, or simply look for those who have already identified the vital behaviors for you, the point is the same. Don’t glance around, take the first piece of advice from a friend, or rely on a hunch. Instead, follow the lead of influence geniuses everywhere. Conduct a genuine search for vital behaviors. If you don’t, it won’t be long before you’ll be searching for serenity.