The Power to Change Anything

If you’re like most people, you face several influence challenges that have you stumped. For instance, at work you’re fighting an uphill battle. You’ve given your heart and soul to a quality-improvement program, but your best efforts to make quality part of the everyday culture have yielded no improvements whatsoever. None.

At the personal level, you’re fighting a weight problem that has gone on for years. Actually you have a metabolism problem. It turns out your body doesn’t burn 6,000 calories a day. Talk about bad luck.

At the family level, your oldest son just turned 13, and he hangs out with a pretty frightening-looking crowd that appears to have lost all interest in civility, decency, and hair care. You’ve tried reasoning and bribing and even a well-timed threat, but when you talk to him, there’s no one home. It’s as if the day he turned 13 your ability to influence him expired.

At the community level, you have a neighbor who allows three vicious, three-foot-tall pit bulls to wander his backyard with impunity. The problem is his four-foot fence. It’s just a matter of time until the dogs break out and run wild, but the local animal control people won’t do a thing about it. According to them, someone has to suffer before they can take action. To cap the whole thing off, your region of the country is going through a five-year drought because apparently the world is heating up like a meatball in a microwave.

And you can’t fix any of this.

Fortunately you’ve learned to follow the words of a well-known prayer: Every day you ask for the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Somehow that gets you through.

THE SERENITY TRAP

And that’s the problem. It’s everyone’s problem. We’ve come to believe that when we face enormous challenges that can be solved only by influencing intractable behaviors, we might attempt a couple of change strategies. When they fail miserably, we surrender. It’s time to quit and move on. We tell ourselves that we’re not influencers, and that it’s time to turn our attention to things that are in our control. We seek serenity.

This would be a good tactic were it not for the fact that the problems we’ve listed—along with everything from changing the culture of an organization to eliminating HIV/AIDS transmission to reducing drug addiction to limiting divorce—can be and have been resolved by someone somewhere. That’s right. There are actual people out there who—instead of continually seeking the “wisdom to know the difference”—have sought the wisdom to make a difference. And they’ve found it. They’ve discovered that when it comes to changing the world, what most of us lack is not the courage to change things, but the skill to do so.

The promise of this book is that almost all the profound, pervasive, and persistent problems we face in our lives, our companies, and our world can be solved. They can be solved because these problems don’t require solutions that defy the laws of nature; they require people to act differently. And while it’s true that most of us aren’t all that skilled at getting ourselves and others to behave differently, there are experts out there who do it all the time.

In fact, one of the best-kept secrets in the world is that over the past half century a handful of behavioral science theorists and practitioners have discovered the power to change just about anything. So instead of pleading for the wisdom to know when to give up, we should be demanding the names and addresses of the influencers who have found solutions to the problems we face every day. We should be seeking to expand the list of things we can change so that we don’t need to seek serenity so often.

Not everyone will become influencers with a capital “I,” but everyone can learn and apply the methods and strategies the world’s best influencers use every day. In fact, that’s the purpose of this book—to share the principles and skills routinely employed by a handful of brilliant and powerful change agents so that readers can expand their set of influence tools and bring about important changes in their personal lives, their families, their companies, and even their communities.

Unlike most books on the topic, we don’t draw upon the traditional way of thinking about how to exert influence by suggesting that the best way to help propel others to change is through the power of verbal persuasion. Wouldn’t it be great if you could encourage others to stop their bad behavior with just the right combination of words? We’ve certainly tried. Legions of leaders have attempted to turn around their latest acquisition by preaching on the need to “do what’s best for the larger good.” Unfortunately, it’s a rare leader who has seen this verbal volley alone change behavior in any noticeable way. Influence requires a lot more than the right combination of words.

For example, as you bite into a burger the size of a toaster, wouldn’t it be nice if one more reminder from your spouse about how you’re digging your grave with your teeth would actually inspire you to swear off fast food forever? But it’s not going to happen.

Instead of merely drawing on the power of persuasion, we explore the full array of strategies successful influencers use every day (often in combination) to change lifelong habits and bring about improvements. That means we don’t offer influence methods that apply only to specific problems such as: “How to potty-train your Chihuahua” or “Six ways to motivate left-handed coal miners.” Instead we look for high-leverage strategies and skills that can be applied across the vast array of human challenges.

For example, consider the following ongoing tragedy. Every year over 3,000 Americans drown—many of them in public pools. This ugly statistic remained unchanged until a team of tenacious leaders from the YMCA and Redwoods Insurance decided to abandon serenity and search for a workable change strategy. It wasn’t long before they reduced fatal accidents at YMCA pools by two-thirds simply by employing a few of the influence strategies we’re about to study.

To reduce the senseless loss of lives, the team found a way to encourage YMCA lifeguards to alter how they performed their job. Now that’s no easy challenge because it requires the ability to exert influence over hundreds of teenage employees across the organization. However, when it came to guarding, the team discovered that one vital behavior—something they called “10/10 scanning”—was a key to saving lives. By using a few of the principles we cover in this book, they were able to zero in on and change a key behavior.

It turns out that traditional lifeguards spend much of their time greeting members, adjusting swim lanes, picking up kick-boards, or testing pool chemicals. However, when lifeguards stand in a specific spot and scan their section of the pool every 10 seconds and then offer assistance to anyone in trouble within 10 seconds, drowning rates drop by two-thirds. To date, scores of communities have been spared the devastating loss of a life because a handful of clever influencers looked for a way to change behavior rather than accepting the existing reality.

And while we’re talking about saving lives, let’s take a look at an influence effort that has saved—and created—tens of thousands of jobs. In 2006 alone (during the writing of this book), the chronic influence failures of the leaders of Detroit auto companies resulted in the cumulative dismissal of tens of thousands of career employees. Yet at the same time, Toyota added tens of thousands of jobs not just in Japan, but in North America. Toyota has grown consistently while U.S. auto companies have declined because Toyota’s leaders have perfected a system of influence that engages all employees in continuous improvement.

CHOOSING INFLUENCE

The reason most of us pray for serenity rather than doggedly seeking a new solution to what ails us is that, left to our own devices, we don’t come up with the big ideas that solve the problems that have us stumped. We fall into the serenity trap every time we seek solace when we should be seeking a solution. To bring this problem to its knees, we first have to see ourselves as influencers. This revised self-image calls for a deviation from the existing norm. Rarely do people say that they currently are, or that one day they will be, an influencer.

“When I grow up, I’m going to move to New York City, where I plan on being a professional influencer!”

“Who me? I work for IBM. I’m the chief influence officer.”

“Yes, I’m married with two children, so I guess I’m working pretty much full time as an influencer.”

We typically don’t think of ourselves as influencers because we fail to see that the common thread running through most of the triumphs and tragedies of our lives is our ability to exert influence. If we did, we’d invest enormous energy in looking for new and better ways to enhance our influence repertoire. For instance, every time we tried to exert influence over others with a few well-chosen words and nothing happened, we’d stop talking and try something new. Every time we tried an incentive and it failed, we’d try something new. We wouldn’t move from talking to carping and from offering incentives to making threats. Instead, we’d try something new.

The fact that many of us don’t realize that it’s our duty to become good at exerting influence causes us a great deal of grief. Instead of owning up to our responsibility of becoming effective agents of change and then going about the task of improving our influence repertoire (much like an athlete running laps or a chess player learning moves), we grumble, threaten, ridicule, and, more often than not, find ways to cope.

WE’RE BETTER AT COPING THAN AT EXERTING INFLUENCE

People tend to be better copers than influencers. In fact, we’re wonderful at inventing ways to cope. For instance, at work we abandon our quality-control program and install full-time inspectors. Nobody will listen. Instead of fixing lousy schools, we complain to our friends and then backfill by tutoring our children. It’s the best we can do. And when it comes to diet and exercise, we own two or three different-sized wardrobes. It’s impossible to stick to a diet.

Consider the following international example of coping. Not long ago the world celebrated the birthday of one of the smallest yet most successful organisms on the planet—a terrifying organism called HIV. A review of the proceedings of its birthday party in Toronto—the 16th International AIDS Conference—demonstrates our universal lack of confidence that we can actually change what people do. Of the speeches, classes, and activities that took place at that conference, over 90 percent dealt with how to cope with the effects of AIDS.

Of course, helping AIDS sufferers is essential. We should spend time talking about how to reduce discrimination against sufferers and how to dramatically increase access to medicines. But it’s indicative of our collective sense of powerlessness that less than 10 percent of the speeches at the international AIDS conference even speculated on how to change the behavior that drives the disease in the first place. Here we have a disease that would never infect another human being if people simply thought and behaved differently, and yet the central forum for discussing the pandemic hardly touched on the topic of human behavior.

To cite an often-spoken metaphor that helps us understand what’s happening with this ongoing tragedy, it’s as if a steady stream of automobiles is hurtling toward a cliff and then plunging to destruction. A community leader catches sight of the devastating carnage and springs into action. However, instead of rushing to the top of the cliff and finding a way to prevent drivers from speeding toward disaster, the bureaucrat parks a fleet of ambulances at the bottom of the cliff. When the vast majority of our efforts go to after-the-fact treatment rather than avoidance of AIDS, we’ve quietly announced that we don’t know how to influence thoughts and behavior, so we’ve given up.

You can see evidence of coping everywhere. What’s the solution to, say, a gambling addiction? Current efforts are aimed at developing an antiaddiction pill. IT department isn’t performing? Outsource it. Spouse giving you fits? Legislate an easy off-ramp to no-fault divorce. Are recently released convicts leaping too quickly back into crime? Don’t free them so soon. Build bigger penitentiaries, and put in a revolving door. Then pray for serenity.

THE WISDOM TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Over the last year U.S. airlines lost over $10 billion and shed tens of thousands of jobs. At the same time, Southwest Airlines racked up its 14th straight year of profits and double-digit growth. What do Southwest’s leaders do that others haven’t figured out? They engage everyone in doing more with less. They turn planes faster at the gates. They treat customers better. And they get a higher percentage of bags and passengers to arrive at the same location. In other words, they’ve perfected an influence strategy that produces the behaviors that drive stellar results across their entire company.

While this has been going on in the business world, another influence genius in Dhaka, Bangladesh, helped over 4 million of the Developing World’s poor to emerge from poverty.

Likewise, thousands of previously overweight Americans declared victory in the battle of their bulges by developing sustainable influence strategies over their own unhealthy behaviors.

And finally, in Thailand alone, over 5 million people avoided contracting HIV because of a remarkably effective influence strategy developed by a quiet but enormously effective influence genius who has a lot to teach us all.

So there is hope. In a world filled with those content with seeking serenity, there are people who know exactly what it takes to exert influence over human behavior—and change the world in a good way. We (the authors) know because we’ve tracked them down. We’ve traveled to Addis Ababa, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Bangkok, Boston, Burkina Faso, Denver, Dhaka, and other rather exotic-sounding places, and we’ve studied what they’ve done.

And what has this rather comprehensive search revealed? Every time we interview these influencers, we’re both awed and humbled. Carefully, systematically, and with no fanfare whatsoever, a small group of tenacious gurus has been able to achieve everything from eradicating diseases to eliminating gender discrimination to turning around companies. One of the wizards we discovered influences hardened criminals and drug addicts to eventually become productive citizens—every single day.

And here’s what qualifies these remarkable individuals as master change agents rather than as merely lucky. They have all successfully applied their influence strategies to problems that others haven’t been able to solve for years—often centuries. None has succeeded through serendipity, nor have any of their results been idiosyncratic. Through years of careful research and studied practice, they’ve developed a handful of powerful influence principles and strategies that they themselves can and do replicate and that others can and do learn.

This book shares their combined knowledge. By sharing the principles and strategies of a handful of brilliant influencers, we (the authors) hope to help you expand your own sphere of influence—and thus change your own life for good.

In this book you’ll meet a few of the influencers who are changing the world.