Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Edition

by Joseph Grenny

Active strategies such as classifying, debating, deliberating, and delaying can help change what you think. They do so by changing where you think. Your know system starts to kick in, and you transfer control from the amygdala to the frontal lobe. Once you change where you think, you change how you think, which in turn changes what you think. You’re now able to carefully contemplate, ruminate, and take a longer-term view. So, if, like Henry, you find yourself obsessing over the possibility of gorging yourself on chocolate—or maybe gambling or spending obsessively to the point where you can scarcely think straight—realize that there’s a set of skills you can call into play if you want to take control of your urges.

When you ask people to step into a place of uncertainty and change,

in order to encourage them to change, you have to generate clear, unambiguous evidence that they can believe you.

Be precise

“The message,” Hopkins reports, “is no more important than the messenger.”

You need influencers to share your message, not innovators

So here’s a key to Mimi’s success. Ensure that everyone understands that they are not just 100 percent accountable—but 200 percent accountable. Create an environment in which everyone is responsible not just to enact the vital behaviors—but to hold others accountable for them as well. When this happens, people make personal transformations that are hard to believe.

However, people aren’t likely to trust your words until you demonstrate your willingness to sacrifice old values for new ones. You’ll need to create visible and believable evidence by sacrificing time, money, ego, and other priorities before people will take similar risks themselves.

Kaizen principles.

When behaviors are out of whack, look closely at your rewards. Who knows? Your own incentive system may be causing the problem.

Be careful about the rewards

Do your best to reward behaviors and not merely outcomes. Sometimes outcomes hide inappropriate behaviors. Finally, if you end up having to administer punishment, first take a shot across the bow. Let people know what’s coming before you impose the punishment.

How to compensate

We eat until small things from our environment make us think we’re full.

So, merely putting the data in front of them was sufficient to change behavior.

Do away with the table, and family members lose a fairly large portion of their time together.

But why would families stop buying and using dining room tables? Behold the microwave. There was a time when the preparation of the evening meal was such a significant undertaking that everyone, of necessity, ate at the same time and in the same place. The microwave changed all that by making it easy to prepare single portions for whomever whenever. Suddenly there was no need to prepare one big meal at one time. Dining tables disappeared, and so did a regular ritual that brought people into face-to-face communication. Nowadays

the benefits that come from informally chatting, collaborating, and eventually synergizing are well worth the investment.

Influencers don’t make this mistake. They apply efficiency principles at the very highest level. Rather than constantly finding ways to motivate people to continue with their boring, painful, dangerous, or otherwise loathsome activities, they find a way to change things. Like an ape fashioning a stick to its needs, the influencer changes things in order to make the right behaviors easier to enact. And depending on whether the glass is half empty or half full, influencers also use things to make the wrong behaviors more difficult to enact.

Much of Delancey’s success also depends on making the right behavior easier while making the wrong behavior more difficult.

Brian Wansink has shown that if you make good eating choices a little easier and bad ones a little harder, you can make a substantial dent in your waistline.

Make it harder to eat junk food

plate size affects the amount of food a person will eat during a meal before deciding that he or she is satisfied.

Smaller portions

Measure frequently. And ensure not just that you measure the right thing, but that your measures are influencing the right behavior.

Put a method into play, observe the impact, learn from the effort, make changes, and repeat until perfected.