More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The bright spots give you an action plan: Go investigate the two successful managers. First, see if either situation is an anomaly. For instance, in your follow-up, you might discover that one of the successful managers had not been giving any more feedback to his team—he’d simply been approaching individuals more often to make small talk. The extra social contact made him feel good but annoyed team members (who were constantly interrupted). That manager is not a real bright spot. The other success might be legitimate. Maybe the manager, Debbie, devised a tracking sheet that reminds her to
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades. And this asymmetry is why the Rider’s predilection for analysis can backfire so easily.
To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?”
This problem-seeking mindset is a shortcoming of the Rider in each of us. Psychologists who have studied this phenomenon—our predilection for the negative—have reached some fascinating conclusions.
“What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?”
Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.
By staying focused on the critical moves, he made it easier for his people to change direction.
Knowing what we know about the Rider, it’s no surprise that Behring’s strategy worked. Behring had scripted the moves that helped his people make hard decisions. What tires out the Rider—and puts change efforts at risk—is ambiguity, and Behring eliminated it.
The more instinctive a behavior becomes, the less self-control from the Rider it requires, and thus the more sustainable it becomes.
And when you’ve dug up stumps together and you start to realize you have shared ideas about what you want the community to be, then things start to happen.” (Notice that the log-clearing day had powerful Elephant and Path elements, as well. The flush of victory—of making a difference—gave the Elephant strength to continue. And the strong support of the community made the Path feel less difficult. It’s easier to make a long journey when you’ve got a herd around you.)
A railroad and a South Dakota small town. Both crumbling. Both with a dense thicket of problems and no real resources to use in untangling them. In each situation, an unlikely leader emerged—a young man fresh out of business school and a high school basketball coach. And both succeeded by formulating solutions that were strikingly smaller than the problems they were intended to solve. (We’ve seen this asymmetry before, in the stories of Jerry Sternin in Vietnam and Bobby the troubled teenager.)
To the Rider, a big problem calls for a big solution. But if you seek out a solution that’s as complex as the problem, you’ll get the Food Pyramid and nothing will change. (The Rider will just spin his wheels trying to make sense of it.) The Rider has to be jarred out of introspection, out of analysis. He needs a script that explains how to act, and that’s why the successes we’ve seen have involved such crisp direction.
We all hear a lot of “common sense” wisdom about change: People don’t like to change; people resist change; people are set in their ways; people are stubborn. But here we’ve seen something else entirely: railroads made profitable, towns reborn, diets changed, and child abusers reformed. Clarity dissolves resistance.
Collins and Porras defined a BHAG as “an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future,” and their research showed that setting these big, motivating goals was a practice that distinguished lasting companies from less successful ones.
We want a goal that can be tackled in months or years, not decades.
We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible. That’s the missing piece of what we’ve discussed so far. We’ve seen the importance of pursuing bright spots, and we’ve discussed ways of instructing the Rider how to behave, but we haven’t answered a very basic question: Where are we headed in the end? What’s the destination?
Our first instinct, in most change situations, is to offer up data to people’s Riders: Here’s why we need to change. Here are the tables and graphs and charts that prove it. The Rider loves this. He’ll start poring over the data, analyzing it and poking holes in it, and he’ll be inclined to debate with you about the conclusions you’ve drawn. To the Rider, the “analyzing” phase is often more satisfying than the “doing” phase, and that’s dangerous for your switch.
Notice what happens, though, when you point to an attractive destination: The Rider starts applying his strengths to figuring out how to get there.
One was “learning”—the convenient notion that even if a particular well doesn’t hit, the team will learn so much from the process that future operations will be more successful.
“I can give you a hundred examples where people made a mistake because they didn’t use knowledge they already had, for every one example where we learn something that is valuable for next time.” The other common rationalization was that certain wells had “strategic value.” Callagher said, “The last defense of the charlatan is always that something is ‘strategic.’ ‘This is a strategic well, so we have to drill it.’” “No dry holes” removed the fudge room. A well might be strategic, or it might not be, but either way, it better not be dry.
Note that the leaders at BP didn’t say, “Two out of three—that’s close enough. Let’s celebrate!” Every dry hole was a failure, and there was no dodging it. Because they couldn’t easily excuse failure—It was strategic! It was a learning opportunity!—they were left with only one choice: Drill smarter next time.
If you worry about the potential for inaction on your team, or if you worry that silent resistance may slow or sabotage your change initiative, B&W goals may be the solution. But, to be clear, you won’t always need a goal that’s so unyielding.
What you don’t need to do is anticipate every turn in the road between today and the destination. It’s not that plotting the whole journey is undesirable; it’s that it’s impossible. To think that you can plot a turn-by-turn map to the end, like a leader’s version of Mapquest, is almost certainly hubris.
When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.
So far we’ve learned a great deal about the Rider and his many strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side of the ledger, the Rider is a visionary. He’s willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs (which is why he fights so often with the Elephant, who generally prefers immediate gratification). He’s a clever tactician, too—give him a map and he’ll follow it perfectly. But we’ve also seen plenty of evidence of the Rider’s flaws—his limited reserves of strength, his paralysis in the face of ambiguity and choice, and his relentless focus on problems rather than solutions.
Here’s the good news: The Rider’s strengths are substantial, and his flaws can be mitigated. When you appeal to the Rider inside yourself or inside others you are trying to influence, your game plan should be simple. First, follow the bright spots. Think of the Vietnamese children who stayed well nourished against the odds, or the Genentech sales reps who racked up sales against the odds. As you analyze your situation, you’re sure to find some things that are working better than others. Don’t obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes. Next, give direction to the
...more
1. Point to the destination. We should paint a picture of the group glory that will result from a successful product launch. The developers will be software heroes, and they’ll have a line on their résumés that will always be impressive. Listening carefully to the customer is simply a way to accelerate that glory.
Script the critical moves. Are we being specific enough about what’s needed from the developers? Imagine that we tell them that their program’s “ease of use” is rated as “poor.” What in the world can they do with that? Their Riders will spin for hours, trying to decide among dozens of possible improvements. It’s our responsibility to define the critical moves—along the lines of, “We need to give people a quicker way to rotate these objects.”
Find the feeling. At Microsoft, the developers were invited to visit the usability testing lab. There, from behind a one-way mirror, they could watch real users struggling with their programs. It made all the difference. The test lab manager says that when developers see a user live, “Twenty ideas just immediately come to mind. First of all, you immediately empathize with the person. The usual nonsense answers—‘Well, they can just look in the manual if they don’t know how to use it,’ or ‘My idea is brilliant; you just found six stupid people’ … that kind of stuff just goes out the door.”
Grow your people. Developers may worry that, if their code needs revising, it reflects negatively on their abilities.
Build habits. Is the customer feedback coming at the most convenient time in the code development cycle? Developers have routines that work for them. Can we make an effort to snap the user-testing onto an existing routine, so we’re not complicating the Path?
At some level, we understand this tension. We know there’s a difference between knowing how to act and being motivated to act. But when it comes time to change the behavior of other people, our first instinct is to teach them something. Smoking is really unhealthy! Your chemotherapy medicine is really important! We speak to the Rider when we should be speaking to the Elephant.
Direct the Rider. 1. Follow the bright spots. Can Carr find some success stories about department heads who figured out how to save money in creative ways (for example, by installing sensor-controlled lighting/heating or by outsourcing administrative functions)? If so, she should help to clone the success across departments.
Motivate the Elephant. 1. Shrink the change. The need to cut 5 percent is clear, but cutting is the kind of task that inspires dread. “People tend to panic a little when you say, ‘We have to cut our budget by five percent,’” says Carr. How can she break down the task?
2. Grow your people. Once the department heads have tackled the first three budget lines, Carr wants to keep the momentum going. She tells them, “We’re already one third of the way there!” She is putting two stamps on their car-wash cards—letting them know that they’ve already made great progress toward the goal.
1. Build habits. Every Monday, like clockwork, Carr sends out budget updates. She requests updates and gives simple action items, such as, “If you don’t think you’ll be able to meet the 5 percent cut in travel, call me today.” By using a very consistent and predictable process, Carr tries to make the cycle of budget cuts more routine, more automatic.
2. Rally the herd. At one point in the budget cutting, all the department heads attend their yearly planning retreat. On the first day, everyone sees what cuts all the departments made in the initial round. Then each department head spends some time, over night, planning a round of deeper cuts. The next morning, they share their proposed cuts with one another. Carr says, “Everyone got to see what each person was already cutting and the i...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
One way to shrink change, then, is to limit the investment you’re asking for—only 5 minutes of housecleaning, only one small debt. Another way to shrink change is to think of small wins—milestones that are within reach.
(This outcome foreshadows a point that we make in Chapter 10 about behavior being contagious. Kelman managed to address all three parts of the framework—directing the Rider, motivating the Elephant, and shaping the Path.)
there are two routes to building people’s confidence so that they feel “big” relative to their challenge. You can shrink the change or grow your people (or, preferably, both). Our picture of change is still incomplete, though, because it’s clear that in some situations even a reluctant Elephant and a confused Rider will manage to change their behavior. For instance, consider the fact that even a lost, angry driver who is hopelessly late for an appointment will stop dutifully for a red light. That’s why, to make changes stick, we’ve got to think about shaping the Path.
the Haddon Matrix, a simple framework that provides a way to think systematically about accidents by highlighting three key periods of time: pre-event, event, and post-event.
Let’s say our goal is to reduce serious injuries from car wrecks. Pre-event interventions would include anything that would tend to prevent wrecks from happening: installing bright lighting on highways, painting clear lane markers on the roads, popularizing antilock brakes, launching advertising campaigns against drunk driving. With event interventions, we accept that crashes will happen and ask ourselves how we can reduce the chances of injury. Seat belts and air bags are classic event interventions, but also think about breakaway light poles and those big orange barrels that line exit ramps
...more
his habits shifted when his environment shifted. This makes sense—our habits are essentially stitched into our environment. Research bears this out. According to one study of people making changes in their lives, 36 percent of the successful changes were associated with a move to a new location, and only 13 percent of unsuccessful changes involved a move.
action triggers are quite effective in motivating action.
Action triggers won’t get you (or anyone else) to do something you truly don’t want to do.
action triggers can have a profound power to motivate people to do the things they know they need to do.
Peter Gollwitzer argues that the value of action triggers resides in the fact that we are preloading a decision.
There’s no cycle of conscious deliberation. By preloading the decision, we conserve ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness.
action triggers are most useful in the most difficult situations—the ones that are most draining to the Rider’s self-control.
