Find the Feeling

MOTIVATE THE ELEPHANT

5

1.

In 1992, Target was a $3 billion regional retailer, a pip-squeak compared to its competitors Kmart ($9 billion) and Wal-Mart ($30 billion). But it aspired to be different. Even in those days, the chain’s advertising was hip and fashionable. Unfortunately, the store’s merchandise didn’t deliver on the advertising’s promise. Customers complained: I see all these great ads, but when I come to the store, you’ve got the same boring stuff as Wal-Mart.

You already know how this movie ends. Over the following fifteen years, Target became “Tar-ZHAY,” the $63 billion giant, the Apple of the retailing world, the keeper of the beloved bull’s-eye, the champion of design. The new era started with the iconic Michael Graves teakettle and expanded over the years to Todd Oldham bedding and Isaac Mizrahi shower curtains and Mossimo sweaters and countless other products that combined the holy duo of hip and cheap.

The beginning and end points of the Target tale are pretty well known. But we suspect you don’t know much about the middle, and that’s a shame, because what happened in the middle was the change. It didn’t happen in the boardroom. It happened because of people like Robyn Waters.

Waters had no intention of working for Target. She was a self-described fashion snob, and she’d vowed not to come back to Minnesota, where she was raised, and where winter takes over much of fall and spring. She certainly had no intention of working for a discounter. She had an enviable job at the posh Jordan Marsh department store and was living in high style: “I was going to Italy and attending meetings with Armani and Versace and rubbing shoulders with all the fashionistas, and that was really cool when you’re in your mid-thirties. But then one day we all got laid off. So that’s how I came to be open-minded.”

She joined Target in 1992 as the “ready-to-wear” trend manager, which made her responsible for black stirrup pants, sweats, and Looney Tunes T-shirts. She’d wondered how she’d managed to slip from Versace to Tweety Bird.

The company was at an important inflection point when she joined. Bob Ulrich had just retired as CEO, and he’d become chairman of the board. He had a very clear vision of Target as an “upscale discounter” that would differentiate itself through design. He dreamed that Target’s bull’s-eye would become a “love-mark,” as respected and well loved as Coca-Cola or the Beatles or Lego. He wanted the bull’s-eye to be as ubiquitous as McDonald’s golden arches.

At the time, though, Target was a long way from realizing that vision. The merchants at Target—the people who select the merchandise that will show up for sale in various departments—had traditionally been copycats. Waters said the mind set among the clothing merchants had been to “find the best seller this year, take

it to Asia, knock it off, and sell it next year at half the price.” For Target to become a design powerhouse, the company had to stop lagging the trends and start riding the trends. That was Waters’s mandate in the trend department.

The problem was that Waters had almost no power to advance this “trend-right” vision. The merchants didn’t have to deal with her. “I had to win them over. I could never mandate, ‘We have to have purple this year because that’s the trend,’” she recalled.

Waters slowly built up believers. An early convert was the merchant responsible for turtlenecks. She was fed up with using the same tired patterns each year—you know, the cutesy snowflake-and-reindeer prints used by every discount retailer. So, at Waters’s urging, she hired a designer to create some fresh patterns, and as they both predicted, sales improved dramatically.

These early-adopter experiments gave Waters much-needed success stories. Since Target had an analytical, numbers-driven culture, publicizing the early results was critical. Waters could point to “heroes” in the organization who’d taken a risk and succeeded. (“Check out what the turtleneck merchant did.”)

For a time in retail, trendy clothing was neutral in color. Everything was gray, white, khaki, tan, or black. Then, one season, color exploded at the fabric shows and in the retailers in London and Paris. It wasn’t an obscure trend; it was a big wave. So, as the design champion at Target, Waters needed to get her merchants excited about color. But the merchants, being numbers driven, would review the past few years’ sales and see that color hadn’t sold. (In this situation, a Rider appeal couldn’t possibly succeed because the data contradicted Waters’s position.)

Waters had to get creative. She went to the candy store at FAO Schwarz, where you could buy M&Ms in whatever color you wanted, and brought huge bags full of bright-colored M&Ms

to her internal meetings. She poured the candy into a glass bowl, creating cascades of turquoise and hot pink and lime green. “People would go ‘Wow,’ and I’d say, ‘See, look at your reaction to color.’”

She brought in samples of Apple’s recently released iMac computers—in lime, strawberry, grape, and tangerine—which had been a sensation. For the first time, consumers were choosing the color of their computers with the same seriousness they used to choose the color of their cars. And she constantly brought in photographs from boutiques around the world. She’d show a merchant the photo of a polo assortment and say, “See how they have three neutrals, and a mild yellow, and then they add the bright blue for a pop.” Then she’d create a mock-up display with actual clothing samples so the merchants could see for themselves, Yup, that blue color pops. And, soon after, that blue polo shirt would show up on the floor of Target, for one clothing line, for one season.

This is how organizational change happens.

When Waters talks about this period, she is emphatic that she’s not the “hero” of the Target story. She says she was one person among many who managed to transform the company. However you assess her contribution, the remarkable thing is that her successes came despite a lack of authority and resources. Waters said, “I had no head count at the time. I was always borrowing people, and my budgets never balanced. But I kept getting support from merchants who would say, ‘Oh, I’ve got an extra head count over here. And you can hire this designer, but she’s only going to work on our stuff.’ And in the next division they’d say, ‘Wow, I want one, too.’”

Not only did Waters lack control over the merchants, she didn’t even speak their language. Indeed, the biggest mystery of Waters’s success might well be this: In the analytical culture of

Target, where numbers were the lingua franca, why did a bunch of demonstrations seem to make the difference?

2.

In The Heart of Change, John Kotter and Dan Cohen report on a study they conducted with the help of a team at Deloitte Consulting. The project team interviewed over 400 people across more than 130 companies in the United States, Europe, Australia, and South Africa, in hopes of understanding why change happens in large organizations. Summarizing the data, Kotter and Cohen said that in most change situations, managers initially focus on strategy, structure, culture, or systems, which leads them to miss the most important issue:

… the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings. This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.

In other words, when change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Rider.

Most of us, in Robyn Waters’s shoes, would create a “business case” for the power of design. We’d compile a PowerPoint presentation with charts and graphs and strategically selected quotes from the chairman who’d embraced the design-forward vision.

When we finished our presentation, everyone in the room would understand what we meant. They might even agree! But would they change their behavior? Kotter’s research suggests no.

Kotter and Cohen say that most people think change happens in this order: ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE. You analyze, then you think, and then you change. In a normal environment, that might work pretty well. If you need to reduce duplication costs in your print shop by 6 percent, or if you need to shave off 5 minutes from your daily commute, then that process will serve you well. Kotter and Cohen note that analytical tools work best when “parameters are known, assumptions are minimal, and the future is not fuzzy.”

But big change situations don’t look like that. In most change situations, the parameters aren’t well understood, and the future is fuzzy. Because of the uncertainty that change brings, the Elephant is reluctant to move, and analytical arguments will not overcome that reluctance. (If someone is unsure about whether to marry her significant other, you’re not going to tip her by talking up tax advantages and rent savings.)

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You’re presented with evidence that makes you feel something. It might be a disturbing look at the problem, or a hopeful glimpse of the solution, or a sobering reflection of your current habits, but regardless, it’s something that hits you at the emotional level. It’s something that speaks to the Elephant.

In staging demos for her colleagues at Target, Robyn Waters was honoring the SEE-FEEL-CHANGE philosophy. She set up displays that let the merchants see what was possible: See how that blue polo shirt pops? See how it catches your attention and draws your attention? She brought in iMacs and M&Ms and let people

ooh and aah over them—“See, look at your reaction to color.” (And, by the way, wouldn’t it be nice to be part of the same movement as Steve Jobs and Apple?)

Waters thought carefully about what her colleagues would see because she knew what she wanted them to feel: energized, hopeful, creative, competitive. They took the bait.

Let’s remember, too, the story about Jon Stegner from Chapter 1, the man who created the Glove Shrine. He knew his colleagues weren’t enthused about his idea for centralized purchasing, so he didn’t bother talking about the numbers. Instead, he showed them something that made them feel something. (We really buy all these different kinds of gloves?) SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Trying to fight inertia and indifference with analytical arguments is like tossing a fire extinguisher to someone who’s drowning. The solution doesn’t match the problem.

It can sometimes be challenging, though, to distinguish why people don’t support your change. Is it because they don’t understand or because they’re not enthused? Do you need an Elephant appeal or a Rider appeal? The answer isn’t always obvious, even to experts.

3.

Pam Omidyar, the founder of HopeLab, knew the struggles of teenagers with cancer. They endured weeks of brutal chemotherapy in the hospital and went home a mess—sapped of energy, their hair falling out, their throats raw and tender, their immune system wrecked. But when they finally walked out of the hospital to return home, there was one silver lining: The worst was likely over. Going forward, their obligations would be relatively simple: They’d need to immediately report any symptoms they developed, such as a fever, and take their medicine faithfully,

which might include a regimen of antibiotics and low-dosage chemotherapy pills for two years.

But many teens simply failed to comply, partly because following the medication regimen wasn’t easy. The side effects of chemotherapy, even at low doses, were rough—nausea, skin breakouts, tiredness, irritability. The side effects of the home regimen, though, were nothing compared to the horror of intensive chemotherapy, and by missing their doses, kids were risking a recurrence of their cancer. Steve Cole, the research director for HopeLab, says, “If you skip 20 percent of your doses, you don’t just have a 20 percent higher chance of getting cancer again. Your odds go up 200 percent.”

How could teens take such a terrible risk? Omidyar was convinced that teens simply weren’t getting the message. She sought a new way of influencing their behavior—something unconventional, something that spoke in their language. Her inspiration: We’ll make a video game.

After months of effort, HopeLab developed a game called Re-Mission. In the game, teens became Roxxi, a silver-suited nanobot who charged through the bloodstream zapping tumor cells with electric-green chemo-rays. In between rounds of gameplay, teens watched short “briefing” videos featuring Smitty, a mentor robot, who provided additional information about chemotherapy and recovery.

Re-Mission featured twenty levels of play, each lasting an hour and packed with information. The team at HopeLab was convinced that if it could get kids to play the whole game, any misunderstandings that could lead to noncompliance would be wiped out.

Eventually the team launched the first clinical trial for Re-Mission. In 2008, the results were announced in the medical journal Pediatrics. To the team’s delight, the game had increased

kids’ adherence to their medication plans. The amount of chemotherapy drugs circulating in the blood of kids who played the game went up by 20 percent. That may not sound like much, but small differences in adherence make a big difference in health. The odds of surviving cancer double if you can bump up chemotherapy adherence by 20 percent.

But there was a surprise buried in the evidence of success. A lot of the kids didn’t actually play the game all that much, attempting only one or two levels instead of the twenty that had been designed into the game. Yet even those early quitters ended up taking their medications more regularly. In fact, the teens who played only two levels were changing their behavior as much as the kids who played all twenty.

At first glance, that finding seemed as absurd as if you’d discovered that students got comparable scores on their algebra finals whether they took only one week of classes or a whole semester. Research director Cole acknowledged, “Clearly, in one or two levels we’re not teaching them a whole lot, since the bulk of that time is spent flying around the body blowing things up.” Why had the underutilized game been so effective at changing the kids’ behavior?

Cole started asking around, trying to understand the puzzling result. One of his friends, a marketing professor at Stanford, said, “Think about this from a marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don’t do it with information. We do it with identity: ‘If I buy a BMW, I’m going to be this kind of person. If I take that kind of vacation, I’m that kind of eco-friendly person.’”

And it dawned on Cole: When teens didn’t comply with their drug regimen, the problem wasn’t knowledge, it was emotion. He said, “It boils down to an identity thing. After you have gone through intensive chemo, you’ve had your life stolen from you

by cancer. So the kids think, ‘I just want to get back to being the original me.’ They don’t want to be ‘the sick kid’ anymore.”

The game was making a gut-level emotional connection. You are Roxxi, the nanobot, boldly defeating cancer. You fuel your ray gun by taking chemotherapy and antibiotics. Medicine means power. And the educational videos that pop up occasionally, with the mentor-robot lecturing you about the importance of compliance, are completely irrelevant to the change that’s going on. The change is not one of understanding but one of feeling. It’s realizing that I can do this. I’m in charge. Chemo isn’t a reminder of the sickness; it’s how you get your life back—how you steal back the real you from cancer. Take the pills, and you can stop being a cancer kid forever.

—————————— CLINIC ——————————

How Can You Make Developers Care About the End-User?

SITUATION At many software companies, the developers—who are responsible for writing new software programs—fall in love with their code. When their programs are tested by customers, they can be skeptical of the customer feedback. At Microsoft, for instance, one test of a new feature showed that six out of ten users couldn’t figure out how to use it. When the test lab shared the data with the developers, their reaction was, “Where’d you find six dumb people?” Many companies experience a form of this problem. Is it possible to convince developers to be more responsive to customer feedback?

WHAT’S THE SWITCH AND WHAT’S HOLDING IT BACK? Ultimately, companies need developers to tweak their software in response to feedback from customers; otherwise, the programs won’t be successful. But sometimes developers resist or dismiss customer feedback and make only “token” revisions rather

than trying to empathize with customers’ difficulties. This is probably an Elephant problem—the developers understand what’s being asked of them but resent being forced to change their beautiful code for the dummies in their audience. But let’s not be too quick to treat developers as a “type” (e.g., as arrogant technologists). Character judgments like that reflect a psychological bias that we explore in Chapter 8. Let’s focus on providing developers with more motivation and a smoother path.

HOW DO WE MAKE THE SWITCH?

• Direct the Rider. 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. 2. 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.”

• Motivate the Elephant. 1. 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.” 2. Grow your people. Developers may worry that, if their code needs revising, it reflects negatively on their abilities. (We’ll talk about more about this in Chapter 7, the section on the “fixed mindset.”) We should stress that the test of a great

developer isn’t the quality of his or her first-draft code; it’s how well the developer codes around the inevitable roadblocks. We should make an effort to praise ingenious solutions to customers’ problems.

• Shape the Path. 1. 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? 2. Tweak the environment. At many companies, programmers are given the best computers. This practice is great for productivity but lousy for customer empathy. One manager says that every time his developers use machines a generation ahead of their customers’ equipment, the software they create has usability problems. Why? Because the developers have no intuition about how slowly the software is running for typical end users. Solution: Require developers to program on the same machines customers use. (This is another Path solution that has been pursued by Microsoft.)

4.

When people push for change and it doesn’t happen, they often chalk it up to a lack of understanding. A mom grouses, “If my daughter just understood that her driving habits are dangerous, she’d change.” A scientist says, “If we could just get Congress to understand the dangers of global warming, they’d surely take legislative action.”

But when people fail to change, it’s not usually because of an understanding problem. Smokers understand that cigarettes are unhealthy, but they don’t quit. American automakers in the early twenty-first century knew they were too dependent on the sales of SUVs and trucks (and thus on low oil prices), but they didn’t innovate.

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.

This realization—that we can make an impeccably rational case for change and people still won’t change—is pretty frustrating. Why did Robyn Waters need to go through all the trouble of staging demos for her colleagues at Target? Shouldn’t the logic of design innovation have been compelling enough on its own?

Why can’t we simply think our way into new behavior? The answer is that, in some cases, we really can’t trust our own thinking.

5.

As you watch, a stranger walks into a room and sits down behind a table. He picks up a piece of paper and reads aloud a generic-sounding weather report: “Tomorrow, we’ll see highs in the upper 80s with an overnight low of 53….” He completes his “report” in about 90 seconds and walks out of the room.

Next, you’re asked to guess his IQ.

You’re part of a psychology experiment, and you object to the absurdity of the request. I don’t know anything about that guy. He just came into a room and read a report. It wasn’t even his report—you gave it to him to read! How am I supposed to know his IQ!?

Reluctantly, you make a wild guess. Separately, Fake Weatherman is asked to guess his own IQ. Who made a better guess?

Amazingly, you did, even though you know nothing about Fake Weatherman. Two psychologists, Peter Borkenau and Anette Liebler, from Universität Bielefeld in Germany, conducted this experiment, and they found that the strangers’ IQ predictions

were better than the predictions of those whose IQ was being predicted—about 66 percent more accurate.

To be clear, it’s not so much that you’re a brilliant predictor; it’s that he’s a lousy self-evaluator. We’re all lousy self-evaluators. College students do a superior job predicting the longevity of their roommates’ romantic relationships than their own.

Savor, for a moment, the preposterousness of these findings. Fake Weatherman has all the information, and you’ve got none. He’s got decades of data—years’ worth of grades, college entrance exam scores, job evaluations, and more. Fake Weatherman should be the world’s foremost expert on Fake Weatherman!

If self-evaluation hinged on information alone, the findings of these studies would have been impossible. It’d be like discovering that you could beat randomly selected mothers on a trivia question about how many kids they have.

But self-evaluation involves interpretation, and that’s where the Elephant intrudes. The Elephant tends to take the rosiest possible interpretation of the facts. (“My 2.1 GPA is a sign of my intelligence—it shows that my intellect simply isn’t being challenged enough to keep me engaged.”)

We’ve all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive illusion factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above-average work. People think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses such as salmonella. Most deliciously self-deceptive of all, people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments.

Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change. Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings. But positive illusions make it hard for us to orient ourselves—to get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing. How can we dispel people’s positive illusions without raining down negativity on them?

6.

One way of cutting through positive illusions is suggested by an example from Massachusetts in a state agency called the Department of Youth Services. DYS dealt with delinquent kids—it was both a corrections agency and a social service organization. In the late 1970s, Massachusetts led a pioneering effort to overhaul its juvenile justice system, scaling back its youth prisons in favor of a network of nonprofits—halfway houses, group homes, outpatient counseling centers, job centers, and more. The goal of these nonprofits was to rehabilitate young offenders and keep them in their home communities.

As Massachusetts embraced this network model, DYS had to change substantially. The agency started working primarily through vendors—such as halfway houses and counseling centers—rather than delivering services to kids directly. As a result, agency staffers had to adapt the way they worked, and most of them handled the transition well.

Except for the accounting department.

The head of accounting was an authoritarian manager who ruled his department with an iron fist. He was known as a yeller; some colleagues called him Attila the Accountant. Attila was meticulous about following the rules, to a fault. If you submitted an expense report to his team and left off a single detail—a date, a subtotal—the accountants would bounce the report right back

at you rather than simply filling in the detail themselves. Because of this perceived pettiness, Attila was “pretty much hated throughout the organization,” recalled Sim Sitkin, who at that time was the director of planning and research for DYS. Attila’s accounting group saw itself more as a watchdog than as an internal service provider.

When DYS shifted to the network model, the focus of the accounting department shifted, too. Now it was outside vendors who were submitting the reimbursement requests, not employees. And we can say one thing for Attila: He was consistent. He treated the new vendors with the same dictatorial style that he had used with his in-house colleagues. If vendors submitted reports that weren’t perfect, he rejected them. This created big problems, though. As Sitkin said, “These nonprofits didn’t have a lot of slack. They were living on a shoestring, and so delays in payments really jeopardized their ability to serve kids.”

Sitkin and Gail Anne Healy, the deputy commissioner of DYS, began to field desperate calls from these nonprofits. In some cases, they couldn’t make payroll unless Attila cut their checks quickly. Sitkin and Healy tried to reason with Attila; they tried to explain why it was important to cut the vendors some slack. But, as we’ve seen repeatedly, the knowledge wasn’t enough to trigger a change. Attila stayed Attila.

Frustrated, Sitkin and Healy asked Attila to join them on a road trip. The three of them drove out to visit several of DYS’s key service providers. Often, these providers were operating from old houses in run-down neighborhoods. Their offices looked dilapidated and chaotic. And in the midst of this environment, the staffers were earnestly trying to work small miracles. “The typical staffer,” said Sitkin, “was like a combination of a beat cop and a social worker. Sometimes they struck you as people who might have once been in the same position as the kids they were trying

to reach. They were working hard and obviously not making a lot of money.”

During the visits, Attila saw firsthand how busy they were and how distracting the workplace was. They didn’t have closed-door offices as he did. It was noisy, thanks to the kids who were living in the homes—they were constantly coming and going, or cooking meals, or just hanging around and talking. Social workers were rushing around, trying to keep tabs on the kids, and shuttling them to doctors’ offices or job interviews.

Attila saw and felt the precarious financial situation of these nonprofits. They were hanging by a thread. When he held up one of their checks, it meant that they couldn’t pay for something. They might have to delay payroll, or skimp on food, or postpone a doctor’s visit for a kid who needed it. For the first time, Attila got a gut-check about the harm he was causing with his nitpicking. He came back to the office a transformed man.

Mind you, he was still Attila. He was still authoritarian, and he still yelled. But he changed what he was yelling about. “Before, he’d yell at his staff, ‘Why did you give me this form when it’s got something missing?!’” said Sitkin. “Afterwards, he switched to, ‘Don’t you realize what happens when we don’t get this check out on time?! People have to make payroll!’”

Attila’s transformation represented a victory over positive illusions. Before the field trip, if Attila had been asked to assess his performance as an accountant, he almost certainly would have put himself in the top 10 percent. In his mind, accounting was about paying attention to details, maintaining rigorous standards, and resisting political pressure.

He would have been right to score himself highly on those measures—but also self-serving. One reason we’re able to believe that we’re better-than-average leaders and drivers and spouses and team players is that we’re defining those terms in ways that flatter

us. (I am really a good team player. I constantly give my coworkers useful tips on how to improve themselves!) The ambiguity in terms like “leader” or “team player” enables our illusions—that’s why it’s so much harder for us to fancy ourselves better-than-average pole vaulters.

The ambiguity in being a “good accountant” dissolved when Attila met the social service workers. When he saw how hard they were working, and the raucous conditions they were working in, he couldn’t help but empathize with them, and that feeling of empathy gave the lie to his positive illusions. I thought being a good accountant was about rigor, but now I see that it’s also about service. Having been forced to experience the inadequacy of his old approach, he became a zealot for the new one: Team, you better get those paychecks out ASAP—people are waiting on us!

That may not be a heartwarming tale, but it’s a big switch. Attila the Accountant was a hard case. Healy and Sitkin managed to break through his prickly exterior and make him feel something. And once he felt something, he changed. That outcome should give all of us hope that we can reach the Attilas in our own life (Attila the Dad, Attila the Boss, or Attila the Teenager).

7.

It’s emotion that motivates the Elephant. In fighting for change, we’ve got to find the feeling. But which feeling? Anger, hope, dismay, enthusiasm, fear, happiness, surprise?

HopeLab built a video game for teenagers with cancer that gave them a feeling of control and power. Jon Stegner’s Glove Shrine shocked the execs and gave them a determination to fix the matter. The Microsoft usability lab made developers feel empathy for their customers. Will connecting with any old feeling do?

We often hear that people change only when a crisis compels

them to, which implies that we need to create a sense of fear or anxiety or doom. Two professors at Harvard Business School, writing about organizational change, say that change is hard because people are reluctant to alter habits that have been successful in the past. “In the absence of a dire threat, employees will keep doing what they’ve always done.” As a result, the professors emphasize the importance of crisis: “Turnaround leaders must convince people that the organization is truly on its deathbed—or, at the very least, that radical changes are required if the organization is to survive and thrive.” In other words, if necessary, we need to create a crisis to convince people they’re facing a catastrophe and have no choice but to move.

Similar beliefs about the importance of crisis once prevailed among therapists, most of whom believed that alcoholics or drug addicts couldn’t be helped until they hit rock bottom. Back in the 1980s, at a professional conference, the therapist Ruth Maxwell gave a presentation suggesting to fellow therapists that the now-familiar technique of family “intervention” could be used to convince addicts to enter a treatment program even if they hadn’t yet hit rock bottom. In her book Breakthrough, Maxwell wrote she was “nearly booed out of the room…. Coming from backgrounds deeply steeped in traditional psychiatric wisdom, they firmly believe that people cannot be treated unless they are motivated for treatment.” And being “motivated” required a rock-bottom crisis.

Speaking of the perceived need for crisis, let’s talk about the “burning platform,” a familiar phrase in the organizational change literature. It refers to a horrific accident that happened in 1988 on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea. A gas leak triggered an explosion that ripped the rig in two. As a reporter wrote, “Those who survived had a nightmarish choice: to jump as far as 150 ft. down into a fiery sea or face certain death on the

disintegrating rig.” Andy Mochan, a superintendent on the rig, said, “It was fry or jump, so I jumped.” He was eventually saved by a rescue mission involving NATO and the Royal Air Force.

Out of this human tragedy has emerged a rather ridiculous business cliché. When executives talk about the need for a “burning platform,” they mean, basically, that they need a way to scare their employees into changing. To create a burning platform is to paint such a gloomy picture of the current state of things that employees can’t help but jump into the fiery sea. (And by “jump into the fiery sea,” what we mean is that they change their organizational practices. Which suggests that this use of “burning platform” might well be the dictionary definition of hyperbole.)

In short, the “burning platform” is a great, uplifting tale for your people: “Team, let’s choose a dangerous plunge into the ocean over getting burned to death! Now get back to work!”

Leaving aside the silliness of the burning-platform metaphor, fear can indeed be a powerful motivator. Think of LBJ’s famous “Daisy” campaign ad in 1964, in which a young girl holds a flower while a mushroom cloud rises behind her. If you vote for Goldwater, the ad suggested, you might as well nuke your child. Or consider the sleazy real-estate-sales boss in Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play: “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado…. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

Health educators, too, have gotten in on the act. Remember the ads showing photos of smokers’ black, gnarled lungs, or the famous “This is your brain on drugs” commercial, which analogized drug users’ brains to frying eggs (those visuals, in turn, made pot smokers very hungry).

There’s no question that negative emotions are motivating. No one wants to see a kid nuked. But what, exactly, are these emotions motivating?

“If you have a stone in your shoe, it hurts and you’ll fix the problem,” said Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In a sense, removing the stone from your shoe is what negative emotions are designed to do—to motivate specific actions. When you’re angry, your eyes narrow and your fists clinch and you get ready for a confrontation. When you’re disgusted, your nose wrinkles and you avoid whatever has grossed you out. When you’re afraid, your eyes grow wide and your body tenses up and prepares to flee. On a daily basis, then, negative emotions help us avoid risks and confront problems.

Bottom line: If you need quick and specific action, then negative emotions might help. But most of the time when change is needed, it’s not a stone-in-the-shoe situation. The quest to reduce greenhouse gases is not a stone-in-the-shoe situation, and neither is Target’s mission to become the “upscale retailer,” or someone’s desire to improve his or her marriage. These situations require creativity and flexibility and ingenuity. And, unfortunately, a burning platform won’t get you that.

So what will?

8.

In 1998, after psychologists had spent decades studying negative emotions, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson wrote a provocative paper called “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” The paper became a classic. It eventually would be cited over a hundred times more often than a typical psychology paper, and it helped to fuel the rise of the discipline of positive psychology, which has yielded many popular books on happiness over the past few years. As Fredrickson suggested in her title, positive emotions are a bit of a puzzle. Unlike negative emotions, they don’t seem engineered to produce particular actions, such as punching or

fleeing or avoiding. They don’t even have their own signature facial expressions. In fact, the emotions of joy, contentment, pride, love, and interest all tend to produce the same generic “I’m pleased” expression, which is known as the Duchenne smile (lips curled up at the corners along with a crinkling in the muscles around the eyes—or the way your spouse looks when you ask, “Have you lost weight?”). Most of our positive emotions are funneled through this same Duchenne mask, like a symphony pumped through a tuba. Worse, we can’t even distinguish readily between a genuine Duchenne smile and a fake Duchenne smile, as generations of beauty pageant winners have illustrated. (Hint: A genuine Duchenne has the eye-crinkling that is hard to fake.)

Negative emotions tend to have a “narrowing effect” on our thoughts. If your body is tensing up as you walk through a dark alley, your mind isn’t likely to wander over to tomorrow’s to-do lists. Fear and anger and disgust give us sharp focus—which is the same thing as putting on blinders. Police detectives, for instance, frequently are frustrated by the testimony of gun-crime victims, who often can provide a rich description of the gun held by the perpetrator but can’t recall whether the perpetrator had a beard.

Fredrickson argues that, in contrast with the narrowing effects of the negative emotions, positive emotions are designed to “broaden and build” our repertoire of thoughts and actions. Joy, for example, makes us want to play. Play doesn’t have a script, it broadens the kinds of things we consider doing. We become willing to fool around, to explore or invent new activities. And because joy encourages us to play, we are building resources and skills. For instance, kids learn physical skills through rough-and-tumble play; they learn to work with objects by playing with toys and blocks and crayons; they learn to get along with others by pretending to be animals or superheroes.

The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.

Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don’t look like burning-platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.

This brings us back to Robyn Waters, who was a master of positive emotions. She didn’t try to create a burning platform: “Wal-Mart is eating our lunch! Target is on its deathbed! Come with me into the fiery seas!” Instead, she found a way to engage the fresh thinking and enthusiasm of her colleagues. What if we had colors that “popped” like these iMacs? And look at this Paris boutique’s display—what if we could arrange our sweaters like that?

Waters helped shift an entrenched culture, product by product, because she found a way to instill hope and optimism and excitement in her coworkers. She found the feeling.

6
Shrink the Change ===========================================

1.

In 2007, two researchers, Alia Crum and Ellen Langer, published a study of hotel maids and their exercise habits. The topic of the study may sound unremarkable, but the results were so surprising that you might find them hard to believe. (In fact, we’ll argue that the researchers themselves came to the wrong conclusion in explaining their findings.)

Let’s start at the beginning, with the maids.

The average hotel maid cleans fifteen rooms a day, and each room takes 20 to 30 minutes to complete. Take a moment and imagine an hour in the life of one of these maids. If you fast-forward through your brainfilm, you’ll see the maids walking, bending, pushing, lifting, carrying, scrubbing, and dusting. What they’re doing, in short, is exercising. A lot. In fact, they are dramatically exceeding the daily doses of exercise recommended by even the most exercise-conscious Surgeon General.

But the maids don’t seem to recognize what they’re doing as exercise. At the beginning of the study, 67 percent of the maids reported to Crum and Langer that they didn’t exercise regularly. More than a third said they didn’t get any exercise at all. Huh? It’s like a third of talk-show hosts complaining that they never get to meet anyone new.

Then again, what is “exercise”? If we accept the cultural definition of exercise as something we do on a treadmill in a fitness club, while surrounded by spandexed women and perspiring men, then the maids were correct. But our bodies don’t make style distinctions—a calorie burned is a calorie burned.

The researchers were curious about what would happen if the maids were told, to their surprise, that they were exercise superstars. One group of maids got the good news: They received a document describing the benefits of exercise, and they were told that their daily work was sufficient to get those benefits. Exercise doesn’t have to be hard or painful, they were informed—and it certainly doesn’t have to be in a gym. It simply requires you to move your muscles in a way that burns calories. The maids in this group were given estimates of the amount of calories they burned doing various activities: 40 calories for changing linens for 15 minutes, 100 calories for a half hour of vacuuming, and so on. Meanwhile, maids in another group received the same information about the benefits of exercise, but they weren’t told that their own work was a good form of exercise (nor did they get the calorie-burning stats).

Four weeks later, the researchers checked in again with the maids and found something incredible. The maids who’d been told that they were good exercisers had lost an average of 1.8 pounds. That’s almost a half pound a week, which is a pretty substantial rate of loss. The other maids hadn’t lost any weight.

Crum and Langer investigated possible explanations. The

weight loss wasn’t simply a statistical fluctuation. There were too many maids for a fluke explanation of that kind, and furthermore, the maids who lost weight had a corresponding drop in body fat. Nor had the maids caught the “exercise bug”—they weren’t exercising any more outside of work than they had before.

The researchers also ruled out a bunch of other possibilities: The maids weren’t working any more hours. They hadn’t changed their consumption of alcohol, caffeine, or tobacco. Their dietary habits hadn’t changed in any meaningful way—they weren’t eating more vegetables or consuming fewer sugary foods. But still they were losing weight.

What was making them slim down?

2.

A local car wash ran a promotion featuring loyalty cards. Every time customers bought a car wash, they got a stamp on their cards, and when they filled up their cards with eight stamps, they got a free wash.

Another set of customers at the same car wash got a slightly different loyalty card. They needed to collect ten stamps (rather than eight) to get a free car wash—but they were given a “head start.” When they received their cards, two stamps had already been added.

The “goal” was the same for both sets of customers: Buy eight additional car washes, get a reward. But the psychology was different: In one case, you’re 20 percent of the way toward a goal, and in the other case, you’re starting from scratch. A few months later, only 19 percent of the eight-stamp customers had earned a free wash, versus 34 percent of the head-start group. (And the head-start group earned the free wash faster.)

People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one. That’s why the conventional wisdom in development circles is that you don’t publicly announce a fundraising campaign for a charity until you’ve already got 50 percent of the money in the bag. (After all, who wants to give the first $100 to a $1 million fund-raising campaign?)

One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.

3.

The researchers Crum and Langer chalked up the maids’ weight loss to a placebo effect. In other words, they concluded that awareness of the exercise value of their activities triggered the weight loss, independent of any physical changes in the maids’ behavior.

The placebo effect is one of the most reliable phenomena in modern medicine, so at first glance, this explanation seems reasonable. We’ve all got friends who swear by the healing powers of questionable remedies—stinkweed supplements or goat horn extract. Maybe the maids got a similar mental boost from their new knowledge.

But notice what placebo-effect situations have in common: They apply to conditions that are self-reported. You take a pain pill, and the doctor asks you afterward, “How much pain do you feel now?” You take an antidepressant, and six weeks later, the therapist asks, “How do you feel?” So it’s understandable (though still fundamentally weird) that the patients who get placebos, rather than Advil or Prozac, might report feeling a bit better.

But this isn’t one of those situations. No one was asking these

maids how they felt or whether they perceived themselves to be healthier. The maids simply stepped onto a scale, and the scale reported a lower weight. Scales aren’t subject to placebo effects.

OK, but if you’ve suddenly discovered that you’re a good exerciser, might not that trigger some kind of mind-body effect? Couldn’t it kick your metabolism into overdrive or something? It’s not impossible, we suppose, but let’s be honest: If the power of thinking could indeed make you skinnier, that would be a scientific revelation on par with cold fusion (as well as a billion-dollar self-help book—Think Yourself Thin).

What’s much more likely is that we’re seeing a reflection of the car wash study. The maids were given a stamp card with two stamps on it. In other words, they were astonished to discover that, contrary to their own self-assessment, they were exercisers. They were 20 percent of the way to the destination, not 0 percent. And that was a tremendously motivating realization. I’m not a sloth—I’m an Exerciser!

Think about how you’d feel in their shoes. What if a scientist came to you and said that, unbeknownst to you, your white-collar job is an aerobic wonderland? With every click of the mouse, you burn 8 calories! Every time you check fantasy-baseball stats, you run a mile! Wouldn’t you feel a rush of satisfaction? Hey, look how good I’m doing!

And here’s the main thing—it almost certainly would change the way you behave from that moment forward. Once you realized that exercise could come from little things, maybe you’d be on the lookout for ways to get a smidgen more active.

Similarly, the maids, getting a jolt of enthusiasm from the good news, might have started scrubbing the showers a little more energetically than previously. Maybe they started making multiple trips back to their carts as they changed linens, just to

add a bit more walking. Maybe they took the stairs to lunch rather than the elevator. And they exerted that extra effort because someone put two stamps on their exercise cards. Suddenly, they found themselves closer to the goal line than they ever imagined.

That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

If you’re leading a change effort, you better start looking for those first two stamps to put on your team’s cards. Rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered. “Team, I know the reporting structure looks different, but remember that we already had some practice working in these groups on the RayCom account.” “Honey, losing forty pounds isn’t going to be easy, but you’ve already given up soda, and I bet that alone will knock off five pounds before the end of the year.”

A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over.

If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.

4.

If you’re like us, you love a clean house but dread housecleaning. And your dread mounts, because with each hour, each day, that passes between episodes of cleaning, the piles of paper in the office

grow taller, the loads of laundry pile up, and the dust on the sideboards accumulates. As the problem gets worse, so does the dread, which deters housecleaning, which leads to a dirtier house, which … Vicious cycle, anyone?

But what is it, exactly, that we dread? Think about it: Does picking up an undershirt off the floor and tossing it in the hamper inspire dread? Nope. Nor does rinsing out a glass and putting it in the dishwasher, or putting a single folder in the filing cabinet, or spraying glass cleaner on the bathroom mirror. So why does dread emerge from a combination of individual actions that seem pretty dread-free? Partly it’s because we fear that, in order to “clean house” properly, our work must (by definition) end with a house that’s clean. And when we envision our way to that end state, picturing all that we will have to conquer to get there—the closets and dishes and carpets and toilets and floors—we simply can’t bear opening that door. It feels like too much.

Yet we don’t dread saving for retirement on the grounds that we’ve got to accomplish it in one mongo-deposit. We understand that retirement savings accumulate one little bit at a time. By the same logic, wouldn’t it be easier just to make the house cleaner rather than clean? Can we free ourselves from dread by scaling down the mission?

That’s the insight behind a clever self-help technique called the “5-Minute Room Rescue,” proposed by Marla Cilley, a home-organizing guru who calls herself the Fly Lady (think of zooming through your housecleaning with wings). Here’s what you do: Get a kitchen timer and set it for 5 minutes. Then go to the worst room in your house—the one you’d never let a guest see—and, as the timer ticks down, start clearing a path, and when the timer buzzes, you can stop with a clear conscience. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

This is an Elephant trick. The Elephant hates doing things

with no immediate payoff. (If you’ve ever seen someone strain to pull a mule in a direction it didn’t want to go, you’ve got the right mental image.) To get the Elephant off its duff, you need to reassure it that the task won’t be so bad. Look, it’s just 5 minutes. How bad can it be?

What good is a 5-minute session of cleaning? Not much. It gets you moving, though, and that’s the hardest part. Starting an unpleasant task is always worse than continuing it. So once you start cleaning house, chances are you won’t stop at 5 minutes. You’ll be surprised at how fast things turn around. You’ll start to take pride in your accomplishments—starting with the clean sink, then the clean bathroom, then the clean downstairs area—and that pride and confidence will build on itself. A virtuous circle. But you couldn’t have enjoyed the virtuous circle without first shrinking the change.

5.

Steven Farrar, a store owner on eBay, and his wife Amanda, a pharmacist, had gotten themselves into a financial pickle. “It all started after we graduated, loaded with $60,000 in student-loan debt; we did what was normal. We bought a house, two new cars, and took on an additional $35,000 in credit card debt. We just didn’t bother—we weren’t trying to keep up with anyone or buy a lot of miscellaneous stuff over time—we just failed to care.” Eventually, panic set in. The Farrars realized they were one accident or one job loss away from bankruptcy. They knew they needed help, so they turned to the work of personal finance guru Dave Ramsey.

Ramsey, in his youth, had a transformative experience. At age 26, he and his wife owned real estate that was worth over $4 million, but then, abruptly, their wealth unraveled. In his book The

Total Money Makeover, Ramsey says, “We went through financial hell and lost everything over a three-year period of time. We were sued, foreclosed on, and finally, with a brand-new baby and a toddler, we were bankrupt. Scared doesn’t begin to cover it. Crushed comes close, but we held on to each other and decided we needed a change.”

Ramsey emerged from this financial near-death experience with a determination to help others avoid the mistakes he had made. In his books and on his radio show, he provides financial advice to individuals and families who are struggling, and most often, their number-one problem is too much debt.

One of Ramsey’s best-known and most controversial debt-fighting techniques is the “Debt Snowball.” When the Farrars found themselves with over $100,000 in debt (not including their mortgage), they started working on the Debt Snowball. The first step was to list all their debts—everything from credit cards to overdue electric bills to student loans—and then arrange them in order from smallest to largest. Next, their instructions were to make only the minimum payments on every debt, with one exception: After the minimum payments were made, every available dollar would be put toward the first debt on the list. Because the first debt was the smallest one, it could be paid off relatively quickly, and the Farrars could cross it off the list and then direct every available dollar to paying off the second debt, then the third, then the fourth. As they crossed off each debt, they were able to eliminate a minimum payment, which gave them more cash to attack the next debt. That’s why the strategy is called a Debt Snowball. With each debt that is conquered, the “snowball” of money applied to the next debt grows and rolls a little faster.

Notice what’s missing here: any mention of interest rates. If the Farrars’ smallest debt was a past-due utility bill, with no interest

charges whatsoever, Ramsey still advised them to pay it off before tackling any of their credit card bills, which might have interest rates of 20 percent or above.

This advice makes the average financial adviser cringe. After all, simple math tells us that we’re financially better-off if we pay down high-interest debt first. But Ramsey knows exactly what he’s doing:

Being a certified nerd, I always used to start with making the math work. I have learned that the math does need to work, but sometimes

motivation is more important than math. This is one of those times…. Face it, if you go on a diet and lose weight the first week, you will stay on that diet. If you go on a diet and gain weight or go six weeks with no visible progress, you will quit. When training salespeople, I try to get them a sale or two quickly because that fires them up. When you start the Debt Snowball and in the first few days pay off a couple of little debts, trust me, it lights your fire. I don’t care if you have a master’s degree in psychology; you need quick wins to get fired up. And getting fired up is super-important.

Most financial advisers recommend that their clients pay down high-interest debt first in order to optimize the impact of their money. But Ramsey’s not trying to solve an optimization problem; he’s trying to solve an Elephant problem. The reason people get themselves into financial trouble, he knows, is that they lose control. They begin to feel powerless in the face of a mountain of debt. And you can’t combat powerlessness with math. You combat it by proving to people that they can win. If you pay $185 toward a $20,000 debt on a high-interest credit

card, you’re still going to feel hopeless. But if you completely pay off a $185 overdue utility bill, you can cross it off your list. You’ve won a victory over debt.

Ramsey is using the same strategy as the Fly Lady with her 5-Minute Room Rescue—if people are facing a daunting task, and their instinct is to avoid it, you’ve got to break down the task. Shrink the change. Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory. Once people clean a single room, or pay off a single debt, their dread starts to dissipate, and their progress begins to snowball.

—————————— CLINIC ——————————

How Can You Cut the Budget Without Creating a Political Mess?

SITUATION Mary Carr is the CFO of a university that is experiencing significant drops in enrollment. With fewer students, the university’s tuition revenue is declining, leading to a budget shortfall. Carr’s job is to oversee meaningful budget cuts across about thirty different departments. [This was a real situation.]

WHAT’S THE SWITCH AND WHAT’S HOLDING IT BACK? Carr needs the heads of the university’s departments to cut departmental budgets without lots of resistance or political infighting. She has already made some progress on clarifying the goal: Her analysis reveals that department heads will need to cut budgets by 5 percent. Most of them understand and agree with the need to cut back, but Carr thinks there is a danger of people dragging their heels. She needs to make some quick progress on the budget cuts, and that depends primarily on her ability to motivate the department heads’ Elephants.

HOW DO WE MAKE THE SWITCH?

• 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? Well, as it turns out, Mary Carr is a Fly Lady fan, and she takes inspiration from the 5-Minute Room Rescue. So she picks two or three budget lines every week—say, office supplies, training, and travel—and asks the department heads whether they can cut 5 percent out of those line items. Carr reports, “Picking out tiny chunks of work at a time stays the panic.” Carr is shrinking the change, making it less likely to engage the Elephant’s resistance. 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.

• Shape the Path. 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 implications of future cuts. And knowing that, the whole body made decisions, not just individual department heads. Everyone was looking at the university as a whole.” In essence, the department heads are exercising positive peer

pressure on one another. It becomes the social norm to think of cuts from the perspective of the university as a whole (a strong, shared identity), rather than from the perspective of individual departments.

6.

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. (Our dad, Fred Heath, who worked over thirty years for IBM, would tell his teams that when “milestones” seemed too distant, they should look for “inch pebbles.” Nice one, Dad.)

Say that you’re trying to motivate your teenager to do some housecleaning. You might embrace the 5-Minute Room Rescue to overcome his initial resistance. But what if you also put a bit of strategic thought into which room he starts with? You might ask him to start his work in the tiny guest bathroom, because you’re confident that after 5 minutes of work, he’ll have it gleaming. The overall goal—cleaning the whole house—is too distant to be motivating, but if you can engineer a small win in the first 5 minutes, it might buy you enough enthusiasm to pursue the next milestone. (Then again, we’re talking teenagers, so don’t count on it.)

If you’ve ever faced a really long drive, no doubt you used this technique on yourself. Maybe you thought about your journey one town at a time, or an hour at a time, or maybe you promised yourself a coffee stop after the next 75 miles. It’s a lot easier to think “75 miles to coffee” than to think “8.5 more hours of sitting here until I’m at Grandma’s.”

You can’t count on these milestones to occur naturally. To motivate change, you’ve got to plan for them.

We’ve been talking about small wins at an individual level—using them to motivate a road-trip driver or a teenage house-cleaner. But the same concept goes for large organizations. For example, a man named Steven Kelman had to figure out a way to create small wins in the federal government.

Kelman, a professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, got a call from the Clinton administration in 1993, asking him to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP). As the head of OFPP, he would be responsible for reforming the government’s procurement efforts. Procurement is the process by which people buy things, and the government does a lot of procuring. In 2003, it spent $320 billion on purchases of discretionary goods and services, a figure that includes everything from paper clips to helicopters for the National Park Service. With that kind of money at stake, you can’t have people running down to Bell Helicopter and plopping down a credit card for a new helicopter. (On the other hand, think of the airline miles.)

Kelman was reluctant to head up OFPP, knowing there was a pretty good chance that despite his best efforts nothing would change, but in the end he accepted the job. He knew exactly what he was getting into, because three years earlier, he’d written a book about procurement reform.

There were lots of problems with procurement. Over the years, the government had established many protocols and protections to prevent abuses of various kinds. There were good intentions behind these protections, but as they built up, layer upon layer, they began to cause more harm than the abuses they’d been designed to prevent. For instance, when making purchase decisions, procurement officials could not use evidence of vendors’ “past performance.” As an example, let’s say the government

gave the company CodeLords a contract to develop software, and the product CodeLords delivered was absurdly behind schedule and inexcusably poor in performance. The government would be barred from using that performance data when evaluating CodeLords for a different job! (Imagine if you had to select a hairdresser without regard to the way he cut your hair in the past.)

Sometimes, too, the sheer quantity of rules was smothering common sense. In one famous example, the Defense Department sought a supplier of chocolate-chip cookies for the troops and published a 20-page set of “milspecs,” detailed specifications that dictated, among other things, ingredients, cookie size, and baking process. These requirements led to outrageously high cookie prices because companies that actually understood how to produce lots of cookies efficiently—say, Keebler or Nabisco—would never bid on the job because some part of the milspecs inevitably conflicted with their standard way of doing things. Meanwhile, the contract did not even stipulate that the cookies taste good.

As head of OFPP, Kelman would lead procurement reform, but he didn’t have much structural power. He had a staff of about twenty people, none of whom purchased anything significant. The actual purchasing decisions were spread across dozens of large federal agencies. Kelman would have to reform procurement by reforming the behavior of purchasing agents scattered across the government.

If ever there was an underdog story, this is it. To put the government’s $320 billion in discretionary purchases in perspective, that’s about the same amount of money it would take to purchase everything that’s produced in a year by the entire computer hardware industry—all the Dell laptops, IBM mainframes, Seagate drives, and others. And then you’d still have enough money left

over to buy every car and every car part produced by the automobile industry.

Thousands of people in the government are involved in procurement, and their desire to please Bill Clinton, the new president in 1993, is tempered by the knowledge that Clinton will be gone in four years (or, worst case, eight). Into this vast, sprawling sand trap of inertia walks one guy named Steven. He’s a professor, no less. He wrote a good book about the sand trap. Now he’s on the hook to fix it, yet he doesn’t control any of it (except for twenty grains of sand on the eastern periphery). You might as well hire a computer-savvy reporter named Phil to overhaul the computer industry.

Kelman knew he’d have to make some progress quickly or else he’d be dismissed. “If an example of successful change could somehow be achieved quickly, it might be possible to use that to set other changes in motion,” he wrote later. He sought a victory that would be fast, achievable, and visible—a small win that would work for all of his constituents, whether the Defense Department or the Health and Human Services Department. If he could get their Elephants moving with an easy mission—the government equivalent of the 5-Minute Room Rescue—he thought he would be able to keep them moving.

One day, a conversation with a government employee sparked an idea. The employee told Kelman that when she needed simple, inexpensive items, such as a few computer disks, the procurement rules made it impossible for her to walk to the computer superstore across the street and buy them. She found this limitation was infuriating.

Kelman spotted an opportunity. He went to the senior procurement executives and issued a challenge: I want you to double your agency’s use of government credit cards over the next year. (Notice the precision of the challenge, à la the 1% milk campaign. By

being specific about the behavioral change, Kelman was directing his constituents’ Riders.) In his vision, anytime employees needed something small—computer disks or a replacement hard drive or a carton of office paper—they should be able to march across the street, armed with their credit cards, and purchase what they needed on the spot. Kelman asked the agencies to make a formal “Pledge” to embrace the idea. The agencies were supportive, so Kelman pushed further. Over the next year, he organized four more pledges.

The second pledge was a biggie: Kelman asked the agencies to break with the tradition of ignoring past performance. He knew this would be a tough sell, so he decided to push for it publicly only when he was sure he had at least eight agencies onboard. He hit the phones, and his employees and advisers rallied the people in their networks. Eventually, his team had eight agencies signed up, but he wasn’t finished. “After we got to nine agencies, participation started snowballing, and soon we could say to the holdouts, ‘Almost everyone but you is participating.’” (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.)

In the end, twenty different agencies agreed to take the “Past-Performance Pledge.” To ensure that the pledge would be taken seriously, Kelman prodded the agencies to identify fifty-eight upcoming contracts in which they would explicitly consider past performance.

With the pledges, Kelman turned an unspeakable level of bureaucratic inertia into demonstrable forward momentum. Five years later, in an internal survey, 70 percent of front line employees said that they were proponents of procurement reform. The Brookings Institution, a well-respected think tank, published a

study in 1998 that graded the success of various “reinventing government” initiatives attempted over the previous eight years. Kelman’s procurement reform was the only initiative that earned an “A.” A single guy had managed to come in and catalyze a big change in the federal government.

7.

When you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It’s Elephant fuel.

Once people are on the path and making progress, it’s important to make their advances visible. With some kinds of change, such as weight loss, progress is easy to measure—people can step on a scale. Unfortunately, there’s no off-the-shelf scale for “new-product innovation” or “reduced carbon impact.” Where do you find a yardstick that can measure the kind of changes you’re leading?

Solutions-focused therapists, whom we mentioned in Chapter 2 in the Rider section, create their own yardsticks. Recall that they ask their patients the Miracle Question: “Imagine that in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens, and all the troubles you brought here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, how will you know?”

These therapists know that the miracle can seem distant to their patients and that they need to keep their patients motivated and hopeful en route to the destination. To do so, they’ve devised a way of quantifying progress toward the miracle. They create a miracle scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 10 is the miracle. In fact, in the very first session they often ask their patients where they’d score themselves. Patients often report back that they’re at 2 or 3, which prompts an enthusiastic response from the therapists.

Wow! You’re already 20 percent of the way there! Sound familiar? The therapists are putting two stamps on their patients’ car-wash cards.

As the sessions continue, the therapists continue to track patients’ self-reported progress. The therapists are trained to celebrate every incremental victory—to react with delight when a patient reports advancing from 3 to 4. This response is counterintuitive for most of us. How many sales managers dance a jig upon hearing that their reps are 40 percent of the way to a quota? But this encouragement is critical, because it’s self-reinforcing. When you’ve celebrated moving from 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 3, you gain confidence that you can make the next advance.

The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let’s say you’re working with your junior-high-age son who is painfully shy. Maybe the miracle for your son would be the ability to ask a girl to the school’s homecoming dance. This feat is presently unthinkable to your son, but you and he have been able to talk about his shyness—he acknowledges it and dislikes it—and by virtue of that conversation, he may already be at 2 on the scale.

An SFBT therapist would ask your son, “What would it take to get you to 3? Let’s not talk about how we can pole-vault up to the miracle—we’re not there yet. Let’s talk about 3.”

Maybe for your son, reaching 3 would involve something simple like asking a grocery store employee where the toothpaste aisle is. If he did that, he’d prove that he could interact successfully with a total stranger, and in doing so, he’d get to see himself moving toward the miracle. The value of the miracle scale is that it focuses attention on small milestones that are attainable and visible rather than on the eventual destination, which may seem very remote.

It’s like climbing a tall ladder and focusing on the next step rather than gawking up at the top. There may be many more steps to go, but you can take comfort that you’re making real progress in the right direction.

Notice, once again, how often Elephant appeals and Rider appeals can overlap. In this case, your son’s Rider is getting very clear direction—Ask the clerk about the toothpaste—at the same time as his Elephant is getting little boosts of hope—Maybe I don’t have to be so shy forever.

By using the miracle scale, you always have a clear idea of where you’re going next, and you have a clear sense of what the next small victory will be. You’re moving forward, and, even better, you’re getting more confident in your ability to keep moving forward.

8.

NFL coach Bill Parcells, who won two Super Bowls as coach of the New York Giants, supports the notion that “even small successes can be extremely powerful in helping people believe in themselves.” In an article published in Harvard Business Review, he continued:

In training camps, therefore, we don’t focus on the ultimate goal—getting to the Super Bowl. We establish a clear set of goals that are within immediate reach: we’re going to be a smart team; we’re going to be a well-conditioned team; we’re going to be a team that plays hard; we’re going to be a team that has pride; we’re going to be a team that wants to win collectively; we’re going to be a team that doesn’t criticize one another.

When we start acting in ways that fulfill these goals, I make sure everybody knows it. I accentuate the positive at every possible opportunity, and at the same time I emphasize the next goal that we need to fulfill. If we have a particularly good practice, then I call the team together and say, “We got something done today; we executed well. I’m very pleased with your work. But here’s what I want to do tomorrow: I want to see flawless special teams work. If you accomplish that, we will be ready for the game on Sunday.”

When you set small, visible goals, and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed. They break the habit of losing and begin to get into the habit of winning. [emphasis added]

Former UCLA coach John Wooden, one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time, once said, “When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”

Coaches are masters of shrinking the change. By pushing their teams to attain a sequence of “small, visible goals,” they build momentum. Psychologist Karl Weick, in a paper called “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” said, “A small win reduces importance (‘this is no big deal’), reduces demands (‘that’s all that needs to be done’), and raises perceived skill levels (‘I can do at least that’).” All three of these factors will tend to make change easier and more self-sustaining.

Let’s not get too rosy-eyed here, though. Any important change is not going to feel like a steady, inevitable march toward victory. It won’t simply be an unbroken string of small wins.

(Don’t forget there are lots of coaches who retired having never won a championship.) More typically, you take one step forward and 1.3 steps back and 2.7 steps forward and then 6 steps to the side, and at that moment, a new CEO will come in and declare a new destination.

No one can guarantee a small win. Lots of things are out of our control. But the goal is to be wise about the things that are under our control. And one thing we can control is how we define the ultimate victory and the small victories that lead up to it.

You want to select small wins that have two traits: (1) They’re meaningful. (2) They’re “within immediate reach,” as Bill Parcells said. And if you can’t achieve both traits, choose the latter! (The 5-Minute Room Rescue wasn’t very meaningful by itself, but it made great change possible.)

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, the quintessential personal productivity book, echoes the importance of setting goals that are within reach. He says that most people make a fundamental mistake when they create their to-do lists: They dash off lots of items: “collect expenses,” “deal with Helen,” “work on slideshow,” “tires,” and so on. In Allen’s judgment, these people are sabotaging the likelihood of action by being too murky. He says it’s critical to ask yourself, “What’s the next action?” Here’s Allen:

People in my seminars often have things on their lists like “Get a tune-up for the car.” Is “Get a tune-up” a next action? Not unless you’re walking out with wrench in hand, dressed for grease.

“So what’s the next action?” [said Allen]

“Uh, I need to take the car to the garage. Oh, yeah, I need to find out if the garage can take it. I guess I need

to call the garage and make the appointment.” [said a seminar participant]

“Do you have the number?”

“Darn, no … I don’t have the number for the garage. Fred recommended that garage to me, and I don’t have the number. I knew something was missing in the equation.”

And that’s often what happens with so many things for so many people. We glance at the project, and some part of us thinks, “I don’t quite have all the pieces between here and there.” We know something is missing, but we’re not sure what it is exactly, so we quit.

When a task feels too big, the Elephant will resist. It is no accident that Alcoholics Anonymous challenges recovering alcoholics to get through “one day at a time.” AA is shrinking the change. To an alcoholic, going a lifetime without another drink sounds impossible. But going 24 hours sounds doable.

Here is the way Al-Anon explains the “one day at a time” mantra: “In most cases, we cannot anticipate every possible turn of events, and no matter how diligently we are prepared, we are eventually caught off guard. Meanwhile, we’ve expended so much time and energy trying to predict future events, soothe future hurts, and prevent future consequences that we have missed out on today’s opportunities. And the magnitude of the task we have set for ourselves has left us drained, overwhelmed, and distraught.”

9.

Small targets lead to small victories, and small victories can often trigger a positive spiral of behavior. Marriage therapist Michele

Weiner-Davis wrote about her clients Paula and George, who’d been married for eight years but had been fighting consistently for the previous two. Weiner-Davis had been counseling the couple for a while, and they’d made some progress but nothing dramatic. Then came the breakthrough—a kiss.

One morning, George kissed Paula. The kiss surprised her, caught her off guard a little, and made her happy. Being happy prompted her do a little thing she hadn’t done in a while: She brewed a pot of coffee. “We used to drink coffee together often, but lately the tradition has fallen by the wayside,” she told the therapist.

George smelled the coffee and came down for a cup. He and Paula had a pleasant conversation. Both of them said the morning made them feel more “relaxed and lighthearted.” Paula reported that her coworkers noticed the difference in her attitude that day. Even George and Paula’s kids seemed affected by the halo of good feelings—they were more relaxed that evening, less argumentative. George’s kiss launched a positive spiral.

Why did such a little thing matter so much? Because it generated hope that change was possible.

It’s a theme we’ve seen again and again—big changes come from a succession of small changes. It’s OK if the first changes seem almost trivial. The challenge is to get the Elephant moving, even if the movement is slow at first. So don’t ask the indebted couple to pay down their high-interest credit card bill; ask them to wipe out their utility bill. Don’t ask government employees to embrace a new regime of procurement; ask them to double their spending on government credit cards. Don’t ask a couple to stop fighting; ask the husband to give his wife a simple good-morning kiss.

The Elephant has no trouble conquering these micro-milestones, and as it does, something else happens. With each

step, the Elephant feels less scared and less reluctant, because things are working. With each step, the Elephant starts feeling the change. A journey that started with dread is evolving, slowly, toward a feeling of confidence and pride. And at the same time the change is shrinking, the Elephant is growing.

7
Grow Your People ===========================================

1.

The St. Lucia Parrot exists only on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. It’s gorgeous, with a vivid turquoise blue face, lime green wings, and a striking red shield on its chest. In 1977, only one hundred St. Lucia Parrots were left on the island. The population had been decimated by habitat destruction, hunters, and people who trapped them to use as pets. The St. Lucia Parrot seemed doomed; in the words of one biologist, the species “could not escape oblivion by the year 2000.”

Enter an unlikely savior: college student Paul Butler. In 1977, Butler was finishing his last year of studies at North-East London Polytechnic. Butler’s passion was conservation, and he’d previously spent five weeks completing a field research expedition in St. Lucia, where he’d studied the parrot and submitted recommendations for preserving the species.

Just before graduation—“with unemployment staring me in

the face,” said Butler—he received a letter from the head of St. Lucia’s forestry department. To Butler’s astonishment, he was offered a job. Impressed with Butler’s recommendations, the head of forestry asked if Butler was interested in returning for six months as the department’s conservation adviser. The job paid $200 a month, and Butler could stay in a government “rest hut.” Butler could barely believe his luck. He was 21 years old, and the government of a beautiful Caribbean island was asking for his help in saving an endangered species.

Butler’s recommendations to the government had been straightforward: (1) Beef up the punishment for capturing or killing the parrot, from a trivial fine to an enormous fine plus a jail term. (2) Establish within an existing forestry reserve a “parrot sanctuary” that would protect the parrot’s habitat. (3) Raise money for the operation of the reserve by licensing “rain-forest tours,” which would offer tourists the chance to see the reserve and its star attraction.

A quick time-out: Notice that these recommendations—changing laws, enforcing new penalties—are exactly the sorts of things that we shy away from in this book, because most of us don’t have those tools in our kit. But here’s the thing: Butler didn’t have those tools, either. And neither did the forestry service. For Butler’s recommendations to be put into practice, the island’s laws would need to change, which meant, in turn, that the public would have to get behind the initiative. So Butler, fresh out of college, working with the forestry department, and armed with a budget in the hundreds of dollars, had to figure out a way to rally the people of St. Lucia behind a parrot that most of them took for granted (and some of them ate).

There was no clear economic case for saving the parrot. It wasn’t the linchpin of an ecosystem, and the sad truth was that most St. Lucians probably wouldn’t notice if it disappeared

completely. Butler knew he couldn’t make an analytical case for protecting the bird. He’d have to make an emotional case.

In essence, Butler’s goal was to convince St. Lucians that they were the kind of people who protected their own. In public events, Butler stressed, “This parrot is ours. Nobody has this but us. We need to cherish it and look after it.” He did everything in his power to make the public more familiar with the bird. He hosted St. Lucia Parrot puppet shows, distributed T-shirts, cajoled a local band to record songs about the bird, convinced local hotels to print up bumper stickers, recruited volunteers to dress up in parrot costumes and visit local schools, and asked local ministers to cite relevant Bible verses (for instance, verses that instructed believers to be good stewards of the things that were in their trust). He even talked a telecom company into printing up St. Lucia Parrot calling cards. On one card, the parrot was displayed next to the bald eagle, which was like putting Selma Hayek next to Dick Cheney. It was clear who had the better-looking national bird.

The St. Lucians began to embrace their parrot, as though it had always been a part of their national identity. Polls commissioned by Butler showed a dramatic rise in public support for the bird. The wave of public support made it possible to pass into law the recommendations that Butler and the forestry department, headed up by Gabriel Charles, had proposed.

As the years passed, the species came back from the brink. At last count, there were between six hundred and seven hundred parrots—an astonishing increase for a species that had been written off. Poaching stopped completely. “No St. Lucian has been caught shooting a parrot for fifteen years,” said Butler in 2008.

In 1988, the government gave Butler full citizenship and later awarded him the St. Lucia Medal of Merit, one of the country’s

highest honors. He had shown St. Lucians what it meant to take pride in their identity, and in the process, he’d become a St. Lucian himself.

2.

Other people noticed what Butler accomplished. In the mid-1980s, a board member from Rare, a conservation organization, asked Butler if he would come to St. Vincent and do what he had done in St. Lucia. Intrigued, Butler joined Rare, working alongside St. Vincent’s forestry division and its chief forest officer. Within a year, the island passed laws to protect its own native parrot.

Butler and the other leaders of Rare realized they had cracked one of the most pressing problems of conservation. It’s very difficult to protect the precious areas of the world without the support of the residents of those areas, but Rare had proved it could inspire those residents to care about their environment. So Rare conservationists resolved to launch similar projects, which they began to call “Pride campaigns,” all around the world. By 2009, Rare had successfully launched 120 Pride campaigns in 50 different countries from Panama to Indonesia. (Full disclosure: Inspired by this work, Dan Heath joined Rare’s board of trustees in 2009.) Pride campaigns focused on animals ranging from the loggerhead turtle to the Napoleon wrasse, a brilliant blue fish whose habitat is coral reefs.

We’ve seen that one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel “big” relative to the challenge. But here we’re seeing something different. Paul Butler didn’t shrink the change. Instead, he grew the people. He made the St. Lucians swell with pride over their parrot—a species that exists nowhere else. He inspired them to feel more determined, more

ready, more motivated. And when you build people up in this way, they develop the strength to act.

3.

Rare’s success in motivating people in fifty countries suggests that something universal is at work here. Confirmation of that comes from the research of James March, a professor of political science at Stanford University. March says that when people make choices, they tend to rely on one of two basic models of decision making: the consequences model or the identity model. The consequences model is familiar to students of economics. It assumes that when we have a decision to make, we weigh the costs and benefits of our options and make the choice that maximizes our satisfaction. It’s a rational, analytical approach. This is the approach that Paul Butler knew would fail with St. Lucians, because there simply wasn’t a strong cost/benefit case for the parrot.

In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions when we have a decision to make: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Notice what’s missing: any calculation of costs and benefits. The identity model explains the way most people vote, which contradicts our notion of the “self-interested voter.” It helps to shed light on why an auto mechanic in Oklahoma would vote against a Democrat who’d give him health insurance, and why a Silicon Valley millionaire would vote against a Republican who’d cut her taxes.

Generally, when we use the word identity, we’re talking about an immutable trait of some kind—such as a racial, ethic, or regional identity. But that’s a relatively narrow use of the term. We’re not just born with an identity; we adopt identities throughout

our lives. We aspire to be good mothers or fathers, devout Catholics or Muslims, patriotic citizens, and so on.

Or consider a professional identity, such as being a “scientist.” Clearly, you’re not born a scientist. It’s an identity you seek out and one that others, such as your professors and mentors, consciously cultivate in you. As you develop and grow in that identity, it becomes an increasingly important part of your self-image and triggers the kind of decision making that March describes. For instance, imagine that as a science professor teaching chemistry, you had a lucrative opportunity to consult on the toxicity study of a new drug for a big pharmaceutical company. From a consequences point of view, the decision to accept the job would be a no-brainer—the work might pay far more than your university salary. But from an identity point of view, the decision to accept the job would seem less clear-cut. You’d wonder what strings were attached, what subtle compromises you’d have to make to please the client. You’d wonder, “What would a scientist like me do in this situation?”

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure. (That’s why it’s so clumsy when people instinctively reach for “incentives” to change other people’s behavior.) So the question is this: How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?

4.

Lovelace Hospital Systems in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was concerned about the rapid turnover among its nurses. Its turnover rate wasn’t any worse than the national average (between 18 and 30 percent per year), but that was small comfort. When nurses

left, replacing them cost a lot of money, morale suffered, and patient care was put at risk during the transition period.

Kathleen Davis, a registered nurse and vice president of hospital operations, decided to try an unconventional approach to analyzing the turnover problem. She hired Susan Wood, a consultant who specialized in Appreciative Inquiry, a process for changing organizations by studying what’s working rather than what’s not (this is another example of the bright-spots focus that we discussed in Chapter 2).

Wood and Davis decided not to investigate why so many nurses were leaving. Instead, they began to explore why other nurses were staying. In a hospital with three hundred nurses, the team interviewed more than one hundred. Wood asked nurses what made their jobs satisfying. She recalled, “These nurses were beaten down and overworked, but as soon as we started them in a conversation about what they were good at, the tone changed.”

Davis and Wood found that the nurses who stayed at the hospital were fiercely loyal to the profession of nursing. In other words, their satisfaction was an identity thing—the nobility of the nursing profession gave meaning to their work. Once the hospital administrators realized this, they knew they’d have to do more to help the nurses cultivate their identity. For instance, they began to find ways to recognize people for extraordinary nursing performance. They developed a new orientation program that stressed the inherently admirable nature of nursing work. They created mentorship programs to help nurses improve their knowledge and skills.

The first hint that something had changed was evident on the annual employee satisfaction survey. Nursing satisfaction scores increased markedly in multiple categories, particularly “communication”—all those interviews and conversations about identity had an impact. But the impact went beyond the survey:

Over the following year, turnover decreased by 30 percent. And then the success made an unexpected leap: On regional surveys, Davis and Wood started seeing improved ratings on patient satisfaction with Lovelace Hospital.

It’s critical to realize that these identity stories aren’t just special case situations, confined to scientists or nurses or St. Lucians. Identity is going to play a role in nearly every change situation. Even yours. When you think about the people whose behavior needs to change, ask yourself whether they would agree with this statement: “I aspire to be the kind of person who would make this change.” If their answer is yes, that’s an enormous factor in your favor. If their answer is no, then you’ll have to work hard to show them that they should aspire to a different self-image. And that’s exactly what Paul Butler did in St. Lucia. He convinced the island’s citizens to think, “This is our bird—if we want to be good St. Lucians, we’d better protect it.”

To see what this means in a business context, consider a firm that invented an identity that subsequently became the engine of its success. The firm is Brasilata—it’s a US$170 million manufacturing firm in Brazil that produces various kinds of steel cans. As you’d imagine, the can manufacturing industry is relatively mature—not much growth, not much excitement. But Brasilata defies the stereotype of a boring, stuck-in-its ways manufacturer. In fact, it has one of the best reputations for innovation of any company in Latin America.

How does a manufacturer of cans become known as an innovator? Brasilata’s founders were inspired by the philosophy of Japanese car manufacturers like Honda and Toyota, which empowered their frontline employees to take ownership of their work. For instance, at Toyota, any employee who spotted a defect could stop the assembly line (this would have been unthinkable in Detroit at the time). Toyota and Honda also actively solicited

ideas for innovation from their employees. In 1987, the founders of Brasilata launched an employee-innovation program modeled on the Japanese forerunners.

A new identity was the core of the program. Employees of Brasilata became known as “inventors,” and when new employees joined the firm, they were asked to sign an “innovation contract.” This wasn’t simply feel-good language. Top management challenged employees to be on the lookout for potential innovations—ideas for how to create better products, improve production processes, and squeeze costs out of the system. Procedures developed within the factory made it easy for inventors to submit their ideas. The program succeeded beyond any reasonable expectations. In 2008, employees submitted 134,846 ideas—an average of 145.2 ideas per inventor! This figure puts Brasilata on par with the Japanese trendsetters that had inspired the program.

Many of the suggestions led to the development of new products. For instance, in late 2008, Brasilata came up with a new approach for steel cans designed to carry dangerous or flammable liquids. To meet United Nations standards, such cans must be able to withstand a drop from 1.2 meters (roughly 4 feet). Traditionally, most manufacturers had reached this standard by thickening the metal layers, which used up more raw material and required new production processes. And the reinforced designs weren’t foolproof—the metal seams were prone to split if a can landed on an edge.

Brasilata’s inventors suggested a new design, inspired by car bumpers that collapse on impact. Their new steel can deformed slightly on impact, reducing stress on the critical seam. The new design resisted impact better while also reducing the amount of steel in the can.

The inventors have led Brasilata through emergencies. In 2001, a severe energy crisis—the “blackout syndrome”—forced

the government of Brazil to ration energy. Businesses received a strict quota of electricity. The inventors went to work dreaming up power-saving ideas—hundreds of them. Within a few weeks, Brasilata’s energy consumption was reduced by 35 percent, falling below the company’s quota and allowing the company to resell its extra energy.

Another unexpected idea was jointly suggested by two employees: Eliminate our jobs; they’re not necessary anymore. The idea was accepted, but the company found a new place for the employees. Brasilata has a no-dismissal policy and also distributes 15 percent of its net profits to employees. It’s no surprise that Brasilata consistently appears on “best places to work” lists in Brazil.

Let’s remember something: This “inventor” identity, which has fueled business success and employee satisfaction, was made up. None of Brasilata’s employees were born “inventors.” The identity was introduced to them, and they liked the sound of it. It seemed to be a mantle worth wearing. Being an inventor has become a source of pride and strength.

5.

If cultivating an identity sounds daunting, take heart. A classic study in psychology shows that you can start with small steps. In the 1960s, two psychologists from Stanford University, Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, asked a researcher to go door-to-door in an upscale neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. When home owners answered the door, the researcher announced himself as a volunteer for “Citizens for Safe Driving” and asked whether they would allow a billboard reading “Drive Carefully” to be installed on their lawns. They were shown a photo of the billboard on the lawn of a different house, and it was a real

eyesore—crudely constructed and so enormous that it obscured much of the front of the house. The home owners were assured that the sign would make “just a small hole in your lawn.”

No doubt if this volunteer knocked on your door, you’d have a colorful response. And, indeed, 83 percent of the home owners passed on the “opportunity.” But here’s the twist: In a different neighborhood, the researchers used a simple technique that more than quadrupled the number of yesses!

The technique was remarkably subtle: Two weeks earlier, the same home owners had been approached by a volunteer claiming to represent a different driver-safety organization. They were asked to put a tiny “Be a Safe Driver” sign—less than half the size of a postcard—in the window of their car or home. The volunteer said the sign was intended to make citizens more aware of the need to drive carefully. This seemed such a trivial commitment that almost all of the home owners said yes. Their little-yes seemed to pave the way for the big-yes. When the researchers came back two weeks later and asked the home owners to install the eyesore billboard, 76 percent accepted it. Freedman and Fraser called this strategy a “foot in the door” technique. Accepting the tiny driver-safety sign greatly increased the likelihood that the home owners would accept the gigantic driver-safety sign.

Then the results got even stranger. Volunteers approached a third group of home owners with a different request. Rather than being presented with the tiny sign about driving safety, home owners in the third group were asked to sign a petition to “Keep California beautiful.” Hard to oppose that, so again almost everyone complied. Then two weeks later, those petition-signers were approached about hosting the eyesore billboard, and half of them said yes! That’s three times the acceptance rate of the home owners who hadn’t signed the petition.

This result confused even Freedman and Fraser. They hadn’t

expected the “Keep California beautiful” petition to be a “foot in the door” for a commitment to driver’s safety. The two domains were completely unrelated. After some reflection, they speculated that the petition signing might have sparked a shift in the home owners’ own sense of identity. Freedman and Fraser wrote, “Once [the home owner] has agreed to the request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes.”

In a sense, signing the petition became evidence to the home owners that they were “concerned citizens,” and this subtle shift in identity led to a shift in their behavior. Two weeks later, when they were approached with the option to put a billboard on their lawns, they subconsciously asked themselves James March’s three identity questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? If you consider yourself to be a “fit in with the neighbors person,” you’ll deny the request. If you consider yourself to be an “immaculate lawn person,” you might assault the researcher. But if you’re a newly hatched “concerned citizen,” you’ll find it honorable to host the sign.

6.

Now, let’s be clear: The Freedman-Fraser study is kind of sleazy. We’ll try to separate the sleazy part from the science part.

The sleazy part is the deception. The home owners are being tricked into doing something stupid. None of the other examples we’ve provided of building identity hinges on this kind of deception. Is it deceptive to persuade people to rally behind a national bird? To cultivate professional pride in nurses? To

encourage employees to act like inventors? Of course not. No one at Brasilata would have been disturbed to hear the CEO say, “We’re trying to get you to think and act more like an ‘inventor’ because that will make our company more competitive and innovative.” The yard-sign study is different: Home owners would indeed have been offended if Freedman and Fraser had come clean and said, “We’re asking you to sign this petition so that, two weeks from now, we can dupe you into putting a giant billboard on your lawn.”

Leaving aside the sleaze factor, the science of the billboard study says something pretty remarkable. It shows us that people are receptive to developing new identities, that identities “grow” from small beginnings. Once you start seeing yourself as a “concerned citizen,” you’ll want to keep acting like one. That’s tremendously good news for someone leading a change effort. It means, for example, that if you can show people why the environment is worth caring about, it won’t take years for them to think of themselves as “environmentalists.” It took only a few days for the home owners to think of themselves as “concerned citizens.”

7.

There is a problem, though. A new identity can take root quickly, but living up to it is awfully hard. For instance, it probably took a while before Brasilata’s employees were any good at inventing. At first, they probably struggled to come up with any suggestions for the company, and they might have felt like impostors calling themselves “inventors.”

We can empathize. At different times in our lives, both of us (Chip and Dan) were urged by our significant others to take salsa-dancing lessons. This was not our first choice of weekend activities, but we agreed to give it a shot. The fantasy was an attractive

one—we could picture ourselves with our partners, full of passion and artistic flair, drawing envious glances from passersby. No question: This “dancer identity” had appeal.

It did not take us long to realize how deeply misguided our fantasies were. All too quickly, we discovered that salsa is a sadistic style of dancing created for the purpose of making middle-aged men feel ridiculous. Salsa requires an array of sensual hip movements that we found structurally implausible. We managed to perform this beautiful dance with all the seductive force of Al Gore giving a lap dance.

We did not continue with our salsa lessons.

Here’s the thing: When you fight to make your switch, especially one that involves a new identity, you and your audience are going to have Salsa Moments. (Don’t worry, we’re not going to adopt that as a buzz phrase.) Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure. You can’t learn to salsa-dance without failing. You can’t learn to be an inventor, or a nurse, or a scientist, without failing. Nor can you learn to transform the way products are developed in your firm, or change minds about urban poverty, or restore loving communication with your spouse, without failing. And the Elephant really, really hates to fail.

This presents a difficulty for you when you are trying to change or when you’re trying to lead change. You know that you or your audience will fail, and you know that the failure will trigger the “flight” instinct, just as the two of us fled our salsa lessons. How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road?

The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route. This notion takes us into a fascinating area of research that is likely to change the way you view the world.

Read the following four sentences, and write down whether you agree or disagree with each of them:

1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.
2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially.
3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

If you agreed with items 1 and 3, you’re someone who has a “fixed mindset.” And if you agreed with items 2 and 4, you tend to have a “growth mindset.” (If you agreed with both 1 and 2, you’re confused.) As we’ll see, which mindset you have can help determine how easy it will be for you to handle failure, and how dogged you’ll be in pursuing change. It might even determine how successful you are in your career.

People who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are basically static. Maybe you believe you’re a pretty good public speaker, an average manager, and a wonderful organizer. With a fixed mindset, you believe that you may get a little bit better or worse at those skills, but basically your abilities reflect the way you’re wired. Your behavior, then, is a good representation of your natural ability, just as the swirled-and-sniffed first taste of wine is a good representation of the bottle you’ve bought.

If you are someone with a fixed mindset, you tend to avoid challenges, because if you fail, you fear that others will see your failure as an indication of your true ability and see you as a loser (just as a bad first taste of wine leads you to reject the bottle). You

feel threatened by negative feedback, because it seems as if the critics are saying they’re better than you, positioning themselves at a level of natural ability higher than yours. You try not to be seen exerting too much effort. (People who are really good don’t need to try that hard, right?) Think about tennis player John McEnroe as a young star—he had great natural talent but was not keen on rigorous practice or self-improvement.

In contrast, people who have a growth mindset believe that abilities are like muscles—they can be built up with practice. That is, with concerted effort, you can make yourself better at writing or managing or listening to your spouse. With a growth mindset, you tend to accept more challenges despite the risk of failure. (After all, when you try and fail to lift more weight at the gym, you don’t worry that everybody will mock you as a “born weakling.”) You seek out “stretch” assignments at work. And you’re more inclined to accept criticism, because ultimately it makes you better. You may not be as good as others right now, but you’re thinking long-term, in a tortoise-versus-hare kind of way. Think Tiger Woods, who won eight major championships faster than anyone in history and then decided his swing needed an overhaul.

Fixed versus growth: Which are you? This isn’t one of those Cosmo Personality Quizzes in which there are no wrong answers (“Are you a Labrador retriever or a poodle?”). Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has spent her career studying these two mindsets—she is the source of the terms. And her research results are clear: If you want to reach your full potential, you need a growth mindset.

Dweck has studied how these two mindsets influence the performance of Olympic athletes and virtuoso musicians and everyday businesspeople. In her must-read book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she makes an airtight case that a growth mindset will make you more successful at almost anything. That’s

because people with a growth mindset—those who stretch themselves, take risks, accept feedback, and take the long-term view—can’t help but progress in their lives and careers.

Once you become aware of these concepts, you start to spot the fixed mindset everywhere. Look at the way we praise our children: “You’re so smart!” “You are so good at basketball!” That’s fuel for the fixed mindset. A growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill: “I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project!” “I could tell you listened to your coach’s comments—you really had your elbow under those jump shots today.”

Our salsa-dancing experience was a classic example of a fixed mindset failure. After trying an unfamiliar movement for a while, we concluded, definitively, that we were Terrible Salsa Dancers and were born that way. And we quit because letting other people see that natural lack of ability made us uncomfortable. Someone with a growth mindset never would have jumped to this conclusion. In fact, they never would have expected to be any good at salsa early on. The mindset would make all the difference.

Which, of course, prompts an obvious question: Can people with a fixed mindset learn to adopt a growth mindset?

9.

In 2007, Dweck and two colleagues, Kali Trzesniewsi of Stanford and Lisa Blackwell of Columbia, decided to run an experiment on junior-high-school students: If they trained the students on the growth mindset, would the kids get better at math?

Junior high is, as you know, a tough transition time for kids. Most people have decidedly mixed memories of junior high, and 40 percent of people actually rank adolescence as the worst time in their lives. (Presumably the other 60 percent didn’t have acne.) Just as puberty begins to kick in, students move to new schools with

harder work and a new crop of teachers who don’t give them the warm individual attention they got used to in elementary school. Junior high is a turning point for fixed mindset kids: Dweck found that in elementary school, fixed-mindset students do about as well as growth-mindset students but in junior high suffer an immediate drop in grades and then continue to slide in the next few years.

The students in Dweck’s study often came up with fixed-mindset explanations for their decline: “I am the stupidest.” “I suck in math.” Notice how they’re talking about their abilities as permanent traits, as if they were saying, “My eyes are brown.” (Other students tended to place the blame elsewhere, saying things like “I didn’t do well because the teacher is on crack” or “My math teacher is a fat male slut.”)

Dweck and her colleagues set up a study for seventh-grade math students in a school where 79 percent of students were eligible for the federal free lunch program—exactly the kind of low socioeconomic environment in which students are at risk for starting a pattern of academic failure. The control group was taught generic study skills, and the experimental group was taught the growth mindset.

The growth-mindset students were taught that the brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise—that with work, they could get smarter. After all, Dweck told them, “nobody laughs at babies and says how dumb they are because they can’t talk.”

Classroom mentors asked the students to think about skills they already had learned—Remember when you first stepped onto a skateboard or played Guitar Hero?—and to recall how practice had been the key to mastering those skills. Students were reminded that “Everything is hard before it is easy,” and that they should never give up because they didn’t master something immediately. In total, the students in the growth-mindset group

received two hours of “brain is like a muscle” training over eight weeks. And the results? Astonishing.

Students in the control group who were taught generic study skills started out their seventh-grade year with math grades at about a C+ level. Over the course of the year, their grades slipped to a C and then toward C–. The “brain is like a muscle” training, however, stopped this slide and reversed it. The students who received it significantly outperformed their peers.

Some students made dramatic transformations. In Mindset, Dweck reported, “One day, we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All at once Jimmy—the most hard-core, turned-off, low-effort kid in the group—looked up with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You mean I don’t have to be dumb?’ From that day on, he worked. He started staying up late to do his homework, which he never used to bother with at all. He started handing in assignments early so he could get feedback and revise them. These kids now believe that working hard was not something that made you vulnerable, but something that made you smarter.”

The teachers, unaware of the experimental conditions their students were assigned to, were asked to identify the students who they thought had experienced a positive change during the spring term. Seventy-six percent of the students they identified were in the “brain is like a muscle” training group.

Those results were dramatically out of proportion with the intervention itself. Math is a cumulative topic, after all, and the students in this experiment were already a third of the way into the spring term. Two hours of instruction, in the junior-high sandstorm of hormones and popularity and YouTube, should have had all the transformative effect of an after-school lecture on the Food Pyramid. Instead, two hours of training in how to think about intelligence made students demonstrably better at

math. Dweck proved that the growth mindset can be taught and that it can change lives.

10.

In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Businesspeople think in terms of two stages: You plan, and then you execute. There’s no “learning stage” or “practice stage” in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how ya do it, just get it done!

But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team. Why is that so critical? Because, as Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter observes in studying large organizations, “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.” A similar sentiment is expressed by marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, who says that “real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back.”

If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical. The leaders at IDEO, the world’s preeminent product design firm, have designed products and experiences ranging from the first Apple mouse to a new Red Cross blood donation procedure. They understand the need to prepare their employees—and, more important, their clients—for failure.

Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, says that every design process goes through “foggy periods.” One of IDEO’s designers even sketched out a “project mood chart” that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It’s a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labeled “hope,” at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labeled “confidence,” at the

end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labeled “insight.”

Brown says that design is “rarely a graceful leap from height to height.” When a team embarks on a new project, team members are filled with hope and optimism. As they start to collect data and observe real people struggling with existing products, they find that new ideas spring forth effortlessly. Then comes the difficult task of integrating all those fresh ideas into a coherent new design. At this “insight” stage, it’s easy to get depressed, because insight doesn’t always strike immediately.

The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubt, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum. Team members begin to test out their new designs, and they realize the improvements they’ve made, and they keep tweaking the design to make it better. And they come to realize, we’ve cracked this problem. That’s when the team reaches the peak of confidence.

Notice what team leaders at IDEO are doing with the peaks-and-valley visual: They are creating the expectation of failure. They are telling team members not to trust that initial flush of good feeling at the beginning of the project, because what comes next is hardship and toil and frustration. Yet, strangely enough, when they deliver this warning, it comes across as optimistic.

That’s the paradox of the growth mindset. Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down—but throughout, we’ll get better, and we’ll succeed in the end.

The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that’s critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.

This lesson was learned the hard way by several hospitals that were trying to embrace a new kind of heart surgery called “minimally invasive cardiac surgery” (MICS). Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, studied the way that sixteen hospitals implemented MICS.

Traditional open-heart surgery is very invasive: A patient’s breastbone is split open, his or her blood is circulated through a heart-lung bypass machine, and the heart is stopped. MICS is much less invasive because it allows the heart to be fixed without the chest being opened. Surgeons sneak up to the heart through a small, 3-inch incision between two ribs. Meanwhile, a tiny catheter with a deflated balloon is threaded through the groin, guided into the aorta, and then inflated, blocking blood flow from the inside. The surgeon proceeds to operate using the small, cramped horizontal space between the ribs.

That cramped operating space changes everything about the surgery. With open-heart surgery, the surgeon blocks off the aorta with external clamps, like putting a Chip Clip on a really precious bag of Doritos. No input is needed from the surgical team. With MICS, the balloon gizmo must act as an internal clamp, inflating to block the flow of blood. The surgeon can’t see it or feel it yet has to inflate it in exactly the right place at exactly the right pressure. To accomplish this, the surgeon must rely heavily on the anesthesiologist to monitor the path of the balloon as it moves toward the heart. Once the balloon is finally in place and inflated, the work still isn’t done. The balloon’s position has to be monitored continuously to make sure blood isn’t flowing past it. As one nurse said, “When I read the training manual, I couldn’t believe it. It was so different from standard cases.”

The procedure requires precarious maneuvers, in a life-or-death situation, by a team mostly blinded. Kind of like landing a jet on an aircraft carrier at night. (Not that we know what either

of these things feels like. We just picture both being substantially more dangerous than writing a nonfiction book.) But there’s a big payoff for these precarious maneuvers: a lot less suffering for the patients. MICS heart patients go home from the hospital in four days instead of eight, and they recover fully in three weeks instead of two months.

The promise of MICS, then, is that it offers big benefits to the patients of teams that adopt it, but only if the surgery teams are willing to endure the initial learning period. Lots of new technologies require this trade-off: Think of architects who stopped creating drawings by hand and started using computer-aided design or distributors who learned to use PDAs in the field to track their shipments and deliveries. Pain now for a payoff later.

Edmondson studied sixteen hospitals as they adopted the new MICS technology. She found that some hospitals successfully learned and embraced the new technique, but several failed and retreated back to open-heart surgery. What she learned about the successful and unsuccessful teams is powerful testimony to the power of the growth mindset.

11.

The most effective teams tended to adopt what Edmondson called a “learning frame.” Members of these teams pictured MICS as something that would be difficult at first but would get easier over time if they were open to changing how they behaved and communicated.

At Mountain Medical Center, Dr. M adopted a learning frame. He often wore a head camera, which allowed the team to see what was going on, and he encouraged questions about what he was doing and why. He also made sure his team practiced diligently: He deliberately scheduled the first six MICS cases in

the same week, so team members could practice repeatedly, with no chance of forgetting what they were learning in the lag times between cases. He also ensured that the same team would be together on the first fifteen cases. After that, he added new members one at a time, so each new person could learn without introducing much risk to the procedure. Mountain Medical Center had great success using MICS, and this success can be attributed to the growth mindset. Dr. M put the focus on practice, he acted as a coach, and he set up the routines to allow the maximum chances to learn and improve.

Other hospitals abandoned their adoption of MICS. At Decorum Hospital, the chief cardiac surgeon, Dr. D, was motivated to adopt MICS for competitive reasons. “We’d like everyone to know we can do it. It’s a marketing thing. Patients want to know we can do it.” His team members talked about adopting the procedure to “keep up with the Joneses” (the other large hospitals in the area). MICS, then, was seen almost like a desirable new toy to be acquired—especially since all the cool kids had one.

Dr. D ended up implementing the procedure in a unique way: He continued to split the breastbone of his patients, albeit with a smaller incision. One of his nurses remarked, “Dr. D is a creature of habit.” And the old habits eventually won out. The use of the new procedure gradually dwindled, and eventually it was abandoned.

Across the hospitals she studied, Edmondson found that the teams who failed made the mistake of trying to “get it right on the first try” and were motivated by the chance to “perform, to shine, or to execute perfectly.” But of course no one “shines” on the first few tries—this mindset set the teams up for failure. By contrast, the successful teams focused on learning. They didn’t assume that

mastery would come quickly, and they anticipated that they’d face challenges. In the end, they were the ones who were more likely to get it right.

Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment. A famous story about IBM makes that point well. In the 1960s, an executive at IBM made a decision that ended up losing the company $10 million (about $70 million in 2009 dollars). The CEO of IBM, Tom Watson, summoned the offending executive to his office at corporate headquarters. The journalist Paul B. Carroll described what happened next:

As the executive cowered, Watson asked, “Do you know why I’ve asked you here?”

The man replied, “I assume I’m here so you can fire me.”

Watson looked surprised.

“Fire you?” he asked. “Of course not. I just spent $10 million educating you.”

12.

In 1995, Molly Howard, a long time special education teacher in Louisville, Georgia, watched as the new Jefferson County High School building was being built.

“Every day I’d drive by the building, and I’d wonder, ‘Who’s gonna run that school?’ And it kept tugging at me, ‘Why don’t you apply?’” Howard said.

She applied and got the job, but with the promotion came a very tough challenge. Eighty percent of the school’s students lived in poverty. Only 15 percent of students in the previous high

school had continued on to college. “The kids you’d expect to be successful were successful,” said Howard. “But what about the other 85 percent?”

Many teachers had a nearly defeatist attitude. “There was this belief that some children can and some children can’t. That we’re here for the ones that can get it, and we’ve got to accept that we’re going to lose some. I knew I’d have to challenge that,” said Howard.

Howard acted quickly. First, she had to sell a new identity. Howard believed that every student could aspire to go to college, so she abolished the school’s two-track system that had separated “college-bound” students from “vocational” students. In her school, everyone would share the college-bound identity.

She beefed up assessments and tutorial programs. She matched students with teachers who’d be their “on-campus advisers” through all four years. Perhaps her most distinctive change, though, was to the grading system. Under her new system the only grades offered at Jefferson County High School were: A, B, C, and NY.

Not Yet.

In Howard’s view, the students at Jefferson had accepted a “culture of failure.” In a fixed-mindset way, they acted as though they were failures to the bone. Students often didn’t do their homework, or they turned in shoddy work. Getting a D or an F was an easy way out in a way. They might get a poor grade, but at least they would be done.

In the new system, the students couldn’t stop until they’d cleared the bar. “We define up front to the kids what’s an A, B, and C,” said Howard. “If they do substandard work, the teacher will say, ‘Not Yet.’ … That gives them the mindset: My teacher thinks I can do better. It changes their expectations.”

The school was reborn. Students and teachers became more

engaged, the school’s graduation rate increased dramatically, and student test scores went up so much that remedial courses were eliminated. In 2008, the National Association of Secondary School Principals declared Howard the U.S. Principal of the Year, out of 48,000 candidates.

Howard transformed her students. She cultivated a new identity in them. You’re all college-bound students. Then she flipped Jefferson from a fixed-mindset school to a growth-mindset school. She believed that every student was capable of doing acceptable work, that no student was doomed to failure. There’s no “never” at Jefferson anymore, only a “Not Yet.”

13.

In times of change, we need to remind ourselves and others, again and again, of certain basic truths: Our brains and our abilities are like muscles. They can be strengthened with practice. We’re not born skateboarders or scientists or nurses; we must learn how to skateboard, do science, or care for sick people. And our inspiration to change ourselves comes from our desire to live up to those identities.

In the story of Molly Howard, we see that amazing things can happen when you combine the aspiration of a new identity with the persistence of the growth mindset. That’s how you grow your people.

Over the past few chapters, we’ve seen that the central challenge of change is keeping the Elephant moving forward. Whereas the Rider needs direction, the Elephant needs motivation. And we’ve seen that motivation comes from feeling—knowledge isn’t enough to motivate change. But motivation also comes from confidence. The Elephant has to believe that it’s capable of conquering the change. And 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.