3 Script the Critical Moves

1.

A doctor was asked to consider the medical records of a 67-year-old patient who had chronic hip pain from arthritis. In the past, the patient had been given drugs to treat his pain, but they’d been ineffective, so the doctor was forced to consider a more drastic option: hip-replacement surgery, which involves slicing open the thigh, wrenching the bone out of the socket, sawing off the arthritic end, and replacing it with an implant. Recovery from hip-replacement surgery is long and painful.

Then came an unexpected break in the case: A final check with the patient’s pharmacy uncovered one medication that hadn’t been tried. Now the doctor faced a dilemma: Should he prescribe the untried medication, even though other medications had failed, or should he go ahead and refer the patient for surgery?

This dilemma, based on real medical cases, was created by physician Donald Redelmeier and psychologist Eldar Shafir, who used it to study the way doctors make decisions. When doctors were presented with this case history, 47 percent of them chose to try the medication, in hopes of saving the patient from going under the knife.

In a variation on the dilemma, another group of doctors were presented with almost exactly the same set of case facts—except this time, the patient’s pharmacy discovered two untried medications. If you were the patient with the arthritic hip, you’d be thrilled—certainly two nonsurgical options are better than one. But when the doctors were presented with two medications, only 28 percent chose to try either one.

This doesn’t make sense. The doctors were acting as though having more medication options somehow made medication a worse bet than surgery. But if 47 percent of doctors thought medication A was preferable to surgery, the mere existence of a second medication shouldn’t have tipped them toward surgery.

What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan, which in this case was a painful and invasive hip-replacement surgery. This behavior clearly is not rational, but it is human.

Decisions are the Rider’s turf, and because they require careful supervision and self-control, they tax the Rider’s strength. (Remember the radish/chocolate-chip cookie study from Chapter 1.) The more choices the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets. Have you ever noticed that shopping is a lot more tiring than other kinds of light activity? Now you know why—it’s all those choices. This is important, because we encounter excess choice all around us. Consider three real examples of decision paralysis:

Scene 1: A gourmet food store. The store managers have set up a table where customers can sample imported jams for free. One day, the table showcases 6 different jams. Another day, 24 jams. As you’d expect, the 24-jam display attracts more customers to stop by for a sample—but when it comes time to buy, they can’t make a decision. Shoppers who saw only 6 jams on display are 10 times more likely to buy a jar of jam!

Scene 2: The office. The employees of a large company read over their 401(k) materials, ready to start saving for retirement. The human resources department has thoughtfully provided many investment options: domestic growth stock funds, domestic value stock funds, municipal bond funds, real estate investment trusts, emerging market funds, developed market funds, money market accounts, and more. Each category might have several choices within it. (Really complete 401(k) plans might offer dozens of options.) The extra options backfire, however, because for every 10 options offered, the employees’ rate of participation goes down by 2 percent. Decision paralysis deters people from saving for their own retirement! And because many companies match employees’ contributions, employees may also be walking away from free money.

Scene 3: A local bar. It’s speed-dating night. Singles meet a series of other singles one-on-one, spending perhaps five minutes with each person, in hopes of making a romantic connection. But decision paralysis thwarts even Cupid. Young adults who meet eight other singles make more “matches” than those who meet twenty.

Bottom line: Decision paralysis disrupts medical decisions and retail decisions and investment decisions and dating decisions. Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that it might affect decisions in your job and life, too.

Think about the sources of decision paralysis in your organization. Every business must choose among attractive options. Growing revenue quickly versus maximizing profitability. Making perfect products versus getting products to market faster. Being innovative and creative versus optimizing efficiency. If you fold together lots of those tensions, you create a surefire recipe for paralysis. It took only two medications to fuzz the doctors’ brains. How many options do your people have?

Think about your local school board. Every year, the problems and solutions multiply. You can just imagine the mental conversation: “Property tax revenue is falling, but the teachers need a 3 percent cost-of-living raise, and we can’t forget about extracurriculars (cutting the marching band last year was a killer), but we must continue to invest in our new science magnet school—if it doesn’t work, there will be egg on our face—yet it’s ridiculous to consider any of this until we fix our crumbling infrastructure and address our overcrowded classrooms.” For the frazzled school board member, it suddenly looks a lot more attractive to roll over last year’s budget with a 1.5 percent increase on every line item.

As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, “we become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”

2.

The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out. You have your routines, your ways of doing things. For most of your day, the Rider is on autopilot. But in times of change, autopilot doesn’t work anymore, choices suddenly proliferate, and autopilot habits become unfamiliar decisions. When you’re on a diet, the habitual daily trip for Nachos Bell Grande is disqualified, and in its place is left a decision. When you’ve got a new manager, the way you communicate stops being second nature and starts being a choice.

Change brings new choices that create uncertainty. Let’s be clear: It’s not only options that yield decision paralysis—like picking one donut from 100 flavors. Ambiguity does, too. In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24 jams.

Ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider, because the Rider is tugging on the reins of the Elephant, trying to direct the Elephant down a new path. But when the road is uncertain, the Elephant will insist on taking the default path, the most familiar path, just as the doctors did. Why? Because uncertainty makes the Elephant anxious. (Think of how, in an unfamiliar place, you gravitate toward a familiar face.) And that’s why decision paralysis can be deadly for change—because the most familiar path is always the status quo.

Many leaders pride themselves on setting high-level direction: I’ll set the vision and stay out of the details. It’s true that a compelling vision is critical (as we’ll see in the next chapter). But it’s not enough. Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is precisely in the details.

In Chapter 1, we explained why what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. The citizens of two West Virginia communities, unhealthy in their eating habits, underwent a major change when a couple of professors coached them to buy 1% milk. They didn’t need a big-picture vision—no one needs convincing that “eating healthy” is an admirable goal. What they needed was someone who could bring a noble goal within the realm of everyday behavior, someone who could cut through the bewildering array of potentially healthy choices and suggest a good place to start.

Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.

3.

In 1995, Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso decided to privatize Brazil’s railroads. He split the system into seven different branches (shades of Ma Bell) and auctioned off the rights to run them. Previous administrations had not invested much in the rail system, and at the time of the auction, it was a deteriorating mess. A study concluded that 50 percent of the network’s bridges needed repair and 20 percent of them were on the verge of collapse. The technologies used in Brazil were far behind those in other developed countries. In fact, the rail system was still using twenty locomotives powered by steam engines.

A private firm, GP Investimentos Limited, decided to bid for the branch known as the “southern line,” which ran through Brazil’s three southernmost states. GP was high bidder in the auction in December 1996. After an interim period of management, the firm put one of its own executives, Alexandre Behring, in charge of the company, which was later renamed America Latina Logistica (ALL). When Behring took charge, he was in his early 30s—just four years out of business school.

Behring didn’t have much to work with. ALL had only 30 million Brazilian reals in cash on its balance sheet. At one of Behring’s first meetings, a mid-level manager beseeched him for 5 million reals to repair a single bridge. Though sympathetic, Behring knew that fixing everything that was broken would require hundreds of millions of reals. The needs were profound, but he faced an unyielding constraint: ALL’s depleted bank account.

The railroad purchased by GP was in chaos, and when Behring and his team took charge, with new personnel and new priorities, more chaos was whipped into the preexisting chaos. The resulting decision paralysis should have been inescapable. And it likely would have been if Behring hadn’t made clear exactly what needed to be done.

His top priority was to lift ALL out of its precarious, cash-strapped financial state. To accomplish this, he and his 35-year-old CFO, Duilio Calciolari, developed four rules to govern the company’s investments:

The four rules were clear: (1) Unblock revenue. (2) Minimize up-front cash. (3) Faster is better than best. (4) Use what you’ve got. These rules, taken together, ensured that cash wouldn’t be consumed unless it was being used as bait for more cash. Spend a little, make a little more.

This is what we mean by “scripting” the critical moves. Change begins at the level of individual decisions and behaviors, but that’s a hard place to start because that’s where the friction is. Inertia and decision paralysis will conspire to keep people doing things the old way. To spark movement in a new direction, you need to provide crystal-clear guidance. That’s why scripting is important—you’ve got to think about the specific behavior that you’d want to see in a tough moment, whether the tough moment takes place in a Brazilian railroad system or late at night in your own snack-loaded pantry.

You can’t script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It’s the critical moves that count. Recall that, in West Virginia, the researchers decided to focus their campaign on milk because it was the source of the most saturated fat in the average diet. The researchers didn’t offer suggestions about bread or soda or butter or potato chips. They scripted the critical move: Switch to 1% milk.

Similarly, Behring’s four rules were focused on financial triage. He didn’t have the luxury of long-term planning. He needed his people to move, immediately, in a new direction, in hopes that they could buy ALL enough time to make a fuller transformation. (Notice that he didn’t say a word about other important issues such as employee morale or marketing or R&D.) By staying focused on the critical moves, he made it easier for his people to change direction.

In 1998, for instance, the company had to turn down business hauling grain because it didn’t have enough locomotives. While its competitors were negotiating for new locomotives, ALL’s engineers worked around the clock repairing old locomotives. (Faster is better than best. Minimize up-front cash.)

Also, ALL’s engineers figured out a way to boost the locomotives’ fuel capacity so they could operate longer without refueling. This reduced downtime, allowing more routes per locomotive, just as Southwest Airlines gets more flights per plane than its competitors because of its quick turnarounds at the gate. (Unblock revenue.) Engineers also found a creative solution to the nagging problem of damaged tracks, which limited a train’s speed. Rather than purchasing new metal rails, which cost US$400 per ton, they ripped up tracks at abandoned stations and installed them on active routes. (Use what you’ve got.)

Three years later, Behring’s discipline was paying off. ALL’s performance improved from a net loss of 80 million reals in 1998 to a net profit of 24 million reals in 2000.

Knowing what we know about the Rider, it’s no surprise that Behring’s strategy worked. Behring had scripted the moves that helped his people make hard decisions. What tires out the Rider—and puts change efforts at risk—is ambiguity, and Behring eliminated it. For every investment decision, his rules suggested the correct choice.

To see the power of this, let’s return to the doctors and the patient with the arthritic hip. Imagine that the leaders of the hospital had scripted their critical moves, and that one of those moves was this: Use invasive options only as a last resort. Does anyone doubt that this guideline would have caused a big shift in the doctors’ decisions?

4.

In the shaded area that follows, we present a feature that we call a “Clinic.” In each Clinic, we describe a real-world situation and challenge you to think about how to apply the Switch framework to create change. At the end of each Clinic, we give our own suggestions, but we encourage you to generate your own game plan before you look at ours. The Clinic is intended to be a kind of pause button, a chance to step outside the text and think about how to apply what you’ve read. We hope you find this a useful way to practice applying the framework. The Clinics are written to be sidebars—if you prefer to plow through the prose uninterrupted, you can return to them later.

5.

When Alexandre Behring set up four simple rules for ALL employees to follow, they changed quickly. So did the West Virginians who were urged to drink 1% milk. But why did these changes need to be scripted? Wasn’t it obvious to the West Virginians that they should be drinking 1% milk instead of whole milk?

Well, no, it wasn’t. Not many people know that a glass of whole milk has the same amount of saturated fat as five bacon strips. That’s not intuitive knowledge. Nor was it intuitive for any of Behring’s employees at ALL to decide, “Yep, let’s rip up old, abandoned tracks instead of purchasing new ones.” When you want someone to behave in a new way, explain the “new way” clearly. Don’t assume the new moves are obvious.

To see why this is so important, consider a campaign that is essentially the “antimatter” version of the 1% milk campaign—a campaign that, while well intentioned, systematically ignores or reverses every smart component of the 1% milk intervention. What would such an antimatter campaign look like? It might look very much like the U.S. government’s Food Pyramid.

The Food Pyramid, which specifies the types and quantities of food that make up a healthy diet, is the perfect example of how not to change people’s behavior. It’s worth considering for a moment, because what dooms the Pyramid could doom your efforts to create change in your life, as well.

Let’s start with the pyramid shape. A pyramid signifies hierarchy, yet no hierarchy is evident in the Food Pyramid. The first version of it displayed rows of food, one row on top of the next, with grains at the bottom and oils at the top. Some people interpreted this arrangement to mean that oils were the most important food group. (Whoops.) The revised version, shown here, abandoned that construct for vertical-ish streaks of color intended to eliminate any implied ranking. What this means is that the pyramid structure itself has no meaning whatsoever. The Food Pyramid might as well be a Food Rhombus or a Food Rooster.

Look at it again—its meaning is almost completely opaque. What do the streaks mean? The only meaning that can be gleaned quickly comes from the stick figure dashing up the side. The meaning is clear enough: “You should exercise.” The answers to more meaningful questions—How much? How often? What kind?—aren’t as easy to infer, which of course adds more ambiguity.

To learn what the Food Pyramid has to say about food, you must be willing to decipher the Pyramid’s markings. If you make the effort, you’ll find that each streak of color represents a class of food. For instance, the yellow streak (the tiny one near the middle) is “oils,” and the orange streak (on the far left) is “grains.” If you dig even further, you’ll find that with every color streak comes a recommendation. For instance, the USDA advises that adults consume about 5 to 7 teaspoons of oil each day.

Quick, how many teaspoons of oil did you consume today?

Quick, how many “ounce equivalents” of grain did you have today?

Can you imagine any message that would be less effective in changing people’s eating behavior? The language and concepts here are so hopelessly abstracted from people’s actual experience with food—which consists of things like buying groceries and ordering hamburgers at restaurants, not tabulating grain portions—that the message confuses and demoralizes: I can’t understand this stuff.

As an analogy, most of us have internalized the rule of thumb to get the oil in our cars changed every 3 months or 3,000 miles. It’s transparent and actionable, like the 1% milk campaign. What if, instead, the auto industry publicized its version of the disastrous Food Pyramid—say, a Car Rainbow, where each color of the rainbow represents a different diagnostic test. (Pink would warn you not to let your engine oil exceed a certain “sludge threshold.”) Jiffy Lube would be out of business in months.

OK, the Food Pyramid is almost too easy to pick on. But the lessons here are serious and practical. If you are leading a change effort, you need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change. Granted, this is asking a lot. It means that you’ll need to understand how to script the critical moves, to translate aspirations into actions. It’s not good enough to ask your team to “be more creative” or to “tighten up on the purse strings.” That’s like telling the American public to “be healthier.”

In a pioneering study of organizational change, described in the book The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, researchers divided the change efforts they’d studied into three groups: the most successful (the top third), the average (the middle third), and the least successful (the bottom third). They found that, across the spectrum, almost everyone set goals: 89 percent of the top third and 86 percent of the bottom third. A typical goal might be to improve inventory turns by 50 percent. But the more successful change transformations were more likely to set behavioral goals: 89 percent of the top third versus only 33 percent of the bottom third. For instance, a behavioral goal might be that project teams would meet once a week and each team would include at least one representative of every functional area.

Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch. To create movement, you’ve got to be specific and be concrete. You’ve got to emulate 1% milk and flee from the Food Pyramid.

6.

How far does this theory go? How much difference can specific instructions make? Let’s subject the idea to the toughest possible test: Can you change child abusers by scripting some critical parenting moves for them?

In 2004, a study was conducted of 110 parents who had abused their children. Seventy-three percent of them had assaulted their kids—hitting or punching them with their fists. Twenty percent had engaged in even more violent assaults, resulting in broken bones or severe lacerations.

The parents tended to blame their abusive behavior on their kids. “They’ll say, ‘I had to discipline my child this way because he’s so rotten and he won’t listen,’” said Beverly Funderburk, a research professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Health Sciences Center. The parents believed that they’d gotten a “bad kid,” or a stubborn one, and that violence was the only way they could get their kids to obey.

The mission of Funderburk’s team was to change these parents, to stop their abuse. If you think that sounds naive and even hopeless, you’re in good company. That’s also what Funderburk worried about when she first began the work.

She practices what’s called parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), which tries to disrupt the escalating cycles of coercion and frustration that characterize abusive situations. In the first step of PCIT, parents are given an assignment: “We want you to play with your child for five minutes a day. Here are the rules: You’re going to devote 100% of your attention to them, you’re not going to answer the phone, you are not going to teach them their ABCs. You’re just going to enjoy them.” The parents are incredulous that five minutes will accomplish anything. “For goodness’ sake,” said one parent, “I spend every minute of every day on this child.”

At first, these five-minute play periods take place in a laboratory setting. The parent and child sit in an empty room with only a table and chairs. Three or four toys are put on the tabletop. The parents are instructed to let the child lead the play session, and they’re forbidden to give commands, to criticize, even to ask questions. Letting their child direct the action is incredibly difficult for them.

During the play session, a therapist watches the parents through a one-way mirror and gives real-time coaching by means of an earpiece. Funderburk describes a typical interaction:

An abusive parent typically finds the five-minute exercise utterly exhausting. (And you understand why—the parent’s Rider has to supervise every single moment.) Funderburk and her colleagues demand that the parents practice the same set of behaviors (called “child-directed interaction”) every day, whether in the lab or at home, so that the behaviors gradually become instinctive. The more instinctive a behavior becomes, the less self-control from the Rider it requires, and thus the more sustainable it becomes.

Parents are taught skills that feel unnatural at first. They are taught to look for opportunities to praise their kids’ behavior. (“I like how hard you’re working.” “Good job. You’re being very kind to that doll.”) They are taught to simply describe their child’s behavior, so that the child feels noticed. (“Oh, look, now you’re putting the car in the garage.”)

Later in the program, after parents have become better at having short positive interactions with their kids, they are taught how to give commands so that their kids will listen and obey. They are taught a very specific formula for a command—combining a command with a reason so the command doesn’t feel arbitrary. (“Johnny, it’s almost time for the bus to come, so please put your shoes on now.”)

Funderburk and her team at the University of Oklahoma studied 110 parents who had abused their children. Half of them were randomly assigned to take 12 sessions of PCIT, and the other half were assigned to take 12 sessions of a form of anger-management therapy, focused on helping them control their emotions—the standard treatment for abusive parents. After the therapy sessions concluded, the parents were tracked for 3 years. Across 3 years, 60 percent of the anger-management-therapy group committed another act of child abuse. In contrast, only 20 percent of the PCIT parents re-offended.

PCIT did not eliminate the problem: One in five parents abused his or her kids again. But, from the perspective of behavior change, the results are staggering. Most of us believe in our hearts that child abusers are irredeemably flawed. Who could hit a child other than someone who is disturbed in some basic way? It simply boggles the mind to think that the behavior of child abusers could be altered by only twelve sessions of therapy concentrating on such simple instructions.

Funderburk said, “In my experience, the physically abusive parent has the same goals as a normal parent; it’s their method and their ideas that are wrong. They think that their child is woeful, because they told their 3-year-old to just play in the front yard, and then he wandered off into the street. And they don’t understand that a 3-year-old might forget an instruction, or might not have that kind of impulse control, so they think they have to punish the child for his own good because he was disobedient and dangerous.”

Earlier, we said that what looks like stubbornness or opposition may actually be a lack of clarity. The PCIT intervention suggests that child abuse, too, may be partly the result of a lack of understanding, a lack of clear instruction or guidance on what to do. This is not to excuse the parents’ behavior, of course. It is simply to point out that simple scripting has power beyond what any of us could have predicted. Even child abusers become pliable in its presence.

7.

In 1995, the same year Brazil’s president Cardoso announced the privatization of the railroads, a group of high school students in Howard, South Dakota, started plotting a revival. They wanted to do something, anything, that might revive their dying community.

Howard and surrounding Miner County had been shrinking for decades. Farm and industrial jobs had slowly dried up, and nothing replaced them. The median price of houses in Howard was only $26,500. The population was about 3,000 and shrinking. The county had the highest elderly population per capita in South Dakota, and it also had the highest rate of youth outmigration in South Dakota, meaning that when young people got old enough, they left and didn’t return.

“We’d been in decline for ninety years,” said Randy Parry, a longtime resident who taught a business class at the local high school, coached the varsity basketball team, and ran an ice cream parlor on the side.

At Howard High School, the students had just finished reading a book about the death of rural communities in Iowa. The students said, “That’s us, it’s just seventy years from now,” according to Parry. “So in class they started asking, ‘How could we change this?’”

Imagine the decision paralysis in this situation. Think of how many factors influence a town’s health: its history, its demographics, its location, its economic base, its weather, among countless others. The problem was simply too complex for anyone to solve. And it wasn’t for lack of motivation—there wasn’t one person in Miner County who wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to help rejuvenate the community. The Elephant herd was ready to move. But where? What can a few people do to restore an entire county?

The students started investigating the situation, designing a survey and distributing it to a sample of Miner County’s 1,000 registered voters. One finding in particular disturbed them: They discovered that half of the residents were shopping outside the county, driving an hour to Sioux Falls to shop in larger stores.

If Miner County was going to be reborn, its economy would need a boost. Most of the things that would boost an economy—investment, entrepreneurship, immigration—were out of the students’ control. But they had uncovered one thing that was very much in their control: spending money locally. They had found their first rallying cry: Let’s keep Miner dollars in Miner County.

Parry urged the students to present their findings to the community. The students accepted the challenge and began to put together a presentation.

The students’ newfound interest in revitalization dovetailed with the efforts of others in the community. A group of other Miner County citizens had been hosting a series of meetings intended to get county residents talking about the future. They held five gatherings, some in the high school and some in people’s homes, and they invited a cross section of residents: farmers and businesspeople and ministers and retirees. They challenged each other: What can we do to energize Miner County?

The issues raised were all over the map: Why does our town look so shabby, with rusty cars on the street? Why should a farmer get a subsidy when a businessperson doesn’t get a subsidy? Why don’t we have a more thriving Main Street? Many of the issues were TBU, unsolvable by the community. Many required investment, but with a limited pool of tax dollars to draw from, it wasn’t clear where they’d find the money. But there were a few things they knew they could take into their own hands.

A gas station owner in the town of Fedora, population 150, complained that residents years ago had cut down a lot of diseased trees—stumps were still littering the area, making Fedora look run-down and sad. The group of concerned citizens decided to deal with the stumps in Fedora. One Saturday, farmers carrying chain saws rode into Fedora on their tractors and loaders. Other residents made sandwiches and cookies for the workers. In a single day, the group dug up four hundred stumps.

Kathy Callies, who was heading up the kitchen crew that day, said it was amazing to see fifty people, ages ranging from 5 to 95, come together to do something for their community. Callies recalled that by the end of the day, “People felt like, ‘Look at what we did in a day.’ And when you’ve dug up stumps together and you start to realize you have shared ideas about what you want the community to be, then things start to happen.” (Notice that the log-clearing day had powerful Elephant and Path elements, as well. The flush of victory—of making a difference—gave the Elephant strength to continue. And the strong support of the community made the Path feel less difficult. It’s easier to make a long journey when you’ve got a herd around you.)

The community began to rally around the movement. Callies remembered the day that Phyllis, a civic-minded woman in her 80s, dropped by the office where the community boosters were meeting. Phyllis announced, “I’ve been waiting for you to call me. I thought if you needed my help, you would call. But then I realized that ‘Oh, they’re all too busy to call!’ So here I am.” On her refrigerator at home, Phyllis had posted a cross-stitch that said “Screw the Golden Years.”

When the high school students were ready to unveil their recommendations, eighty-five residents gathered in the high school gym to hear the presentation. Among them were the top leaders of the towns in Miner County: the school boards, the city councils, and the county commissioners.

The crowd listened attentively to the high school students. Parry said, “You could hear a pin drop…. People said, ‘I can’t say no because I want to make this a place where these kids can come home someday.’ Because the other option is we sit here and keep watching things decline, so pretty soon all that will be left is the dust.”

The students had prepared an impressive array of spreadsheets and charts and graphs. But they’d also simplified the complex data into one simple, surprising fact: They’d calculated that if Howard residents spent just 10 percent more of their disposable income at home, they would boost the local economy by $7 million.

The audience was impressed, and the presentation worked better than anyone expected. The students had scripted the first critical move for Miner County, and the locals responded immediately, consciously spending more of their money in the county. A year later, South Dakota’s Department of Revenue released an astonishing number: The amount of money spent in Miner County had increased by $15.6 million, more than twice the increase the kids had expected.

The change began to snowball. Suddenly, because the county was collecting more taxes, money was available to fund the other proposals the local groups had considered. And in the years following the students’ presentation, the tax receipts kept climbing, which enabled the community to tackle even more ambitious problems. Later, Howard and Miner County received $6 million in grants from various foundations to fuel the transformation. Randy Parry left his teaching job and became a full-time revitalizer-in-chief. The town of Howard became the host to twenty-first-century businesses such as an organic beef producer and a wind-turbine repair shop.

“It all started small,” said Parry. “It’s like when I took over the basketball team at the high school. They were just coming off of a losing season and you couldn’t get people to come into the gym. But then you start to win and a few people come, and then more people come. And then we started winning a lot.” To date, Parry has discussed the rebirth of Miner County with community leaders from thirty-three different states.

8.

A railroad and a South Dakota small town. Both crumbling. Both with a dense thicket of problems and no real resources to use in untangling them. In each situation, an unlikely leader emerged—a young man fresh out of business school and a high school basketball coach. And both succeeded by formulating solutions that were strikingly smaller than the problems they were intended to solve. (We’ve seen this asymmetry before, in the stories of Jerry Sternin in Vietnam and Bobby the troubled teenager.)

The challenges facing Miner County were big and sprawling: the decline of an industrial base, the aging of a population. The citizens understood these challenges well, but the knowledge was TBU—true but useless. It was paralyzing knowledge.

To the Rider, a big problem calls for a big solution. But if you seek out a solution that’s as complex as the problem, you’ll get the Food Pyramid and nothing will change. (The Rider will just spin his wheels trying to make sense of it.) The Rider has to be jarred out of introspection, out of analysis. He needs a script that explains how to act, and that’s why the successes we’ve seen have involved such crisp direction. Buy 1% milk. Don’t spend cash unless it makes cash. Shop a little more in Miner County.

We all hear a lot of “common sense” wisdom about change: People don’t like to change; people resist change; people are set in their ways; people are stubborn. But here we’ve seen something else entirely: railroads made profitable, towns reborn, diets changed, and child abusers reformed.

Clarity dissolves resistance.