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:

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.

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:

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:

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.