11 Keep the Switch Going

1.

“A long journey starts with a single step.” As clichés go, that’s pretty wise.

But you know what else starts with a single step? An ill-conceived amble that you abandon after a few minutes.

So, yes, a long journey starts with a single step, but a single step doesn’t guarantee the long journey. How do you keep those steps coming?

The first thing to do is recognize and celebrate that first step. Something you’ve done has worked. You’ve directed the Rider, you’ve motivated the Elephant, you’ve shaped the Path—and now your team is moving, or you’re moving. When you spot movement, you’ve got to reinforce it. On this front, we can take inspiration from a rather unlikely source: trainers of exotic animals.

The writer Amy Sutherland studied animal trainers who teach dolphins to jump through hoops and monkeys to ride skate boards. These are very, very long journeys indeed. What do you do, in the first hour of the first day, to teach a monkey how to ride a skateboard?

The answer doesn’t involve punishment. Animal trainers rarely use punishment these days. You can punish an elephant only so many times before you wind up as a splinter. Instead, trainers set a behavioral destination and then use “approximations,” meaning that they reward each tiny step toward the destination. For example, in the first hour of the first day of training, the future skateboarding monkey gets a chunk of mango for not freaking out when the trainer puts the board in his cage. Later, he gets mango for touching the board, then for sitting on it, then for letting the trainer push him back and forth on it. Mango, mango, mango. Hundreds of sessions later, you’ve got a mango-bloated monkey ready to skate a half-pipe.

As Amy Sutherland studied the exotic-animal trainers, she had an epiphany: She wondered what would happen if she used these techniques on that “stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.” Inspired by the idea, she wrote a hilarious New York Times article on her attempts to train her husband. The article, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” became the most e-mailed article on the Times website in 2006, and it led to a book on the same topic.

Frustrated by her husband’s various pecadilloes, Sutherland began to use approximations with him: “You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.” And Scott, basking in the appreciation, began to change.

This approach contrasts with much of the thinking on improving relationships at work. For instance, you probably have been asked to take a personality test or a “work style” test for a job. The idea is that if you understand your colleagues’ “types,” you’ll all get along better. And some people may find the knowledge of types useful. But notice that this sounds like Fundamental Attribution Error thinking. To develop better relationships, you don’t need to know whether your colleague is a Navigator or a Pleaser or a Passive-Aggressive Chieftain. You just need to notice and reinforce your colleague’s positive behaviors—as Sutherland did with her husband—and trust that your colleague will do the same with you. After all, advice about aligning styles and expectations can’t be the answer to everything. A trainer in California taught six elephants to stand in a line and urinate on command, and they hadn’t even completed a Myers-Briggs.

Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on to the second, third, and hundredth steps. And that’s a problem, because most of us are terrible rein-forcers. We are quicker to grouse than to praise. At work, we love to bond with our colleagues through communal complaining. (Sutherland calls this behavior “verbal grooming.”) But this is all wrong: We need to be looking for bright spots—however tiny!—and rewarding them. If you want your boss or your team to change, you better get a little less stingy with the mango.

Learning to spot and celebrate approximations requires us to scan the environment constantly, looking for little rays of sunshine, and it isn’t easy. Our Riders, by nature, focus on the negative. Problems are easy to spot; progress, much harder. But the progress is precious. Shamu didn’t learn to jump through a hoop because her trainer was bitching at her. She learned because she had a trainer who was patient and focused and reinforced every step of the journey.

Psychologist Alan Kazdin prescribes an almost identical set of techniques for parents. Kazdin urges parents to “catch their children being good.” He said, “If you want your child to do two hours of homework on her own every night, you don’t withhold praise and rewards until she does two hours of homework without being asked to.” Instead, you set small goals and gradually build her up. And when a child doesn’t get something right, Kazdin advised: “Ask yourself, ‘Was there anything about it that’s a component of what I’d like her to do?’ If the answer’s yes, and it almost always is, then jump on that component: It was great that you did X.”

Kazdin points out that in certain situations, parents do this kind of reinforcement instinctively—for instance, when a child first starts trying to walk: “You praised him wildly when he pulled himself up from a crawling to a standing posture. You held his hands and helped him to take a few steps, encouraging him by exclaiming, Look at you! You’re walking! What a big boy! He was not walking, of course … but you were shaping that behavior by reinforcing the stages on the way to it.”

Let’s be clear, we’re not advising that you treat your colleagues or fellow citizens like monkeys or children—Roger, you cut back your expenses last month! What a big boy you are! Reinforcement doesn’t have to be condescending, and it doesn’t have to come with a power dynamic. Think of the way a friend urges you on at the gym (“Good work—now do one more rep!”). But reinforcement does require you to have a clear view of the destination, and it requires you to be savvy enough to reinforce the bright-spot behaviors when they happen.

The most important lesson we can learn from Kazdin and the animal trainers is this: Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. There is no moment when a monkey learns to skateboard; there’s a process. There is no moment when a child learns to walk; there’s a process. And there won’t be a moment when your community starts to invest more in its school system, or starts recycling more, or starts to beautify its public spaces; there will be a process. To lead a process requires persistence.

A long journey requires lots of mango.

2.

In the Elephant section, we told the story of Steven Kelman, the man who accepted the daunting task of reforming the federal government’s procurement processes. In his book Unleashing Change, he observed an encouraging dynamic in his change efforts: Once the change started, it seemed to feed on itself.

We’ve seen this snowballing effect many times. The citizens of Miner County, eager to revitalize their community, began their efforts by simply digging up tree stumps. Within a few years, they managed to build up the tax base of the entire county. At Rackspace, the customer-service team had the call-queuing system unplugged. It was a simple change, but it didn’t take long before the customer-service ethic took root and led the company to a spectacular period of growth.

Kelman, the procurement guru, attributed the snowballing effect to several phenomena. Psychologists call one of them the mere exposure effect, which means that the more you’re exposed to something, the more you like it. For instance, when the Eiffel Tower was first erected, Parisians hated it. They thought it was a half-finished skeletal blight on their fair city, and they responded with a frenzy of protest. But as time went by, public opinion evolved from hatred to acceptance to adoration. The mere exposure principle assures us that a change effort that initially feels unwelcome and foreign will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it.

Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things. (Think of Brasilata’s “inventors.”)

Kelman points out that these forces aren’t contingent on change efforts being successful in the early going; these aren’t the reinforcing spoils of achieving “small wins.” Rather, they kick in automatically as time goes by. So, although inertia may be a formidable opponent in the early goings of your switch, at some point inertia will shift from resisting change to supporting it. Small changes can snowball to big changes.

3.

These are encouraging realizations: Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball. But this is not the same as saying that change is easy. If it were, we wouldn’t see around us so many struggling alcoholics and troubled marriages and lagging companies and thwarted social change efforts. Change isn’t always easy and it isn’t always hard. In some ways change is ubiquitous; in others it’s unlikely.

We can say this much with confidence: When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment. In other words, when change works, it’s because the Rider, the Elephant, and the Path are all aligned in support of the switch.

Take becoming a parent. If you think the organizational change you’re contemplating is wrenching, forget about it—it can’t hold a candle to the amount of change required by having kids. Whatever acts of will may be required to execute your new idea at work, no one will be called upon to send the controller to college (or to burp the CFO).

Raising children is an absolutely massive change that works pretty darn well, and it’s no great mystery why. For one thing, it’s a clear and vivid destination. We’ve all been kids, and we’ve all seen parents (our own and others) in action. We’ve received decades of vicarious training in parenting. So the Rider knows what direction to go and what kinds of behaviors lead to success. (Mind you, there’s still a lot of winging it en route to the destination.)

People have kids because of feelings, not knowledge. A rosy-eyed couple looks forward to raising a child. They think about what it’ll be like to have their own little bundle of joy. So the Elephant is excited to begin a long and arduous journey that, in other circumstances, might induce panic. Furthermore, parenthood is an identity that appeals—you start making your decisions based on what’s good for the kids rather than on what’s most comfortable for you. The identity is so powerful, in fact, that your Elephant starts embracing short-term sacrifices for the good of the kids.

Once we become parents, our friends and families find ways to shrink the change, especially in the first few months: Your mom comes to help in the first few weeks; your friends bring you food; your employer gives you leave from work; and your relatives keep tabs on you.

And think of all the other ways that society has shaped the Path for raising kids: from little things, like high chairs at Olive Garden, to big things, like maternity leave and school systems and neighborhoods built explicitly to be good places for raising children.

Maybe this sounds like common sense to you. But if it’s common sense, then it’s common sense that stays confined to the “parenting area” of our brains. Because if we really did understand why an extreme change like having kids works while minor changes routinely fail—if we really did understand that change rarely happens unless it’s motivated by feeling, or that the environment can act as a powerful brake or accelerant on our behavior—then, let’s face it, the Food Pyramid would not exist, managers would never kick off change initiatives with PowerPoint presentations, and global warming activists would never talk about the number of carbon parts per million in the atmosphere. If it’s common sense, it hasn’t quite made the leap to action.

When change happens, it tends to follow a pattern. We’ve got to stop ignoring that pattern and start embracing it.

4.

When Mike Romano went to Vietnam, surrounded by drugs, he started doing opium, and when he came home, surrounded by friends and family, he stopped. When the employees at Rackspace had a call-queuing system, they didn’t answer customers’ calls, and when the system was thrown out, they started answering. Change follows a pattern.

When the two of us started jury-rigging our computers to fight e-mail distractions, we were fighting the same battle as the people who purchased a Clocky, determined to keep themselves from oversleeping. Change follows a pattern.

When some hotel maids were given an identity of themselves as serious exercisers, they turned up their activity level a notch. When the “inventors” at Brasilata faced an electricity shortage, they came up with so many energy-saving ideas that the firm ended up with a surplus. Change follows a pattern.

When Jerry Sternin went to Vietnam, the government gave him six months to make a dent in malnutrition. He didn’t speak a word of Vietnamese, but he knew how to look for the bright spots, and soon mothers had learned cooking techniques that foiled malnutrition. When the conservationists at Rare saw how St. Lucians had rallied behind their parrot, they realized they had a bright spot on their hands, and since then, they’ve spread “Pride campaigns” to over fifty countries. Change follows a pattern.

What’s not part of the pattern is the type of person who’s doing the changing. We mentioned a few CEOs in this book, but we mentioned vastly more people who had less impressive titles and who didn’t have much money in their budgets: professors and nurses and middle managers and government bureaucrats and principals and parents. Their quests ranged from eccentric to epic. We saw a professor who shrank moviegoers’ popcorn containers, and two people who reined in Attila the Accountant, and a woman who reformed child abusers, and a man with a staff of 75 who saved 100,000 lives.

Their situations were different, and the scale of their changes was different, but the pattern was the same. They directed the Rider, they motivated the Elephant, and they shaped the Path. And now it’s your pattern.

What will you switch?