influencer

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

1. Leadership is Influence

We call this ability to create changes in human behavior influence and the people who do it influencers.

what qualifies people to be called “leaders” is their capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results. They think intentionally about their ability to help others act in unprecedentedly effective ways. They think about influencing behavior, talk about it, and practice it, and all of them have created remarkable changes in domains where failure has been the norm.

the key to consistent high-quality performance is getting them to practice two vital behaviors: (1) admit when they have problems, and (2) immediately speak up when they won’t meet a deadline. People will give a kidney before doing either of these things, but there is way.

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The lion’s share of the problems that really bother us don’t call for additional technology, theory, philosophy, or data (we’re up to our necks in that); instead, the problems call for the ability to change what people do. And when it comes to this particular skill, demand far exceeds supply.

2. The Three Keys to Influence

1. Focus and measure. Influencers are crystal clear about the result they are trying to achieve and are zealous about measuring it.

- Dr. Hopkins and the Guinea worm.

- Unsuccessful agents of change make one of three early mistakes that undermine their influence

1. Fuzzy, uncompelling goals: They begin with only a vague sense of what they’ll achieve (“Empower our employees,” “Help inner city kids,” or “Build the team”).

- Don Berwick (creator of the triple aim) one of the most influential people in healthcare. "its unacceptable that the 6th leading cause of death in the US is healthcare." Goal: 100k Lives Campaign.

2. Infrequent or no measures: Even when they have a somewhat clear result in mind (“Develop a culture of candid communication”), unsuccessful individuals rarely develop credible measures against which to match their intentions.

3. Bad measures: And finally, even when they do take measures, folks who fail often drive the wrong behavior by measuring the wrong variable.

- Military sexual assault - measuring perceptions of soldier safety or safety in reporting assault over number of assaults reported.

- Measure your measures by the behavior they influence. And finally, measure the right thing, and measure it frequently

2. Find vital behaviors. Influencers focus on high-leverage behaviors that drive results. More specifically, they focus on the two or three vital actions that produce the greatest amount of change.

- Reducing YMCA drownings by having lifeguards watch their section every 10 seconds and offering assistance to those possibly in need within 10 seconds.

- ABCD - always be collecting dots.

3. Engage all six sources of influence. Finally, influencers break from the pack by overdetermining change. Where most of us apply a favorite influence tool or two to our important challenges, influencers identify all of the varied forces that are shaping the behavior they want to change and then get them working for rather than against them. And now for the really good news. According to our research, by getting six different sources of influence to work in their favor, influencers increase their odds of success tenfold.

1. Personal motivation - do they enjoy this?

2. Personal ability - can they do it?

3. Social motivation - do others encourage them to enact the wrong behavior?

4. Social ability - do others enable them?

5. Structural motivation - do rewards and sanctions encourage them?

6. Structural ability - does their environment enable them?

Chapter 3 - Finding Vital Behaviors

97% of Thailand's AIDs epidemic rested with hetero men having unprotected sex with sex workers

Delancey convict employee recidivism - First, she requires each person to take responsibility for someone else’s success. Second, she demands that everyone confront everyone else about every single violation or concern.

Pareto Principle - 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

Markman found that overcoming just four hurtful behaviors reduces the chances of divorce or unhappiness by over one-third. If a couple’s disagreements include significant amounts of four behaviors (blaming, escalation, invalidation, or withdrawal), then their future is bleak. If, on the other hand, they learn to take time out and communicate respectfully during these few minutes, then their entire future will be far brighter.

Hospital nurses having daily morning meaningful conversations with patients and writing their goal of the day on the wall.

Avoid spending time and effort on wrong behaviors with 3 vital behavior search strategies:

1. Notice the obvious

2. Look for crucial moments - find time when behavior puts success at risk.

3. Learn from the positive deviants - distinguish behaviors that set apart positive deviants - those who live in the same world but somehow produce much better results. Someone who by all rights ought to have a problem but doesn’t. Find those who found a way to succeed despite the change in conditions. Ask the deviants to watch the standards and vice versa (keyboard shortcuts in physician transcription)

1. ID deviants

2. Vice versa vicariousness (watching)

3. Get everyone on board.

4. Spot culture busters - find  behaviors that reverse stubborn cultural norms and taboos.

Hand-washing norms of a health system to reduce hospital-acquired infections. Starting and reinforcing norms (asking people to wash their hands if they haven't). Norm is reinforced by asking someone, and then having that someone thank the normer so that they don't feel vulnerable and are more likely to call out the next time.

"Influence hinges on helping someone step up to a crucial conversation."

Part 2 - Engage 6 Sources

Get people to do things by overestimating the resistance to change.

At the personal level, influencers work on connecting vital behaviors to intrinsic motives as well as building personal ability to actually do each behavior through deliberate practice.

At the group level, savvy folks draw on the enormous power of social influence to both motivate and enable the new behaviors.

At the structural level, they take advantage of methods that most people rarely use. They attach appropriate incentives or sanctions to motivate people to pick up the vital behaviors.

And finally, they go to pains to ensure that things—systems, processes, reporting structures, visual cues, work layouts, tools, supplies, machinery, and so forth—support the vital behaviors

The Guinea worm’s defeat will not have come through medical science but rather through social science

Chapter 4 - Help Them Love What They Hate

Personal motivation - is the vital behavior intrinsically pleasurable or painful?

Dr. Scott Peck: its natural to never brush teeth. Just because a desire/behavior is natural doesn't mean it's unchangeable.

Tactics to turn love into hate.

1. Allow for choice.

Your “yes” means nothing if you can’t say “no.” There can be no commitment if there is no choice.

People would rather lose their lives than surrender their freedom

2. Create direct experiences.

Don Berwick making executives personally investigate medical errors in their respective hospitals resulting in patient death.

People overvalue what they'll lose and undervalue what they'll gain

3. Tell meaningful stories.

Dr. Albert Bandura - one the phobics had a personal and positive interaction with the snake, they never regressed and it improved their lives forever. He took a request for an impossible direct experience and first made it into a possible indirect experience.

In 1993, Martha Swai changed the behavior of an entire nation by simply telling a story.

Rogers and Singhal proved with rare scientific certainty that exposing experimental subjects to believable models through powerful stories affected not only their thoughts and emotions but also their behavior

She told a story that helped awaken Biff to the moral content of his actions

4. Make it a game.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creator of the "flow" state. Flow is enacted thru game-playing. Here are the elements of an enjoyable game.

Keeping Score

Competition

Constant Improvement

Control

Fundamental attribution error. They forgot to talk about the other end of the FAE spectrum, where when we recognize the same behaviors in ourselves we attribute them to the situation rather than a moral cleft or personality defect.

- Influencers view it as a moral slumber rather than a moral defect.

- How do you get people woke. Infuse a crucial moment with moral significance.

Interventions are misinterpreted here.

An inaccurate assumption of therapy is that confrontation motivates change.

Dr. William Miller - Father of Motivational Interviewing.

Chapter 5 - Help people do what they can't

Dweck - adopt a growth mindset

Ericcson - delayed people to better

Bandura - people can change

With some tasks, we stop short of our highest level of proficiency on purpose. The calculus we perform in our heads suggests that the added effort it’ll take to find and learn something new will probably yield a diminishing marginal return, so we stop learning.

Deliberate practice requires complete attention. Deliberate practice doesn’t allow for daydreaming, functioning on autopilot, or only partially putting one’s mind into the routine. It requires steely-eyed concentration as students watch exactly what they’re doing, what is working, what isn’t, and why.

asking subjects to employ “willpower” by directing their attention to tasks that were difficult, aversive, or boring didn’t work. Despite the fact most people are convinced that individuals who show poor self-control merely need to exert a stronger will—demanding that subjects dig down, suck it up, or show strength of character—research found the opposite. Telling people to hunker down didn’t improve performance.

Another effective way to manage emotions is to argue with your feelings. Psychologists call this particular strategy cognitive reappraisal. When emotions come unbidden through the go system, they can be dragged into the light of the know system by activating skills only the know system has. To do this, call out to your frontal lobe by asking it to solve a complex problem. That’s right. If you ask your brain to work on a question that requires more brain power than the amygdala can muster, this mental probe can help kick in the know system and restore normal thought.

To start the reappraisal process, distance yourself from your need by labeling it. (I have a craving for a cream cheese-covered bagel. Bad.) Debate with yourself about it by introducing competing thoughts or goals. (What I really want is to be proud of myself after lunch when I write down what I ate.) Distract yourself (conjure up a potent image of the feeling you have when your belt feels loose). Or delay. That’s right—the go system can often be outwaited.

If you delay your urge, within a fairly short period of time the brain returns control to the know system, and different choices become easier.

Once you change where you think, you change how you think, which in turn changes what you think.

Chapter 6 - Provide Encouragement

That’s the finding that got Milgram in trouble. He hadn’t discovered a tiny handful of Connecticut zealots and sociopaths who would gladly give their souls over to the totalitarian cause. He had found the vulnerable target within all of us. He had looked for the freak and found himself—and you and me. And nobody liked it.

Milgram concluded that one variable more than any other affected how people behaved: the presence of one more person

Make sacrifices, and there are four kinds, time, money,

the merit of an idea did not predict its adoption rate. What predicted whether an innovation was widely accepted or not was whether a specific group of people embraced it.

The key to getting the majority of any population to adopt a vital behavior is to find out who these innovators are and avoid them like the plague.

Instead, you need early adopters, or opinion leaders. The rest of the population—over 85 percent—will not adopt the new practices until opinion leaders do.

Don Berwick, when the guilds talk, physicians listen.

“The message,” Hopkins reports, “is no more important than the messenger.”