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Help Them Love What They Hate

PERSONAL MOTIVATION

Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

—Steven Wright

We’ll start our exploration of the six sources of influence by examining tactics that address the first source, personal motivation. This important source of influence answers the question: Is the vital behavior intrinsically pleasurable or painful?

We’ll start here because the first problem influencers often face is that good behaviors feel bad while bad behaviors feel good. For example, to eradicate the dreaded Guinea worm disease we mentioned earlier, change agents have to get 3 million people who are suffering the terrible agony associated with an emerging worm to avoid doing the one thing that would bring them immediate relief—soaking their infected limbs in the water. How could you possibly hope to convince others to do something so painful and difficult?

But it’s not just Guinea worm disease eradication that demands that people find a way to do what they don’t like doing. Think about it. The vast majority of the intractable influence problems we face or the stretch goals that we routinely miss are made more daunting because bad things are fun and good things aren’t. The AIDS virus, for example, has been perniciously successful because the behaviors associated with its transmission bring pleasure. In a similar vein, tens of thousands of people die in hospitals each year because healthcare workers don’t always wash their hands properly. Why? In part because it’s tedious and boring. But also it can even be painful to do it for the eighty-seventh time in a day. Bathing chapped hands with alcohol isn’t all that fun. And when it comes to influencer Danny Meyer, the New York restaurateur, he has to find a way to help thousands of employees take pleasure in going to extraordinary lengths to serve clients who are sometimes unruly or even petulant.

Is such a thing even possible? Can you help others want to do something that they currently don’t want to do? Is it possible to help others learn to love what they presently hate? Let’s take a look.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON AT DELANCEY STREET

It’s 3:17 Tuesday afternoon. Terri, a convicted felon, is carrying a CD loaded with financial data from the accounting office to the Delancey Street Restaurant. The manager asked her to bring it over ASAP, so she logged into her computer, burned the data onto the disk, and headed for the restaurant.

What surprises Terri is how quickly her feet are moving. She can’t recall the last time they moved this fast. From the time she was nine, she had perfected a purposefully casual gait. She took great pride in her “I’m okay/you suck” approach to life. No matter that this attitude had landed her in jail for most of her adolescent years. No matter that it had earned her a manslaughter conviction after someone looked at her sideways in a bar. Nobody was going to tell her what to do. Nobody.

So why is Terri walking so fast now? It’s been 19 months since she was offered a place at Delancey Street rather than serving her last five years in prison. Every semester, Terri has attended Delancey’s graduation ceremony. It’s a grand gathering where all 500 residents of the San Francisco campus crowd into the main hall to celebrate each other’s progress. The first two times Terri was recognized for her accomplishments, she stared at the floor and ignored whatever they were saying about her. “Who cares that I now know how to set a stupid table? This is all a pointless game, and I’m not playing it!” When the applause for Terri had died down, she walked back to her chair, unaffected.

But last week they talked about her diploma and her promotion to crew boss. She looked over at Dr. Silbert, who was waving her arms and barking out Terri’s amazing accomplishment. Terri made the mistake of listening to what Silbert said—just for a second. Then came the wave of applause. Terri looked around the room and caught the eyes of a few of her crew members. Then she looked quickly back down at the floor. Her legs felt weak when she walked back to her chair. “I’m not sure what that is,” she mumbled to herself. “I’m probably just hungry.” She ate a candy bar.

Now as Terri rushes to the restaurant, she looks down again, only this time at her legs. They’re moving so fast it’s as if they have a mind of their own. And then she lifts her hand to her cheek and feels something wet. “I don’t do this. What the hell is this?” Terri is crying.

MAKE PAIN PLEASURABLE

So, what has happened to Terri at this tender moment of an ongoing transformation? As Terri explained, she realized in that instant that she was feeling emotions she had never felt before. She was taking pleasure in accomplishing something. She was finding joy in her work. Better still, she has learned to care about something. In Terri’s own words, “After thinking about it all afternoon, I finally realized, I was crying because I cared. I cared that I got the disk to Lionel. I cared.”

If that’s true, if Terri has found a way to take pleasure from something that she had previously disliked, what might your average person learn from this? For example, what mysterious trick might you pull in order to help your son enjoy doing his chores? Could this same magic potion help a team enjoy the work involved in reducing errors to below 3.4 per million? And can you use Terri’s mystical elixir to make eating mini carrots as enjoyable as wolfing down a slice of chocolate cream pie?

Actually, people do learn ways to take pleasure from almost any activity, even if the activity isn’t inherently satisfying. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck makes this point rather bluntly: “Just because a desire or behavior is natural, does not mean it is … unchangeable.… It is also natural… to never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature—perhaps the one that makes us more human—is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.”

We’re extending this argument even further. Humans don’t merely find ways to act unnaturally. They find ways to enjoy activities that aren’t inherently enjoyable. Depending on your point of view, hand washing in a hospital can feel like either a tedious distraction or a sacred duty. Finishing tasks on time can feel like either a bureaucratic bore or a demonstration of integrity. Changing a baby’s diaper can feel like either a gruesome chore or a precious moment. The question is, how can you help vital behaviors feel like the latter rather than the former?

Influencers use four tactics to help people love what they hate:

1. Allow for choice.

2. Create direct experiences.

3. Tell meaningful stories.

4. Make it a game.

Influence This

A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.

—Benjamin Franklin

As part of a worldwide search to discover how influencers deal with a deficit of personal motivation, we found ourselves at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. While it’s true we were hankering for a burger, our primary errand was to see how the leader of one of Danny Meyer’s more casual eating establishments is able to maintain extreme levels of customer service—in a burger place, no less.

Imagine that you are the manager of this busy burger joint. You’ve got an employee named Biff who just isn’t into the whole customer-serving thing. You’ve been reminding him, coaching him, and even pleading with him to greet customers, thoroughly clean tables, and in other ways improve the guest experience. But today you look over the patio eating area where you see five filthy tables, and then your eyes land on Biff, who is sitting at a table, stuffing his face with French fries, and sending a text message. What will you do? Think about it. If you had to craft one sentence to influence Biff, what would it be?

Read Your Lips. Now, examine your sentence. What method of influence did you employ? If you’re like most of us, your sentence was some form of nag, guilt, or threat. Generally when we face a problem like Biff, we make an automatic assumption that he just doesn’t care. In other words, we assume the problem is that he’s simply not motivated because he takes no pleasure from doing the work. Then, without even realizing it, we make a second mental leap. We assume that the reason he’s not motivated is because of some moral defect.

That may sound harsh, but think about it for a moment. When a doctor fails to wash his hands, we typically assume, “He’s just concerned about his own convenience.” Similarly, when Biff fails to exert himself for customers, we conclude, “He’s just lazy.” We attribute the problem not just to a simple oversight but to nothing less than a character flaw. And finally, when we do make this rather harsh diagnosis, we then respond with the only tool that might affect such a recalcitrant miscreant: coercion.

This proclivity to attribute others’ worst behavior to some underlying character flaw is so common that psychologists have given it a special name. It’s referred to as the fundamental attribution error. This is the belief that people do what they do merely because they enjoy it: “Why did that bozo just cut me off in traffic? Because he wanted to get where he wanted to go and didn’t care about me! In fact, he probably enjoyed it.” Whenever others cause us inconvenience or pain, we have a natural tendency to suspect they have selfish motives coupled with malicious intentions.

That’s where influencers depart from the pack. Influencers are far more reluctant to conclude that others enact unhealthy behaviors simply because of a moral defect. Rather, they suspect the misbehavior might be caused by something less severe. In fact, they think the misbehavior may actually be curable. In their view, others don’t suffer from a moral defect but rather, from moral slumber. The problem is not that these people are incapable of caring about others. It’s that they aren’t thinking about others—at that particular moment.

In other words, my neighbor who just survived a heart attack isn’t eating the “Death by Chocolate” dessert (aptly named) because he’s impulsive and doesn’t care about surviving to raise his children. He’s doing it because in this moment he isn’t thinking about the relationship between his current consumption and his future relationship with his children. Similarly, the doctor who fails to wash her hands between patients may not be uncaring about patients. It could be that in this moment she’s not thinking about germs and infections. She’s thinking about examining a condition or perhaps even comforting a family member.

So if the problem with Biff is not moral defect, but moral slumber, what can you do to wake him up? How can you infuse a crucial moment—one in which he can act in a way to better serve customers (but in which it feels like he is just cleaning up a mess)—with moral significance?

TACTIC 1. ALLOW FOR CHOICE

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

—Peter Block

We’ve placed allow for choice at the top of our list of strategies because it is the gateway to all other methods of influencing personal motivation. Compulsion first replaces then erases motivation. You can never hope to engage people’s commitment if they don’t have permission to say no.

Think about how you yourself respond when people try to remove your agency. Your natural reaction is to resist. One of the deepest human drives stems from the desire to retain our will. The history of civilization frequently demonstrates that we would rather lose our lives than surrender our freedom. It almost doesn’t matter how small the encroachment on our agency; we’ve been known to go to war over it.

Now, in principle this concept is easy to understand, but in practice it flies in the face of our most powerful impulses. When others appear to be willfully misbehaving, our native reaction is to nag, guilt, or threaten them.

“Biff! Get back to work!”

This knee-jerk response to coerce others into embracing our version of right living rarely works. In fact, the more we push others to comply, the less it works. This is particularly true with individuals who are addicted to their wrong behavior. They have already suffered through the impassioned speeches of their loved ones, listened to the clever podcasts from the experts, and squirmed in their pew as their minister has harangued them for their self-and other-defeating actions. And yet they continue in their weak and evil ways.

Do you really think your piled-on plea is going to get them to turn the corner? Most people do—even professionals. Turn on the TV and watch as degreed TV psychologists work with troubled addicts of all types. They start with gentle instruction, move to pleading, and end up with harsh “tell it like it is” lectures—while the audience hisses and boos. Switch to another channel and you’ll find a competing television psychologist who uses the ultimate pile-on tactic. Since pleading doesn’t appear to be working with their competitors, why not try an “intervention”? You know, bring in a whole host of friends and relatives who will take turns haranguing, shaming, and threatening? That’ll work.

Lest we become convinced of our own innocence in this matter, consider our own history of verbal persuasion. Perhaps you have a grown child who comes to family events late—every single time. And when she walks in the door late, you say: “It’s about time you got here!“—every single time. Or whenever your spouse bites into a fatty dessert, you give him the evil eye. Maybe when your neighbor rides by on her bike without wearing a helmet, you shout “Can you afford to crush your brain? I can’t!” And then you smile as if making a joke. None of these tactics work for us, and yet we repeat them. Some call this insanity—applying the same tactic and expecting a new result—but a kinder explanation would be that we’re desperate. We want to convince others to change, but we have only one set of strategies—nag, guilt, and threaten. And since they’re all we have, we use them over and over.

William Points the Way

I am not a teacher but an awakener.

—Robert Frost

Fortunately, not everyone follows his or her natural proclivity to coerce others into changing. For instance, Dr. William Miller is an influence expert who has found a way to help addicts want to change without so much as a whisper of lecture. He knows how to transform from a lecturer who’s trying to instill moral uprightness in others into an alarm sounder who helps awaken others from their moral slumber.

Dr. Miller stumbled onto this extraordinary technique by asking a simple research question: “What’s better for addicts—more therapy or less?” Mental health professionals held their collective breath as he tallied his data, then went into paroxysms of denial when he announced that the length of time therapy lasted was irrelevant. Next he asked, “Is there one therapeutic technique that works better than others?” He found that the method didn’t matter much either.

After offending almost everyone in his field by undermining the apparently irrelevant distinctions upon which people build careers, Miller stumbled onto an interesting finding. He found a distinction that did matter. It had to do less with what the counselor did than with what the counselor didn’t do.

A reigning but inaccurate assumption in counseling—as evidenced by the TV gurus we referred to earlier—is that confrontation motivates change. Miller learned that forcing people to face their demons—and their friends, colleagues, and therapists who hated those demons—didn’t work. In fact, in one study, he found that confrontation actually increased alcoholic bingeing. This led Miller in a different direction. He began to explore the opposite. What if the counselor merely helped patients figure out what they wanted rather than what their fed-up friends wanted?

With the new question, Miller discovered that the best way to help individuals align their behavior with their deepest motives was to stop trying to control their thoughts and behaviors. You must replace judgment with empathy, and lectures with questions. If you do so, you gain influence. The instant you stop trying to impose your agenda on others, you eliminate the fight for control. You end unnecessary battles over whose view of the world is correct.

This discovery led Miller to develop an influence method called motivational interviewing. Through a skillful use of open and nondirective questions, the counselor helps others reach their own conclusions about the values that are most important to them and the changes that might be required for them to live according to their values. When you ask thought-provoking questions and then listen while others talk, they discover on their own what they must do. Then, propelled by their own aspirations and beliefs, they make the necessary changes.

Dozens of studies have shown Miller’s approach to be effective in helping people find the will to step up to the uncomfortable vital behaviors involved in recovering from alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, HIV risk behaviors, and diet failures—and to stick to their healthy commitments. The additional good news is that the power of motivational interviewing isn’t limited to therapeutic settings. Smart leaders accomplish the same results with everything from safety to cost cutting to productivity—when they replace dictates with dialogue.

For example, Ralph Heath, now president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, was tasked by the company to move the fifth-generation F-22 fighter jet from drawing board to production floor in 18 months. To do so, he had to engage 4,500 engineers and technicians and change their view of what it took to invent things. Heath had to convince them that results mattered more than ideas (a tough sell with engineers) and that engineering needed to bow to production (an even tougher sell).

So Heath didn’t sell; he listened. He spent weeks interviewing employees at all levels. He tried to understand their needs, frustrations, and aspirations. When he finally began sharing directives, he framed them in ways that honored the needs, concerns, and goals of those he had interviewed. His influence didn’t result from merely confronting problems but from listening to people and then framing the change process in their terms. The now legendary turnaround of the F-22 began when Heath helped people discover what they really wanted and how it related to corporate objectives—rather than simply issuing orders.

What William Miller teaches us is that a change of heart can’t be imposed; it can only be chosen. People are capable of making enormous sacrifices when they have the agency to act on their own. For instance, healthcare professionals have known for decades that if you give patients control of their own IV-administered painkillers, they’ll use less than when the painkillers are provided by a nurse. Give people a choice, and they’ll step up to the plate. On the other hand, they’ll resist compulsion on pain of death. Try to keep drugs from them, and they’ll demand more.

Ginger Graham, the CEO of the medical devices company Guidant, learned this in a crisis. After the company introduced a new cardiovascular stent, sales went through the roof. Graham described this scenario in her April 2002 article for the Harvard Business Review titled, “If You Want Honesty, Break Some Rules.” Almost overnight, good news turned into bad news as demand for the stent far outstretched supply. And all this hit as the holidays were approaching.

Executives figured that just meeting demand until new sources of production could come online would require three-shift workdays and seven-day workweeks. Graham could have simply mandated the work and required people to fill their obligations, but she knew that wouldn’t work. Not only was it unfair to the employees to force this family-unfriendly schedule on them when they deserved time off, but it would also provoke resentment and just might hurt productivity.

So instead, Graham asked for help. At an all-company meeting, she praised the work that had brought about the wonderful success. She shared the sales data. She read success stories from doctors who were using the stent to avoid bypass surgery and save patients’ lives. She then extrapolated the sales data and showed how many unmet needs would result if supply couldn’t be stepped up substantially. And then she made a request: “We have the chance to do something [for patients and for ourselves] that no company has ever done in the history of our industry. We have an obligation to rise to the challenge. And if you’ll rise to the challenge, we’ll do all we can to make your lives easier during the tough times.”

Within half an hour, employees had made a list of all the things management could do to help them through the holidays—including shop for their presents, wrap them, supply late-night taxis, bring in pizza, and so on. And with that, employees made a pact with management. Production hit new records, and the product was available on time for all patients who needed it. Total sales almost tripled in one quarter. Employees earned nice bonuses.

More importantly, the employees who went through this experience felt as if they were part of something special. Something important. A moral quest. And all because their leader knew better than to mandate a plan and, instead, allowed others to choose for themselves. When you swap coercive methods with personal choices, you open up the possibility of influencing even the most addictive and highly entrenched behaviors by gaining access to one of the most powerful human motivations: the power of the committed heart.

People can actually love engaging in behaviors that otherwise might seem obnoxious. But only if they’re allowed the psychological freedom to choose them.

TACTIC 2. CREATE DIRECT EXPERIENCES

That learning which thou gettest by thy own observation and experience, is far beyond that which thou gettest by precept; as the knowledge of a traveler exceeds that which is got by reading.

—Thomas à Kempis

We’ve just suggested that the first tactic for helping people find greater personal motivation is to avoid demotivating them by inviting choice rather than giving orders. With this in mind, let’s return to our dirty doctor and reluctant employee. Obviously allowing them to make choices resulted in the one passing germs from patient to patient and the other cooling his heels and feeding his face rather than caring for customers. What next?

As we suggested earlier, people often make poor choices because they prefer the short-term benefits of their bad behavior over the long-term benefits of doing the right thing—chocolate today (love it for sure) versus the unknown likelihood of a stroke 40 years from now. Hmm. Pass the cake.

The most powerful way to help people recognize, feel, and believe in the long-term implications of their choices is to get out of their way and let them experience them firsthand. As Kempis suggests, travel trumps reading. And to no one’s surprise, influencers help people go out into the cold, hard world and experience the consequences of their choices.

For example, healthcare safety expert Dr. Don Berwick once taught at a Harvard seminar for CEOs of some of the largest hospital systems in the world. The list of attendees was a literal Who’s Who of patient safety. These leaders were sipping lattes, jotting notes, and in other ways having a delightful seminar experience as they examined ways to improve the overall healthcare experience—including eliminating costly hospital errors. And although it was a stimulating intellectual experience, Berwick had seen this happen so many times before that he knew the stimulating-lecture format would influence no one. All would return home, say they had a great time, e-mail their notes to their management team, and generate no real change.

“Then I had an idea,” Dr. Berwick told us. “On the spur of the moment. I said, ‘Look, before you come to the session next month, find an injured patient, someone who was harmed while in your hospital. And you investigate the injury. Do not delegate it. You find out what happened and come back and report it.’”

Berwick was unsure what would happen. Would the CEOs complete the assignment? Would they return with diagrams or data dumps? Or would it awaken passion?

Berwick’s answer was emphatic: “Unbelievable!” he said. “I didn’t know this would happen, but these people came back—I’m talking three-piece suit, high-end executives—and one by one they choked up and cried as they told their stories. They described the illusions they had about their systems and how fallible they now realized they were.” As a result of this singular, poignant, firsthand experience, many of these leaders not only became champions for patient safety but they also remained champions for the rest of their careers.

What happened here? Like all of our influencers, Berwick operated on the belief that the problem with these leaders was not some moral deficiency. These were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters—all of whom were capable of caring about human pain and suffering. However, the healthcare world around them shielded them from the human pain and suffering caused by the current behavior of their employees. Pain, suffering, and depravation had been turned into numbers, statistics, and charts—which sometimes inform but never inspire. So what did Berwick do?

Dr. Berwick trusted that if he set senior leaders loose inside an experience that would allow them to connect with the human consequences of their hospital’s current behavior, they would truly care. Transform numbers into names, statistics, faces, and charts into human conditions, and everything would change. What seemed like an interesting abstraction would become a moral imperative. And it did.

With this in mind, it should surprise no one to learn that the gold standard of tactics for engaging personal motivation is direct experience. Let people feel, see, and touch things for themselves. Everywhere we’ve traveled we’ve seen influencers develop clever ways of helping connect people experientially with the consequences of their choices. And when they do, they change. They begin to feel differently about new and better behaviors.

Invite People to Try It

Getting people to create their own direct experience is a powerful way to help them connect to genuine human consequences and ultimately find moral significance in vital behaviors. Field trips can do that. When you go out into the world on a field trip, so to speak, you can see firsthand what’s happening. Rather than simply hearing impassioned speeches or clever words (that can be easily discounted), you see for yourself what’s actually happening. You can feel the pain associated with the consequences you observe—all powerful tools in creating personal motivation.

But there’s more.

Personal experience can be an equally important way to remove fears that keep people from doing the right thing. As you encourage others to create their own direct experiences—taking field trips, interviewing similarly addicted people, and so forth—it can be tough to get individuals to take that first step. This is true for a couple of reasons. First, people tend to resist new behaviors because they’re crystal clear about what they’ll lose by changing but uncertain about what they’ll gain. Like it or not, when it comes to change, humans tend to overvalue what they’re losing while undervaluing what they gain. So we don’t eagerly embrace the verbally recommended strategy.

This cognitive limitation is worsened by the fact that we humans are notoriously bad at predicting how we’ll feel in new circumstances—for example, predicting what will make us happier.

In fact, psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made a career out of demonstrating that human beings are downright awful at predicting their own likes and dislikes. For example, most research subjects strongly believe that another $30,000 a year in income would make them much happier. They feel equally strongly that adding a 30-minute walk to their daily routine would be of trivial import. Yet Dr. Gilbert’s research suggests that the added income is far less likely to produce an increase in happiness than is the addition of a regular walk.

Dr. Mimi Silbert confronts this inability to predict happiness every single day. It’s her job to ask new residents at Delancey Street to do things that, to them, sound painful, boring, or both. For example, lifetime criminals have no idea what a law-abiding life might be like. When they do try to imagine it, they make some very predictable errors. They assume that it will be very much like their present life—minus the fun. You know, cleaning toilets while giving up the excitement of crime or the stimulation of drugs. They’re unable to imagine the pleasure associated with getting a raise, owning a home, or gaining any of a thousand other perks of a law-abiding life they’ve never experienced.

Silbert could spend a lot of time lecturing about the Delancey vision. “Trust me,” she could say, “you’re gonna love it. By the time you’re out of here, you’ll have a high school diploma. You’ll be literate. You’ll have gone to concerts and museums. You’ll have mastered three different trades and tried a dozen others. You’ll have a whole new set of friends. Just sign here.”

Right.

These arguments are easy to make but hard to sell because they involve verbal persuasion, and the people you’re talking to are very unlikely to understand the language you’re using. You’re describing activities and outcomes for which they have no frame of reference, and you’re then asking them to make immediate sacrifices (no gang, no drugs, no freedom) in order to achieve them.

It won’t work. It can’t work.

Silbert realizes that it’ll take awhile before new residents personally experience the benefits of a new life. She explains, “After they get their high school equivalent, we offer two-year college degrees through San Francisco State University. Some even get a BA. But early on, residents hate the discipline that it takes to study. We also go with them to museums, operas, and plays. Oh, believe me, they whine like crazy. They don’t want to go. But I just keep saying, ‘You can hate opera, but not until after you’ve been to an opera.’ Coming in, our residents hate everything. But of course they’ve never done anything!”

So Dr. Silbert simply plods forward, demanding that residents try studying for a class, attending the opera, mentoring another student, and so forth. Experience has taught her that if residents try new behaviors, they end up liking many, if not most, of them. Okay, perhaps few become opera fans. Nevertheless, over 90 percent come to enjoy dozens of behaviors they never would have imagined they’d one day enjoy.

Silbert sticks with the strategy of asking residents to “just try it” until every single one has something similar to Terri’s Tuesday experience in which she suddenly realizes that she now feels wonderful about something she once didn’t understand or care about an iota. Dr. Silbert says it happens to virtually everyone at Delancey. In fact, the residents transform so many aspects of their lives that there comes a day when they become vastly different from the people who first walked in the front door at Delancey. They transform into people they’ve scarcely met before. They care. They take satisfaction in accomplishment. They’ve discovered the intrinsic satisfaction that comes with living a law-abiding life. And Silbert helps get them there by encouraging them to “just try it.”

TACTIC 3. TELL MEANINGFUL STORIES

The challenge in getting people to create direct experiences is that it’s tough to create them for all of the people you need to influence. If you have few resources and limited time, yet still have a need to solve a personal motivation problem, what’s an influencer to do? Plus, not everyone will attempt an action simply because you tell them to “just try it.” Others won’t buy in to your verbal persuasion; they won’t do what it takes to create a direct experience, and your invitations to “just try it” will fall on deaf ears. Now what? Stated in the terms we’ve developed so far, is there something you can do that lies between verbal persuasion and direct experience?

Snakes on a Campus

To answer this important question, we’ll visit the chief theorist behind many of the influence principles we’re about to discover: Dr. Albert Bandura. One of Bandura’s many contributions to the science of influence was his remarkable work in the 1970s with phobics. His insights shined light on dealing with unmotivated—even terrified—subjects.

When Albert Bandura came on the phobic scene, the common treatment consisted of years on a couch. The accepted theory at the time was that the phobias originated in some critical childhood experience and the only way out of them was protracted efforts to resurrect and resolve those memories. Bandura took a different view. Rather than dredge up the past, he wondered if a more direct route would be to create influential, firsthand experiences in the present.

Phobics were a great test of some of Bandura’s new theories of influence because they tended to resist every effort to verbally persuade them of the inaccuracy of their beliefs. He learned, as we suggested earlier, that when you try to convince others simply with words, they may not trust you, so they won’t follow your advice. Either they believe you don’t have their best interest in mind and what you’re suggesting will not serve them well, or they don’t trust your expertise. You may want what’s best for them, but your ideas are wrong and will get them into trouble. Either way, verbal persuasion has feet of clay.

To find a different influence tool, Bandura began with a search for research subjects by running an ad in the Palo Alto News asking readers who had a paralyzing fear of snakes to descend into the basement of the psychology department to get cured. He was hoping that at least a dozen subjects would respond. Despite the creepy tone of the ad, hundreds of people made their way to the research site. All had been seriously debilitated by their unreasonable fear of things that slither. Most had horrible nightmares; many were veritable shut-ins; and since their irrational fear extended to even harmless garter snakes, the possible subjects suffered endless ridicule and indignity. It’s little wonder that they showed up for therapy—they were desperate.

Like any good influencer, Bandura began by defining the result he wanted to achieve and how he would measure it. Success, he decided, would be achieved when subjects could sit with a six-foot red-tailed boa constrictor draped across their lap. Could a goal be clearer?

When they began, none of the subjects would so much as enter the room containing a snake in a covered terrarium. In fact, Bandura’s very description of the objective caused some to pass out.

Given these challenging circumstances, Bandura resisted any effort to rush or coerce the subjects. At every step of the way he offered options and allowed them to choose. If people wanted to opt out, they could. If they wanted a simpler task, he would devise one. They were in control at all times.

Bandura’s strategy began with the “in between” influence technique everyone had been searching for. He provided a secondhand experience by asking subjects to watch a research assistant handle a snake. He invited subjects to watch from the doorway of the room—or if that was still too difficult, to watch through glass—as the assistant walked into the room containing the snake, took a look at it, opened the terrarium, petted the snake, and finally removed the boa and placed it on his or her lap.

After the subjects watched someone else handle the snake, Dr. Bandura invited them to have a direct experience. First they would simply walk into the room. But this wasn’t enough to put everyone at ease. Some of the subjects asked for protective gear—hockey goalie gloves, a baseball catcher chest protector and mask, and so on. Now, dressed like samurai warriors, subjects entered the room and stood next to the enclosed tank. Gradually, after several tries they worked up to removing the terrarium cover and then quickly retreated from the room. No harm done. After a bit more experience, they finally touched the snake. Later still they touched the snake without gloves and so forth. Eventually subjects sat in the room by themselves with the six-foot boa constrictor draped across their lap.

And now for the real miracle: the entire process took only three hours! People who had been debilitated most of their lives by a paralyzing fear were completely cured in a single morning. And the results lasted a lifetime. Once the phobics had a personal and positive interaction with the snake, they never regressed, and it improved their lives forever.

In Dr. Bandura’s own words, “It was surprising to see how liberating it was for the subjects to be freed from the phobia. Their whole life seemed to open up before them now that they didn’t have to worry about snakes. In addition, they gained confidence about their ability to make personal changes. Since they had been able to conquer their fear of snakes, perhaps now they could overcome other problems.”

Take note of the influence technique we’ve just seen demonstrated. Subjects couldn’t be talked into the room with the snake in order to create direct experience (without kicking and screaming), but they did choose to watch someone else interact with the snake. For the typical phobic, it was as if it were happening to them personally. The person was right in front of them, they couldn’t deny what was happening, and the experience felt real and vibrant (many subjects actually hyperventilated). In short, Bandura had found the in-between tactic. He learned to create a vicarious experience, and through this method he helped subjects to the point where they could create direct experience and eventually become cured.

How to Tell Influential Stories

Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best—and change—from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.… Those in leadership positions who do not grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.

—John Kotter

Although it’s true that Dr. Bandura had demonstrated the power of vicarious experience as a way of helping others see the world as it is, it still leaves us with the question of how your everyday person could use a similar technique—without the aid of an entire research team and university.

Dr. Don Berwick, the influencer we referred to earlier who aimed at saving a hundred thousand lives, shows the way. He walks to a podium to address an audience of healthcare leaders. They’ve been listening to speakers all morning and look a bit lethargic. Berwick isn’t about speeches. He’s about influence. He wants people to leave this room behaving differently. He wants them to take steps to ensure they and their colleagues save lives from the half dozen medical mistakes that most often kill or injure patients. In the allotted time, he can’t have his audience of 800 investigate an injury. So what does he do? He tells them about Josie King.

Josie King was a little girl who loved to dance. She was 18 months old, had brown eyes and light brown hair, and she had just learned to say, “I love you.” In January 2001 Josie stepped into a hot bath and burned herself badly. Her parents rushed her to Johns Hopkins Hospital where she was admitted into the pediatric intensive care unit. Much to her parents’ relief, Josie recovered quickly. She was transferred to the intermediate care floor and was expected to be released within days.

But Josie’s mom noticed that something was wrong. “Every time she saw a drink, she would scream for it, and I thought this was strange. I was told not to let her drink. While a nurse and I gave her a bath, she sucked furiously on a washcloth.” Josie’s mom told the nurse Josie was thirsty, and she asked her to call a doctor. The nurse assured her that everything was okay. She asked another nurse to check on Josie, but this nurse confirmed that everything was fine.

Josie’s mom called back twice during the night and was at her daughter’s bedside by 5:30 the next morning. By then Josie was in crisis. In her mother’s words, “Josie’s heart stopped as I was rubbing her feet. Her eyes were fixed, and I screamed for help. I stood helpless as a crowd of doctors and nurses came running into her room. I was ushered into a small room with a chaplain.” Two days before her scheduled release, Josie had died of thirst. Despite her mother’s repeated pleas for help, this sweet little girl died of misused narcotics and dehydration.

Now that medical mistakes have a face, a name, and a soul, now that the moral content of his topic is present, Dr. Berwick digs into the logic and order of the topic.

What Influencers Do

The cynic in all of us can sit in Dr. Berwick’s audience and wonder about the efficacy of a simple story. Certainly the emotions it evokes are ephemeral, right? We’ve all been in “motivational” sessions where we’ve felt a potent sense of conviction about doing something, only to have it wash off hours after the speech.

Although it clearly takes more than a story to drive change, when used in combination with other influence methods, storytelling can be a powerful tool in anyone’s influence repertoire. In fact, the most convincing field experiment in the entire history of behavioral science research makes exactly this point. In 1993, Martha Swai changed the behavior of an entire nation by simply telling a story.

Swai was the program manager for Radio Tanzania. Her goal was to change the behavior of her fellow Tanzanians in order to strengthen families, improve the lot of women, and save lives from HIV/AIDS. Fortunately for her, televisions were not widely available in Tanzania, so, as a program manager for a radio station, she had access to millions of ears every single night. How could she leverage this tool?

Swai hired the best dramatic writers she could find. Then she and her team invited David Poindexter, a world’s expert in entertainment education, to teach them how to craft a story for maximum influence. Swai understood that her task wasn’t easy because those she was trying to influence held deep beliefs about how men should relate to women and about what causes AIDS and what cures it. For one, many thought that men could be cured of AIDS by having sex with a virgin.

When the time came to launch the radio show, disaster struck. Bureaucratic problems blocked Radio Tanzania transmission during the show’s airtime to the large Dodoma region of central Tanzania. This programming barrier turned into a social science bonanza—as we’ll shortly see.

In 1993 the show Twende na Wakati (“Let’s Go with the Times”) hit the airwaves. To demonstrate the cause and effect of AIDS, writers created a flamboyant, macho, and highly controversial truck driver named Mkwaju. He abused his wife, wanted only male children, drank excessively, engaged in unprotected sex with prostitutes along his route, and bragged about his escapades. His wife, Tutu (a model for female independence), eventually left him and succeeded in her own small business.

Over the course of many months, the philandering Mkwaju (who eventually died of AIDS) became so real to the listening audience that when the actor playing him went to a local vegetable market, villagers recognized his voice and women actually threw produce at him!

To see the emotional and behavioral impact firsthand, we interviewed several listening groups just outside Tanzania’s capital city. One family group consisting of a father, mother, grandmother, aunt, and five grown children had religiously tuned in to the wild antics of Mkwaju and had been enormously affected. When we asked them exactly how the program had influenced them, the father explained that at first he had admired Mkwaju, but with time he concluded that the truck driver’s reckless behaviors were causing pain to his wife, Tutu, and their children.

After tuning in to the show for several weeks, the father had come to sympathize with all the characters, and one day when sweet Tutu was hurt by her alcoholic husband, a light went on—his own wife was also suffering from similar treatment. Although this avid listener wasn’t a truck-driving philanderer, he had abused alcohol. A part of him was Mkwaju. From that moment on he stopped abusing both alcohol and his family members. It seemed strange that this self-discovery would come through a contrived radio show, but as the transformed father finished his story, everyone in his family nodded in energetic agreement. He had truly changed.

This touching account, along with similar interviews, provided anecdotal evidence that Twende na Wakati was more than just a story. It created a poignant, believable vicarious experience. It didn’t merely provoke emotions. It changed minds. It changed people’s moral arithmetic about their choices in a way that led to lasting change. Or so it appeared in the interviews.

But is there more than just anecdotal support for the power of this influence strategy? The answer is yes, and we know with a certainty because Twende na Wakati was the first controlled national field experiment in history. Since the Dodoma region of Tanzania was excluded from the evening radio broadcasts, researchers could explore the effect of the vicarious models offered over the radio. From 1993 to 1995 all regions experienced a variety of HIV/AIDS interventions, but only half were exposed to the radio drama.

In their award-winning book Combating AIDS: Communication Strategies in Action, renowned social scientists Everett Rogers and Arvind Singhal report that one-fourth of the population in the broadcast area had modified its behavior in critical ways to avoid HIV, and they attributed the change in behavior to the influence of the program. The impact was so remarkable that the controlled experiment had to be stopped after two years in order to make the intervention available to everyone. Within a year, similar results were seen in Dodoma.

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. People who tuned in to Twende na Wakati were more likely to seek marital counseling, make better use of family planning, remain faithful to their spouses, and use protection than were their neighbors who didn’t listen to the serial drama.

Change agents don’t use stories to aim vicarious models only at audiences in the developing world. Readers may not be aware of how effectively the same methods have been deployed in the United States. Before David Poindexter (the founder and former president of Population Communications International) and his colleagues exported serial dramas to Africa, Poindexter met with Norman Lear—producer of popular TV sitcoms such as All in the Family and Maude. As part of their agenda to reduce population growth, Poindexter, Lear, and others routinely injected family planning messages into their programming.

It was no coincidence that in 1972, with 41 percent of those watching TV in America tuned in to his show, Lear created an episode (“Maude’s Dilemma”) in which the star—a middle-aged woman—announced that she was considering an abortion. This was the first time this topic was inserted into a primetime plot line, and it wasn’t included by accident. Love it or hate it, it was part of a systematic plan of using compelling stories (complete with vicarious models) to influence social change. And according to public opinion surveys, it did just that, as have dozens of other programs that have since made use of poignant stories.

Back to Biff

Storytelling isn’t just for TV and radio. Time and again we watched influencers awaken people to the profound choices they were making by telling poignant, believable, and compelling stories that put a human face on people’s actions. Independent of the industry—whether healthcare, IT, financial services, manufacturing, or telecommunications—leaders who helped build a sense of mission in their organizations were always storytellers.

However, when we decided to poke around Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) restaurants, we thought we’d have to qualify our statement. Certainly you couldn’t tell an emotional and touching tale about something as mundane as wiping down tables and cheerily greeting customers. Could you?

It turns out that storytelling is part of the DNA of USHG leaders. Earlier we retold Danny Meyer’s story of the employee who tracked down a customer’s purse. But that isn’t where storytelling ends. Danny isn’t the only one who tells engaging stories.

Here’s what’s likely to happen when Biff seems disengaged in the vital behaviors. His supervisor walks over to him and says, “Hey Biff, a few minutes ago a young mother walked into our patio area holding the hand of her three-year-old daughter. She set her daughter up on a chair and walked to the window to order their food. While her back was turned, her daughter began sweeping her hand back and forth across the table that was smeared with ketchup from a previous guest. Then she began licking her hand.”

At this point, Biff cringes. He doesn’t even wait for his boss to finish the story—but instead, he rushes to grab a rag and begins wiping down the tables.

What happened here? The supervisor made a connection. Rather than relying on verbal persuasion to nag, guilt, or threaten, she created a vicarious experience. She told a story that helped awaken Biff to the moral content of his actions. And that changed everything.

Now, is it possible that Biff may need more than this in order to become a hospitality zealot? Yes! The remaining chapters add just such richness. Nevertheless, the difference between influencers and the rest of us is that when influencers recognize that others aren’t personally motivated to enact a vital behavior, they don’t work around that problem. They work through it. They operate on the confidence that people are not morally defective, but morally asleep. When called for, they create vicarious experiences through telling compelling stories.

TACTIC 4. MAKE IT A GAME

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap! The job’s a game.

—Mary Poppins

Let’s look at still another way of transforming neutral or detestable vital behaviors into something enjoyable. Once again, an individual tries a new behavior but still doesn’t like it all that much. Now what? Take hope from the fact that humans invest themselves in a wide variety of pursuits that, on the surface, don’t look particularly engaging or rewarding. Yet somehow humans extract enjoyment from them. So, what’s the trick?

It turns out that one of the keys to personal motivation lies in a force just barely outside the activity itself. It lies in the mastery of increasingly challenging goals. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher at Claremont Graduate School, has devoted his career to what he has come to call “flow,” or the feeling of enjoyment that comes from losing yourself in an engrossing activity (something, he suggests, we all should be seeking with dogged determination).

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi has discovered that almost any activity can be made engaging if it involves reasonably challenging goals and clear, frequent feedback. These are the elements that turn a chore into something that feels more like a game. And we all like games. For example, imagine that you removed the scoreboard from a basketball court. How long would you expect fans to stick around without knowing the score? How long do you think the players would run breathlessly up and down the court? Much of what we do to transform intrinsically unpleasant behavior into something enjoyable is merely turning it into a game.

Consider the elements of an enjoyable game:

Keeping score: This action produces clear, frequent feedback that can transform tasks into accomplishments that, in turn, can generate intense satisfaction. The designers of many of today’s video games have an intuitive feel for Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s research and have used it to create games that call for highly repetitive activities that end up being amazingly addictive as individuals strive for that next level of achievement.

Competition: Seeing numbers does more than provide data. It imbues the data with meaning: Am I doing better than before? (And certainly better is good.) Am I doing better than others? This element is more questionable (it can lead to unhealthy rivalry)—but to be honest, competition, especially with oneself, can help people take satisfaction from what would otherwise be a repetitive task.

Constant improvement: As you walk into fitness centers across the country, you’ll note that many of the facilities’ walls are papered with charts. A closer look reveals that each chart displays various members’ personal progress. Some track weight. Others track measurements. Others track body mass indexes, bone densities, resting heart rates, and a whole host of other health indicators.

As you listen to experts talk with their clients—poring over the charts in detail—you’ll often hear the word “slope”: “The actual numbers,” experts explain, “aren’t as important as the overall slope. In what direction are you heading? You may not be improving at the rate you initially expected or you once achieved, but as long as you’re headed in the right direction, time is your best friend.” This also helps turn any regime into a game. Are you improving?

Control: Finally, game makers are careful to ensure that all earned points and rewards are in the participants’ control. At work people often miss this element when their personal or team progress is folded into a larger, less successful unit’s overall results. So employees lose any sense of control over their own contributions. Avoid this common mistake. Create and record measures over which individuals have complete control. Let them see the impact of their work. For many, the impact is far more rewarding than the job itself.

SUMMARY: PERSONAL MOTIVATION

We often don’t act in our long-term best interest because the short-term actions we currently enjoy are far more motivating than the remote and distant likelihood of suffering in the future. With persistent influence challenges, bad actions are generally real, fun, and now, whereas negative consequences are often fuzzy, maybe not so bad after all, and most certainly a long time off. To turn this around, influencers learn to help others love what they currently hate by allowing them choices, creating direct experiences, telling meaningful stories, and turning the tedious into a game.