2
The Three Keys to Influence

I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn’t very good at being a [university] president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing.

—Warren Bennis

So far we’ve claimed that influencers don’t randomly succeed at creating impressive and lasting changes in human behavior. The good news is that if they did rely on chance, we wouldn’t have a clue how to replicate their efforts. But they don’t rely on chance. Instead, they count on three keys to success—keys that all influencers adhere to and that you can use to your own benefit:

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

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.

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.

KEY 1. FOCUS AND MEASURE

To shine light on this first influence key, we’ll fly to Atlanta, Georgia, where we’ll meet with Dr. Donald Hopkins, a physician, the vice president of healthcare programs at the Carter Center—and a real influencer. Hopkins originally attracted our attention because he has taken on one of the most amazing influence challenges in history. His goal is to banish a horrendous disease from the planet without finding a cure.

And just what is this daunting disease Dr. Hopkins is attacking? To answer this question, take a look at a rather disgusting sample Hopkins keeps on his desk. If the enemy could stand, she would be three feet tall. But alas, she has no skeletal system. She’s a worm. More specifically, she’s a Guinea worm. Hopkins keeps his sworn enemy in a jar of formaldehyde as a reminder of the challenge he and his team have decided to confront. Helping individuals who have contracted Guinea worm disease is an enormous challenge because once someone has it, it will inevitably run its painful and ugly course through the host’s body. Medical science offers no hope of relief. None. There are no medicines, surgeries, or magical techniques. Once you have the worm, it will cause havoc every single time. So Hopkins, in order to solve the seemingly intractable problem, became a social scientist.

When Dr. Hopkins came on the scene, over 3 million people in 23,000 remote villages in 20 countries were contracting Guinea worm disease every year. The disease begins when villagers get a little more in their drink of water than they bargained for. Hiding within the fetid ponds that many use as a water source lie the Guinea worm larvae. Drink the water, ingest the larvae.

And then, it gets really ugly. The larvae soon hatch into worms that eventually burrow out of the body by whatever route they choose—through the muscle and skin on an arm, leg—well, you can imagine the other options. This journey causes such enormous pain and suffering that the host eventually rushes to the nearest water source and plunges the emerging worm into the water to find a moment of relief. At this point, the dreaded worm ejects thousands of eggs into the pond—guaranteeing next year’s crop of Guinea worms—when the awful process begins again as it has for thousands of years.

Hopkins took an interest in the Guinea worm because he concluded that it could literally be eradicated from the planet. All he had to do, he told us matter-of-factly, was change the behavior of 120 million people spread over 10 million square miles.

Think about it. How would you approach this kind of problem? With a team of two dozen people and a few million dollars in the budget, how could you even think about getting millions of strangers to change?

The difference between Dr. Hopkins and the rest of us is that he (like all the influencers we studied) knows how to think about these kinds of problems and how to develop predictably repeatable and effective strategies to solve them.

The first thing influencers do is focus and measure. They clearly articulate the goal they are trying to achieve. They know that fuzzy objectives are anathema to influence. Equally important, they know that clear, consistent, and meaningful measures ensure that they’ll actually track their efforts and genuinely hold themselves accountable. This act alone sets them apart from the crowd. In fact, of the hundreds of influence attempts we’ve studied over the years, the vast majority of them fail at the outset by neglecting this first key. 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”).

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.

Fuzzy, Uncompelling Goals

You’d think that if people only got one thing right when trying to create a change, it would be the way they define their objective. Their objective, after all, is the voice that calls out for change in the first place. “We have really poor customer service.” “Our inner city kids need help.” “Our quality is mediocre, and we want to be the best.”

The goals associated with each of these cries for change seem obvious. Leaders need to improve customer service, help inner city kids, and push quality to new heights. Such goal statements sound good, but, quite honestly, they are too vague to exert any real influence. Heaven only knows what they actually mean. “Improving customer service” could be interpreted as everything from answering the phone by the second ring to giving customers a free monkey with every purchase over $10.

Fortunately, not everyone fouls up the goal-setting part of their change process by providing vague objectives. For example, consider the near legendary work of another powerful influencer, Dr. Don Berwick, the former CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). In spite of IHI’s diminutive size and Berwick’s complete lack of position power in the $2 trillion U.S. healthcare industry, he is universally described as one of the most influential people in the field and a fine example of making strong use of clear and compelling goals.

“I think it’s unacceptable,” Berwick told us, “that the sixth leading cause of death in the United States is healthcare.… We inadvertently kill the equivalent of a jumbo jet filled with passengers every day of the year. We know how it happens, and we know how to avoid it. The challenge is influencing people to stop it from happening.”

Now watch how Berwick uses a clear and compelling goal to lead change. One December day in 2004, Berwick stood in front of a group of thousands of healthcare professionals and issued an audacious challenge by setting a crystal clear and compelling goal: “I think we should save 100,000 lives. I think we should do that by June 14, 2006.” Pause. “By 9 a.m.”

Berwick’s intent was to influence the behavior of hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers in order to save lives from medical mistakes. The success of the 100,000 Lives Campaign is now in the record books. By galvanizing the attention and efforts of thousands of people across an entire country, Berwick and his team beat the 100,000 lives goal.

How did he accomplish such a feat? He used all three of the keys to influence. To begin with, as our first key suggests, Berwick started with a crystal clear goal. He and his team weren’t just going to “try to reduce problems.” They weren’t going to “improve safety.” They weren’t going to “help a bunch of people within the next few years have better lives.” They weren’t going to save an impressive number of lives “as soon as they could.” They were going to save 100,000 lives by June 14, 2006—by 9 a.m.

There’s no lack of clarity or room for misinterpretation here. Notice how compelling Berwick’s goal statement is. Then notice the difference between these two statements:

• “We will reduce preventable harm in hospitals.”

• “We will save 100,000 lives from medical mistakes by June 14, 2006. By 9 a.m.”

You can actually feel the difference. The second goal statement contains clear, compelling, value-based language. You’re saving lives, not simply changing numbers on a chart. And you know exactly how many and by when.

Clear goals aimed at a compelling target can have an enormous impact on behavior because they engage more than simply the brain. They also engage the heart. Research reveals that a clear, compelling, and challenging goal causes the blood to pump more rapidly, the brain to fire, and the muscles to engage. However, when goals are vague, no such effects take place.^*

We saw firsthand what happens when a leader uses the influence of a clear and compelling goal. This time we visited with the influencer Martin Burt who started Fundación Paraguaya 30 years ago. Initially his goal was to provide Paraguay’s poor with access to credit as a means of helping them climb out of poverty. Unfortunately, after spending 30 years trying to meet that goal, Burt became concerned that many people were getting access to credit, but too few were emerging from poverty. As Burt and his leadership team learned the importance of creating both a clear and compelling goal, they made a stunning change. No longer would they focus on how many loans they processed (a somewhat uncompelling goal). Instead, they announced the following: beginning in April 2011, “Our goal is to help 5,000 poor families to earn $5 per day per person [the national poverty line] or more before the end of the year.” (This goal, by the way, was not only clear but it was also at least 10 times more challenging than simply making loans and collecting payments.)

The effect of providing this clear, compelling, and time-bound target was immediate. It started a whole chain of events that virtually redefined the organization. It influenced the way people saw their jobs. It influenced the skills loan officers would need to work with clients. It influenced a million conversations that happened between Fundación Paraguaya employees and their clients over the next eight months. And, best of all, it generated enormous pride when on December 31, 2011, Burt announced that over 6,000 families had achieved this goal. Later on we’ll explore how all this happened, but for now take comfort in knowing that it all started with a new clear and compelling goal—the first key to influence.

So, influencers don’t merely start their change efforts with their ultimate goal in mind. They take care to craft that goal into a clear and compelling goal statement. Such statements can provide focus and inspiration to families, communities, and even whole countries as individuals rally around a compelling cause.

Infrequent or No Measures

We’ll start this concept with a government example. It’s their turn to shine—or maybe not.

When the commander in charge of the Coast Guard boot camp located in Alameda, California, asked the authors to help him design an entirely new training experience, we leapt at the chance. Hundreds of young people were passing through the training center monthly where they were exposed to whatever the leaders could come up with to transform them into perfect, newly initiated “Coasties.” It was an irresistible influence challenge.

“I worry about the amount of verbal and physical abuse we heap on these young people,” the commander began. Having seen and heard about the rather frightening boot camp experience, we understood his concern. In fact, only meters outside the commander’s cinder-block office, petty officers were shouting at their recruits, forcing them to drag around huge anchor chains, making them lie on their backs with their arms and legs squirming above them as they acted the part of a dying cockroach, and otherwise causing the recruits to regret their decision to join such an outfit.

“The theory,” the commander continued “is that you break them down, and then shape them into what you want. You get them used to taking orders, and then later on when you tell them to do something dangerous or frightening, they’ll do it without pause. But I don’t know if it works. To me it seems like we’re doing more harm than good.”

“But we see such progress,” interjected the chief petty officer in charge of instruction. “For one, we help improve their confidence.”

Wondering how having them play a dying cockroach helped improve their confidence, we asked how they knew that confidence improved.

“Well, take last week’s graduation,” the chief enthused. “One of the recruits’ parents attended the ceremony, and within minutes the fellow introduced me to both his mom and dad.”

“And that shows that confidence is improving?”

“Heck yeah. Before going through boot camp, the kid wouldn’t have had the confidence to handle a family introduction like that.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Why, if you’d seen these kids before we put our boot to them, you’d know what I’m talking about.”

This discouraging example highlights a new challenge. You can talk about results all you want, but they remain nothing more than ideas until you decide exactly how you’re going to measure them. This seems simple enough when you’re looking at something like weight or profits. You merely stand on a scale or calculate income minus expenses. However, when you’re trying to track morale, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, or, as was the case with the boot camp, confidence, such items have to be operationalized into something you can measure. You have to pick something to represent the idea.

Now, these well-intended boot camp leaders aren’t the only ones who fail to create a clear measure. The people with whom we routinely consult often leave out this step—not on purpose, but because they think they already have a firm grasp on the results they care about. But they don’t. Their conclusions are based on anecdotal evidence and gut impressions rather than reliable measures.

We’ve all made this mistake. Perhaps we’ve set a goal of consuming X number of calories per day, and then we track our efforts by keeping a running guesstimate in our heads. Later when we log our exact food intake, we learn that our estimates were off by as much as half. Or maybe we think the morale in our office is just fine because everyone seems happy enough. Nobody has caused a scene or anything. And then one day we’re surprised to see someone quit because he or she “hates the place.” Then another person takes a job across the street for less pay and worse benefits. “What’s that all about?” You wonder, but you don’t know because you don’t measure.

Surprises like this often take place in corporate settings because leaders see satisfaction, engagement, and other human metrics as not only difficult to measure but as “soft.” Meaning, they don’t believe the measures matter in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t trust the measures. So leaders don’t take “soft measures” more often than, say, every two years. This schedule is typically kept against a backdrop of measuring quality every 10 minutes and discussing cash flow measures every two hours. A measure won’t drive behavior if it doesn’t maintain attention, and it certainly won’t maintain attention if it’s rarely assessed—especially if other measures are taken, discussed, and fretted over a hundred times more frequently.

For example, what do you think would happen if our friend Danny Meyer measured restaurant revenues daily but customer experience only annually? Revenue would drive management attention, and customer experience would get a ritualized yearly review—as is the case in most of Danny’s competitors. If you want a measure to influence behavior, it must be refreshed frequently.

Of course, frequently gathering data consumes enormous resources. Leaders often complain that it takes as much effort to measure an influence campaign as it does to deploy the campaign itself. And within this complaint lies the real problem. Leaders assume measurement is completely separate from influence. It isn’t. Measurement is an integral part of the change effort, and done correctly, it informs and drives behavior.

Bad Measures

Not everyone forgets to take measures and to do so frequently, but people still fail to create measures that generate the right kind of influence. They do so by measuring the wrong variable. For instance, during the Cold War, Soviet leaders didn’t have or measure such a capitalistic thing as profits, and nobody tracked customer satisfaction (who even cared about such nonsense?), so they decided to improve productivity—something they did measure—by tracking weight. In short, production facilities were required to produce more tonnage. Nail factory leaders responded to this demand by switching production from the nails that were sorely needed for construction to huge railroad spikes that are heavier but weren’t really needed. When the party bosses saw the results, they changed the measure to the number of units, and the nail factory leaders started producing tiny, mostly useless brads by the billions.

Or how about this? For years, charities have measured their success by how many services they provide. The more people they serve, the better they are doing, right? This, of course, leads agencies to focus their efforts on activities rather than results. (Imagine FedEx bragging in an annual brochure about how many miles its drivers had driven!)

Now, this all sounds pretty obvious, so let’s look at an example where it takes careful analysis to uncover what you should be measuring. And by way of warning, this particular example is both complicated and heartbreaking.

Make no mistake. Senior officers of the U.S. Army find sexual assault repugnant to everything they stand for. And no one is more intolerant of it than Lt. General Tom Bostick—the Army’s head of personnel. If you leave a conversation with General Bostick believing anything less, then you weren’t paying attention. At a recent briefing, he described in shocking detail how a particular soldier deployed to Afghanistan was allowed to rape one fellow soldier after another. There were seven victims before the perpetrator was finally identified and arrested. General Bostick talks about these victims with as much emotion as he would have discussing his own children.

However, Bostick and his colleagues have yet to make a dent in the problem. They’ve poured enormous leadership and financial resources into reducing and preventing sexual harassment and assault with almost nothing to show for the effort. Last year there were over 3,000 assaults reported. The common belief is that this number represents as little as 10 percent of the violence that actually occurs. If that is true, then the real cost of this perpetual calamity is 30,000 damaged lives every year. And it’s not getting any better.

How could the best intentions and focused efforts of so many people amount to so little influence? The first reason is that the Army measures the wrong thing. The only measure they track frequently is the number of sexual assaults. That might seem like exactly the right thing to measure, but it only seems so when you don’t think about the measures you take as part of your influence strategy.

Let’s speculate for a moment. What do you predict would result from the following strategy? You tell every military officer, “Look, we’re now tracking reports of sexual harassment and assault. Your job is to make that number go down in your unit.”

The number will drop. You give your senior military leaders a serious command, and they will move heaven and earth to “make it happen.” But if the number drops, it won’t necessarily be good news. If it’s true that as many as 90 percent of assaults go unreported, then the first sign of making progress might be that the number actually goes up. An increase could mean that you’ve made it safer to speak up and then go get help. Assaults are decreasing, but more are being reported more frequently so, in the net, the number increases.

But how can you know whether the increase is good news because reporting has gone up or bad news because the actual incidents have increased? By measuring the real target you need to change: people’s thoughts and actions. A useful measure would tell you (unit by unit) how safe people feel. It would tell you (1) if they feel safe from harassment or assault and (2) if they feel safe reporting harassment or assault. If you gather these numbers frequently, you’re in a much stronger position to properly interpret an increase or decrease in reported assaults. Which, to their credit, is why the Army is currently revisiting what they’ll measure and how they’ll measure it as they work feverishly to resolve this horrendous problem.

From these examples we learn that good measures don’t merely inform us. They also drive the right behavior. Sometimes it may take awhile to figure out exactly which measures you should be taking, but it’s worth studying in detail. The measure of a measure is its actual influence. If there’s a chance that the very process of measuring results might drive the wrong behavior, then be sure to faithfully measure the actions you need to produce those results as well.

For instance, you want to improve innovation (as measured by the number of new product proposals per quarter), and you have decided that the reason you’re not as innovative as you would like to be is because people aren’t comfortable raising new ideas. You interview employees, and they tell you that they get ridiculed or otherwise punished when they make suggestions, so they clam up.

You put together a course that teaches individuals how to speak up in a way that’s heard and makes it safe for others to do the same. Then you track two measures: innovations and instances of speaking up. If both increase (and a control group you measure doesn’t increase), you can then conclude that your efforts are well placed, and you can move ahead with confidence. You know what behaviors to change, and you have a clear understanding of what strategies to implement in order to actually change those behaviors. (We call these actions that lead to important results vital behaviors.)

So, start every change project with a clear and compelling statement of the goal you’re trying to achieve. Measure your progress. Don’t leave it to intuition or hunches. Measure your measures by the behavior they influence. And finally, measure the right thing, and measure it frequently.

KEY 2. FIND VITAL BEHAVIORS

Every year over 3,000 Americans drown, many of them in public pools. This problem remained unchanged for decades until a team of tenacious leaders from the YMCA and Redwoods Insurance got serious about influence. It wasn’t long before they had reduced the portion of these 3,000 deaths that happened at YMCA pools by two-thirds.

How did they do it? They studied tragedies and successes until they found one vital (high-leverage) behavior that made the difference. They discovered that traditional lifeguards were spending much of their time greeting members, adjusting swim lanes, picking up kickboards, and testing pool chemicals. (Doesn’t sound much like life guarding, does it?)

However, when lifeguards do 10-10 scanning, drowning rates drop immediately. This means that a lifeguard stands in a special spot and scans her section of the pool every 10 seconds, then offers assistance to anyone who might be in trouble within 10 seconds. Simple. And it yields incredibly high leverage. Kevin Trapani and his colleagues at Redwoods Insurance and YMCAs across the world have spared scores of families from devastating loss of life by identifying and implementing one vital behavior that has made all the difference.

Let’s see how this concept of focusing on high-leverage actions applies to Danny Meyer, the restaurant mogul we visited. He didn’t demand dozens of actions of his staff. Instead, he focused on one vital behavior captured in the acronym ABCD, or “Always Be Collecting Dots.” Dots, in Danny’s world, are pieces of information about a guest’s needs and desires that his staff can collect by astutely observing and interacting with that guest. Danny found that the employees who were best at collecting dots were also the ones who were most capable of connecting them in creative ways to create unique and special experiences for their guests.

For instance, Danny’s employees learn that a customer works in the publishing industry, and they seat him at a table near other publishers. They also look for food preferences, seating choices, body language, emotions, special events, and other dots, and then use that information to create a customized guest experience. Consequently, one day when a distraught woman walks through the door of one of Danny’s establishments without her purse, Gramercy Tavern employees pick up the dot. They then find out exactly what has her worried, and they take spectacular initiative to solve the problem.

Danny understands that in order to create profound change, you don’t have to change 50 behaviors. You usually have to change only a couple of them.

In the next chapters we’ll dig into how influencers go about searching for and finding vital behaviors as well as the methods they use to influence each. The good news is that the key of finding no more than a handful of high-leverage behaviors works with almost any problem. Change vital behaviors, and soon you’ll achieve the results you’ve wanted all along.

KEY 3. ENGAGE ALL SIX SOURCES OF INFLUENCE

The third and final key to influence lies in finding a way to get people to actually carry out the vital behavior you identify. You’ve identified what you want. You know what behaviors it’ll take to get you there. Now you have to get people to adopt the new behaviors. This is no small trick. In fact, we’ll spend the bulk of the book examining best practices for doing so. For now, we’ll share the high-level principle: engage all six sources of influence. Influencers succeed in creating change where others fail because they overdetermine success. They marshall a critical mass of not one or two, but six different sources of influence that shape human action. And when they do this, change becomes not only more likely but almost inevitable.

For instance, consider the work of a couple of educational influencers, David Levin and Mike Feinberg. They didn’t stumble into a way of getting tens of thousands of inner city youth to—and through—college. They studied their way into it. As of the date this book was written, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) system that Levin and Feinberg founded in 1994 had 133 free public college prep schools serving over 30,000 students. Their teachers are paid no better than public school teachers. Their budgets are no larger. Their work hours are much longer. And they go out of their way to recruit kids with the fewest opportunities. Eighty-five percent of their students are from low-income families.

And yet with all these challenges, a child attending a KIPP school is four times more likely to graduate from college than a child attending the public schools in his or her surrounding neighborhoods.

How do these two masterful influencers do it? If you’ve been paying attention, you already know two of the three keys. First, they are goal and measurement maniacs. They know the results they’re after, and they measure them mercilessly. Second, they know their vital behaviors. “Work hard” and “Be nice” are veritable watchwords at KIPP. Everything teachers and administrators do is designed to enable every student to develop these habits to a high art. And the third key to their success lies in their ability to routinely overdetermine their results. To do so, they have studiously amassed six different sources of influence (used in combination) to help all of their kids practice their two vital behaviors. These powerful sources include the following.

Source 1. Personal Motivation

We’ll start with the source people most frequently include in their influence attempts: personal motivation. As you watch others not doing the right thing while repeatedly doing the wrong thing, ask: Do they enjoy it? In most cases—particularly with deep-rooted habits—this source of influence is an important factor in propelling and sustaining behavior. For instance, when it comes to education, far too many students find school both boring and pointless.

At KIPP, you’ll find the opposite. Hard work is constantly connected with bright futures. People constantly talk about getting “to and through college.” Children introduce themselves by saying, “I’m Clifton, class of 2018.” With time and success, students learn to associate hard work with good grades, which makes the work more enjoyable. Most end up enjoying the act of learning itself because it’s routinely connected with success. Plus teachers make the in-class learning fun. Walk into almost any classroom, and you’re likely to hear times tables done in percussive rap rather than in morose drills.

Source 2. Personal Ability

Of course, motivation isn’t everything. When trying to understand why others don’t do what they should do, ask: Can they do it? Just because individuals enjoy something doesn’t mean they’ll succeed. They have to have the skills, talent, and understanding required to enact each vital behavior or they’ll fail. For instance, Levin and Feinberg learned that kids drop out not simply because they’re more interested in hanging out in the neighborhood but because they’re routinely failing their assignments and courses and they feel incompetent and bad about themselves. Dropping out is a sane response to persistent disappointment and repeated reminders that they’re performing below average.

At KIPP the entire design of the learning process is to create a feeling of competence and mastery. Educators achieve this objective by providing students with informative and engaging deliberate practice experiences coupled with clear feedback. When Levin was asked how long it takes to see results from a new child, he smiled disarmingly and answered, “One hour. When they succeed, they want to repeat their success. And our whole goal is to help them experience success from day one.”

Source 3. Social Motivation

Next, you need to examine the social side of influence by asking: Do others encourage them to enact the wrong behavior? When half of your colleagues drop out of school, quitting becomes the norm. And this is the norm most low-income youth experience. Unless your peers value scholastic achievement, you’re unlikely to value it yourself.

At KIPP, college pennants are ubiquitous. Not hypothetical ones—but pennants from the colleges students from their school are already attending. Students frequently talk about where they’ll be going to college, why, and what they expect to achieve from their efforts. As entering students meet and interact with peers who value learning, try hard, aim for college, and achieve, they want to follow a similar path. At KIPP, new norms are established and trumpeted loudly from day one. This rising social tide lifts all students.

Source 4. Social Ability

Others not only provide a source of motivation but they can also enable vital behaviors. To examine this important source of influence, ask: Do others enable them? Students who typically drop out have few resources to help, coach, and mentor them.

One of the strangest experiences parents and students have at KIPP takes place when they first meet the teacher. It happens in their home. The KIPP administrators want the family to know there is nothing they won’t do to help the student succeed. So the teacher visits with the parents and child and concludes the visit by giving the family his or her phone number—his or her mobile phone number. Then turning to the child, the teacher says, “Your classmates will help you succeed. If you’re stuck on an assignment, here are three you can call for help. And if they can’t help you, call me. Now, repeat after me: ‘Try three before me!’” More than one child described his or her disbelief at being given a teacher’s cell phone number. So they did what any curious kid would do in such circumstances—they tried the number! Something happened inside them when the familiar voice answered. Something they hadn’t felt before. Hope.

Source 5. Structural Motivation

Most burgeoning change agents think about both individual and social factors, but they leave out the role “things” play in encouraging and enabling vital behaviors. To check for this source, ask: Do rewards and sanctions encourage them? There is little perceived incentive to stay the course at most at-risk schools. In fact, some inner city youth see far more benefits from getting a job (legal or illegal) than from getting an education.

At KIPP, fun rewards are offered to kids who have done everything on time for the month. For example, they get to attend the monthly “Attend-Dance”—an invitation-only dance for those kids who maintain certain levels of participation.

Source 6. Structural Ability

Finally, “things” can either enable or disable performance. To examine this source, ask: Does their environment enable them? When your school is dismal, your learning tools are antiquated, and your home environment is insecure, you have a hard time focusing on abstract learning.

At KIPP both the home and school environments are seen as important parts of the learning experience. Levin, Feinberg, and others routinely visit homes, assessing what’s helping and what’s hurting learning, and then they take action. For example, Feinberg describes how a mother in a tough Houston neighborhood had a difficult time getting her daughter to do her homework rather than watch TV. Feinberg (who was the principal at the time) made a routine home visit to check on the girl. After hearing the mother’s despair, he said, “Okay, let’s get rid of the television!” “What? I can’t do that!” the mother protested. “Well,” Feinberg pressed, “it sounds like you’ve tried everything else. I guess it’s TV or KIPP. Which is it?” Without hesitation the mother said, “KIPP.” Minutes later Feinberg exited the apartment carrying a 36-inch television—and still another girl made it to and through college (and later got her television returned). KIPP teachers help parents and students think about how to organize the home environment to make study easier and more successful.

As you can see from this extended example, KIPP’s Levin and Feinberg have embedded dozens of tactics that draw from six very different yet important sources of influence. They select one vital behavior, and then they purposefully examine each of the six sources—first identifying the factors that are working against them, and then turning these factors in their favor. By using them in combination, they overdetermine success. The results speak for themselves.

So, there they are—the three keys to influence. Whether you’re eradicating disease, improving customer service, or engaging struggling students, these three principles provide the foundation of all effective influence strategies. They aren’t tricks or gimmicks. They aren’t fads or the latest “things.” They aren’t quick fixes. But together they make up a learnable path to success. They are the science of leading change.

^*http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887617701001135. A German study has shown that even brain-damaged patients perform arithmetic better when they have been given a clear and challenging goal than when they have been given a vague “do your best” challenge.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/77/5/694/. This study has shown the heart rate as well as the cognitive and behavioral effects of the presence of a challenging goal.