Al Switzler
Al Switzler is a consultant and co-author of the bestsellers Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, and Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Switzler and fellow authors, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan, are also the leaders of VitalSmarts, an innovator in training and communication services.
Almost any consultant can pull together a recommendation for change, but the best ones excel at influencing events and people to bring about lasting, positive transformation. We asked Switzler what we can do to help clients bring about the changes they need and expect.
Interview Summary: The Six Sources of Influence
Influence strategies must address both Motivation and Ability in six ways:
- Make the Undesirable Desirable
- Surpass Your Limits
- Harness Peer Pressure
- Find Strength in Numbers
- Design Rewards and Demand Accountability
- Change the Environment
Adapted from: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
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McLaughlin: When starting a change initiative, what do you recommend as a first step?
Switzler: I think first you have to figure out why people change—or don’t change. For decades, I’ve said that individuals, teams, and organizations change for four reasons.
The first three reasons are reactive: imminent danger, a powerful enemy, or terrible pain. The fourth is a more proactive reason: inspired leadership. People respond to passion, vision, rage, or a compelling argument for changing.
It’s astounding how many successful change efforts start with rage—when people get so fed up with an existing situation that they take action. For instance, the founders of Mothers Against Drunk Driving said we’ve had enough of this, let’s do something.
So the first step is to find that powerful need, help people clarify it, identify with it, and engage in it. I think everything after that is mostly tactics.
McLaughlin: So what approaches and tactics for change have you seen that work well and which ones don’t work so well?
Switzler: Figuring that out is the basis of more than twenty-five years of research that my colleagues and I have done. We started by asking why some methods work and other don’t. Then we went out to find those instances in the real world, to study them, but also to apply them and see what happens.
Examples of failed change efforts are all around us. Dieters spend about $40 billion a year, and the only thing nineteen out of twenty of them lose is their money. Consider recidivism among criminals: two out of three criminals are rearrested within about three years. Training is a $300 billion industry but when you really test results, you find that people apply only about 10 percent of what they are taught in training classes.
We believe that change fails because people stop short—they don’t diagnose problems completely and don’t follow through in a systematic way on all of the six sources of influence. They over-simplify and settle into what we call the serenity trap: You try a couple of change strategies. When they fail, you lower your expectations and say well, this is as good as it gets so we need to be content with that.
Most people aren’t very skilled at influencing change—in themselves or others. On the other hand, we’ve traveled all over the world and found true influence masters—people who have faced persistent, resistant, pervasive problems, have tackled them, and made huge, lasting advances.
McLaughlin: How good are most change agents at doing the kind of thorough diagnosis you mentioned?
Switzler: Again, most people try a few new methods and when they fail, they cope. That’s because we are perfectly designed to get what we’re getting. Our whole world is designed to perpetuate current results. That’s why habits persist and are resistant; that’s why we continue to struggle and get stalled.
You have to step back and ask: What results do we really want? What few, vital behaviors will yield those results? Do we have the right behaviors? Are they aligned with the results? What are the barriers and negative influences that are preventing us from changing?
Effective diagnosis reveals the complexity and depth of the negative influences that we must account for. The masters of influence are capable of marshalling more powerful and positive influences to do that. If they diagnose but don’t get there, they diagnose again and find more influences, or they induce people to alter behaviors, or they rally more people. But they follow through with those steps as a process.
McLaughlin: Is this the idea that we need to change the way we change minds?
Switzler: I think that’s one of the points. As Abraham Maslow said, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
One problem with consultants—and with business writers too—is the limited ways they attempt to change minds and behavior. You have the “I did it” approach: I’m wise and you can follow what I did and get the same results. Often, that doesn’t require any diagnosis but assumes that all I have to do is pass on the information.
Then you have the “good thinkers”—in the best case Peter Drucker and others—who may have the right ideas but still they say if we share the information, change will happen. Ultimately, though, intellectual persuasion is not enough.
Influencers use two other, more powerful ways to change minds and behavior. One is vicarious experience, especially the use of stories. Parables and personal stories of challenges faced or adversity overcome, touch not only the head but the heart. Vicarious experience through stories—both positive and negative—is a catalyst for change.
Another way that influence masters help people change is through direct experience. For example, executives at MacDonald’s can become isolated in their corporate building but what do they do? They send them out to work at drive-through windows. If you go to Home Depot’s corporate headquarters, you see the orange aprons proudly displayed in executive offices because they earned them by working in the stores.
Commonly, people say, let’s send out a motivational email, or a demand, or a threat. Let’s get everybody in a meeting and show them pages and pages of spreadsheets. In the end, those communications are not nearly as effective as people making the human connection by feeling a story or going out there and experiencing it.
Influence masters use all three of these methods in the right mix, as opposed to just PowerPointing people to death.
McLaughlin: After you’ve done your diagnosis and believe you’ve identified what you call the vital behaviors, what’s next?
Switzler: I’d like to talk more about vital behaviors. There are whole industries that claim, if you do this and this, you’ll get the results you want. They are recommending specific, new behaviors, but the problem is that they’re over simplified, or misaligned, or they’re just wrong.
I once heard someone say the diet that works best is the one you stick with. I’m saying no, some diets are actually better than others, and some behaviors are better than others. A vital behavior is directly linked to the results you want (some behaviors are not), and it carries other behaviors with it to produce high leverage.
By the way, identification of vital behaviors is a testable hypothesis. For instance, if we could get 4,000 people in the company to do these four vital behaviors habitually and voluntarily, could we get that result? Then you diagnose–why are they not doing it? What’s causing our existing situation to persist?
To answer that, we turn to the six sources of influence, which deal with both motivation and ability at the personal, social, and structural levels. These are windows we can look through to uncover what influences are at work.
A lot of people, who as Maslow points out are handy with the hammer, think well, we’ve looked at their skills and at their individual motivation; we’ve looked at the effect of the influences of others on them. But they may not have considered the organizational environment, its structure, or its policies, so they have stopped short.
Having a robust, balanced diagnosis is the first step. Once you’ve figured out what’s not working, the next step is to look at all the six sources and ask: what will it take to influence people to behave the way we need them to?
McLaughlin: Could you give us a simple example?
Switzler: Yeah. Let’s say you have parents who realize that their kids are not reading at all and they want to turn that around. What they do is nag them, right? They put up a few stickers around the house that say “Make sure you read.” When they catch the kids watching TV, they tell them to go read. And then they say if you don’t read, I’m not going to let you go to the soccer game this weekend.
But if they did better diagnosis, they’d say wait a minute. Who do these children see reading? Do they see mom or dad reading? Well, no. What about the environment? Look around the house and ask: what is the house perfectly designed for doing? Well, we have no good lamps, and the chairs and couch are aimed directly at a big screen TV.
What if we created a quiet corner over here with a good lamp, a nice bookshelf, and some books? What if we structured the environment not only to motivate but to enable?
Change works best when you bring all the sources of influences to bear on the problem. Often people just don’t see or use all their options.
McLaughlin: Some organizations find that change is temporary. Maybe they get an initial productivity boost or a changed behavior for a time, but it reverts back. What advice do you have for dealing with backsliding?
Switzler: Whether we are talking about individuals, families, teams, or organizations, people fail to achieve lasting change partly because they’ve only diagnosed a few of the causes and so they haven’t addressed negative influences that are hidden or still persist.
The second reason change fails is that people under-whelm overwhelming problems. When organizations find lasting change elusive, we ask them to tell us how they went about it. The response is often, oh, we had a big meeting at which we clarified the issue; we sent out a written policy about what people are supposed to do; we formed new teams and put in a mentor. Ok, that’s four strategies.
We ask, what have you done to make sure your people have the skill for the new behavior you want? Have you restructured the situation to make it easier in any way? Well, no, we didn’t do that. And have you changed your incentive program? And they say no, we’ve kept the same system. So they’re expecting A but rewarding B, which is classic organizational behavior.
They’re trying four things that are helping but they may have five or six things that they haven’t dealt with that are causing the old behaviors to persist. That’s a very common reason why change doesn’t last.
Another reason is too much reliance on a leader with charisma, passion, or an ability to teach. Or maybe it’s a leader who follows up and holds people accountable. But it’s all what a few people do or one individual does to influence the many. As soon as that person leaves, gets promoted, or changes his or her priorities, the old ways creep back in.
You have to institutionalize the sources of influence so that change is not dependent on the will of a few individuals.
McLaughlin: You’ve already touched on this, but what in your mind distinguishes a great influencer from all the others?
Switzler: What’s interesting about the great influencers is that many are quiet, unassuming people. They don’t look for the spotlight. You wouldn’t even rank some of them very high on charisma. But they have consistent, systematic ways of diagnosing problems and then marshalling overwhelming, positive influence to change vital behaviors.
I think the big idea is that if we can’t change human behavior we’re probably going to come up short. The great influencers find ways to identify and alter those vital human behaviors. The second part is that they are not haphazard about it.
McLaughlin: If you were to give a consultant one piece of advice about influencing change, what would it be?
Switzler: The advice I would give comes from the medical profession: diagnose before you prescribe. Put differently, it would be to engage before you implement. I think too many initiatives are simply installed. People are looking for a solution, they find an off-the-shelf one, and say let’s put that one in. One size fits all. When you do that, you’re likely to get the change du jour, the flavor of the month, and a stalled initiative.
How many times have you seen people get in a room and say we’ve tried this and that and now it’s time to get serious? You get serious by diagnosing, by clarifying, and then by marshaling enough influence that’s not just dependent on the will of one or a few leaders.
McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.
You can find out more at www.vitalsmarts.com and www.influencerbook.com.
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