Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

So sit back, and see why influencing people means focusing on behavior, not end results; how one woman regularly influences hundreds of hardened criminals to become productive, peaceful citizens; and what people who live in irrational fear of snakes can teach us about change.

In its short introduction, the book opens with a startling claim: All the problems we face in our lives, in our companies, and in the broader world can be solved. Most of us fail to try to address our own problems, much less the world's ills, because we've been trained to accept that real solutions lie out of our control. The authors believe that we seek a kind of passive serenity amid turmoil, rather than trying to stop the turmoil by correcting its root causes.

Coming over a bit like a late-night infomercial, the authors strongly urge us to reject that sort of serenity. One of the world's best-kept secrets, they say, is that a handful of behavioral scientists and practitioners have "discovered the power to change just about anything." They've done so by unlocking the riddle of influence. The question of influence has interested self-help authors for decades, going back to Dale Carnegie's famous How to Win Friends and Influence People. "Influencer" is different from other books in the genre, though, because past works focus on verbal persuasion, which the authors believe is a weak approach.

Real influencers, they claim, don't waste their time pestering people to change. Rather, they effect change through a few distinct strategies – ones that you can master, the authors assure us.

Before getting round to laying out precisely what those strategies are, the authors spend the book's first chapter introducing us to their favorite influencers. We meet a woman who's created a small empire by rehabilitating drug addicts and criminals and turning them into responsible members of society. Then there's the Mexican television producer whose soap opera inspired millions of adults to seek help with their literacy. Finally, they spotlight a Thai government official who devised a campaign that more or less stopped the AIDS virus in its tracks in Thailand – after several previous campaigns had failed.

What do these people have in common? In chapter two, we get a concise answer: They focus on changing key behaviors, not end results. The logic works like this: Say you're a school teacher and your students have performed horribly on a standardized test. If you simply pester them to improve their score next time around, you'll likely be disappointed. You're focusing on an end result, without giving the kids a sure map to get there. If you urge them to "study more," you're getting warmer, but you still haven't offered them a concrete change to make.

Finally, after talking to several students about their habits, you discover a pattern. When the students get home from school, they're spending hours on the computer, playing video games and "chatting" with friends. After several hours of these recreational activities, they finally knuckle down to their homework. By that time, though, they're exhausted – too tired to study effectively.

Now you've identified a key behavior. If you can get the kids to study immediately after getting home from school, and relegate computer activities to when they're finished with the books, you'll probably get more effective study time and better test results. You've identified a high-leverage behavior. If you can get them to change that one little thing, your goal may well be achieved.

But how do you identify such behaviors? One way is to look for what the author calls "positive deviance." Look at the outliers – the people who stray from the norm. To go back to our schoolteacher analogy, consider interviewing the few students who performed well on the test, and figure out what they did differently from their peers.

All of this leads to a key question: Once you've identified the vital behaviors that can deliver the results you want, how do you convince people to change? In the next chapter, the authors begin to sketch out an answer. The short version goes like this: Tell stories, compelling ones, and try to create what they call "profound vicarious experiences" – or vividly imagined experiences.

To illustrate their point, the authors turn to the example of a group of people who suffer from a debilitating fear of snakes. For some in the group, leaving their homes counts as a major challenge. They fear that a long reptile might be slithering, waiting to pounce with a venomous bite, just outside their front door. A therapist took on the challenge: How to influence these people to shake off their fear and live productive lives?

For these people, talk doesn't do much good. You can tell them over and over again that their chance of suffering a household accident is far greater than the chance of meeting a venomous snake on the street. Nor will assurances that most commonly encountered snakes are harmless do the trick. Their fear is irrational, so rational arguments won't cure it.

To bring them around, the therapist turned to vicarious experience. He put a massive boa constrictor in a room, and invited the patients in. They all refused; one even had to be restrained from fleeing the building altogether. Then a curtain dropped and the patients were able to view the snake through a sturdy window. A collective gasp rose up; several patients made a mad rush to the exit, but found the door locked.

Then the patients watched a man walk calmly into the room with the snake. He petted the snake as if it were a cat, and then sat down and draped the snake on his lap.

Even the most terrified of the patients gawked at the spectacle. Then the researcher asked patients if they wanted to meet the friendly snake. After ironing out a few complications – some patients demanded protective gear – the therapist managed to get each one of the phobics to enter the snake's room. Several even stroked the docile reptile; all reported that encountering the dreaded creature had greatly decreased their fear level.

Here's the moral of the story: Even people clinging to deeply held beliefs can be influenced to change. And the key to influencing them is: When possible, show, don't tell.

This is no doubt solid advice, but it's also the point when we begin to question the authors' promise that they're offering the power to "change anything." Haven't communications experts been practicing "show, don't tell" for decades?

Well, having laid the foundation for their argument, the authors spend the rest of the book laying out the nuts and bolts of how to make it work. They identify six sources of influence – and claim that if we utilize some combinations of them, we can remake the world to match our desires, or at least our little corner of it.

The first tip is to make the undesirable desirable. This might be thought of as a fundamental skill of influence – convincing people not only to do things they don't want to, but to enjoy it! The authors offer no sure-fire, one-size-fits-all technique for this one – just good old fashioned hard work and perseverance. Say your division has to deliver a critical presentation in the coming weeks, for example. The problem is this: The fellow who'd be perfect to lead the presentation, who has the most intimate and nuanced knowledge, is allergic to public speaking.

Most likely, he knows as much about public speaking as one of our snake-phobic friends knows about living among the slithering reptiles. People tend to fear the unknown – and then cling to their fears. So, to make the undesirable desirable, order the man to give practice presentations to small groups of co-workers he knows well. Likely as not, he'd love the attention, and as he basks in audience adulation, he'll want more. Before you know it, he'll be grabbing the microphone at the next big presentation.

The next chapter amplifies ideas expressed in the first. Now you've used vicarious experience to convince someone to at least try to change. But the job isn't necessarily complete. The authors point out that the motivation to change doesn't necessarily imply the ability to change. So when a would-be influencer motivates people to change, he risks disappointment if he doesn't work also to improve their ability. Effective influencers over-invest in strategies that increase ability.

But how can you "increase" ability? The authors point to an old homily: Practice makes perfect. As people try new behaviors, they need time and space to practice. And encouraging practice means tolerating mistakes and setbacks – and setting benchmarks for improvement. Through regular, focused practice, the authors claim, new behaviors, once mastered, morph into new habits.

The next chapter encourages would-be influencers to harness the power of peer pressure. Here the authors acknowledge a disturbing facet of their idea: Just as people can be influenced to make positive changes, they can also be influenced to destructive ends. They recount a chilling psychological experiment undertaken in nineteen-sixty-one that was designed to test the human capacity to commit torture. The study found that most people will willingly apply electrical shocks to someone who they believe has a heart condition, if an authority figure in a white coat calmly tells them to – even as the shrieks of pain from the heart patient (really a lab tech posing as a heart patient) grow more shrill.

Whatever else it shows, the example demonstrates that people will listen to those in authority. The authors draw a useful – if not exactly original – lesson: When seeking to inspire change among a group of people, focus on their leaders first. If you can convince the leaders to change, the followers will likely fall into line.

In the next chapter, the authors further that insight by urging us to "find strength in numbers." They point to the old saying that "no man is an island," and remind us that we can solve few problems on our own. When the people around you seem to be adding to the problem you're trying to solve – disabling rather than enabling your efforts – resist the urge to lash out. Instead, co-opt them by showing them that the problem you're trying to solve hurts them too. As the authors put it, turn a me problem into a we problem.

While the advice seems sensible enough, it does rather raise the question of how: Specifically, how do we bring our detractors over to our view?

Perhaps the answer lies in the next chapter, entitled "Design Rewards and Demand Accountability." Or to, to put it another way, offer a carrot, but wield a stick. This chapter brims with solid advice on how to run a department or division with a proper balance of rewards and punishment. But the authors warn us to tread carefully when it comes to extrinsic awards, which can easily become expensive and backfire.

Before passing out fat bonuses to sales champs, first make sure that they get intrinsic satisfaction from their triumphs – that is, that they can enjoy the art of the sale, and feel respected for it by management. Then make sure they feel a strong sense of social support from peers. Finally, to motivate them to reach a higher level of achievement, a cash bonus might be in order. But if you jump into cash incentives without building these intrinsic rewards, employees can become cynical and disaffected when someone else gets the next cash bonus.

Moreover, it's usually more effective to work vital behaviors, not just results, into reward plans. For example, Toyota management has proven that by rewarding perfect attendance and punctuality – behaviors it deems vital – it delivers better results. As for punishment, these should be judicious, come only after a warning, and be in direct response to a behavior breach.

In their final principle for exerting influence, the authors look at the physical environment. Here, the authors claim that great changes can be achieved literally by changing things around. To make their point, they point to the family dining table – or lack thereof. According to the authors, dining tables are vanishing from US homes at a rapid rate. Since the rise of the microwave oven, many families no longer eat together – each family member heats up his or her own favorite food as he or she gets hungry, and eats it alone, often accompanied by some electronic entertainment device.

Without a daily place to gather, family communication breaks down, and dysfunction rises. The authors directly link the demise of the family dining table to the decline in parental influence.

This chapter also makes the point that corporate workplaces should be structured in a way that encourages interaction between several levels of the hierarchy. Again, that's solid advice, but not particularly new.

The book ends with a chapter that repeats much of what we've already heard, punctuated with an invitation to post about your progress as a budding influencer on the authors' website.

All in all, "Influencer" contains a wealth of solid advice that, in the end, doesn't feel like it lives up to the authors' grandiose claims. They promised to show us how to "change anything"; but they delivered a more or less standard self-help guide. Readers of the authors' previous book, Crucial Conversations, ended up with specific strategies for making interactions work better. Readers of "Influencer" end up with a less-focused message.

Digging through it all, one bit seems worth heeding above all others: Change may well be best influenced by focusing on specific behaviors, not outcomes. However, to say that gives us the "power to change anything" seems too extreme.

"Influencer" by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler is published in paperback by McGraw-Hill.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.