Switch - Chip Heath [116]
A miracle scale ranging from 0 to 10. See also the discussion of the miracle scale in Steve de Shazer, Yvonne Dolan, Harry Korman, Terry Trepper, Eric McCollum, and Insoo Kim Berg (2007), More than Miracles: The State of the Art of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, New York: Haworth Press, pp. 61–72. There’s a great example of the scaling question in practice in the case study of Lee the dock manager in Scott D. Miller and Insoo Kim Berg (1995), The Miracle Method: A Radically New Approach to Problem Drinking, New York: Norton, pp. 39–59.
Track patients’ self-reported progress. Once the 0 to 10 scale is set up, it becomes easier for clients to notice and start talking about even small improvements toward their goal. When a therapist identifies a substantial change on the scale—say, a half-point improvement toward the goal—the therapist will ask, “How did you do it?” Therapists are trained to be persistent in asking the how question several times: “It’s important to be persistent even if, and oftentimes particularly if, the client seems to be struggling a bit at first to formulate an answer. The question implies the client did something that was helpful; things didn’t get better without a reason.” Some therapists call this process positive blaming. Try it with your kids when they make an improvement. See discussion around p. 63 of de Shazer et al., More than Miracles.
NFL coach Bill Parcells. See Bill Parcells (2001), “The Tough Work of Turning Around a Team,” reprinted in Harvard Business Review on Turnarounds (pp. 105–114), Boston: Harvard Business School Press; the quotation is on pp. 111–112.
UCLA coach John Wooden. Quoted in Robert Maurer (2004), One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, New York: Workman, p. 11.
Small wins. See Weick (1984), “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psychologist, 39(1), p. 46.
David Allen. See Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, New York: Viking Penguin, p. 239.
Al-Anon. See Al-Anon Family Groups (1995), How Al-Anon Works for Families and Friends of Alcoholics, Virginia Beach, VA: Al-Anon Family Groups; the quotation is on p. 73.
George kissed Paula. See Michele Weiner-Davis (1992), Divorce Busting, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 92.
Chapter Seven
College student Paul Butler. The facts of the Butler story are from an interview Dan Heath conducted with Butler in October 2008. For a short version of the story and a photo of Butler, go to http://rareconservation.org/about/page.php?subsection=History (accessed May 28, 2009).
Pride campaigns. Information about Rare’s Pride campaigns is available on Rare’s website: http://www.rareconservation.org. Rare now focuses more on protecting precious areas, such as reefs and forests, than on preserving particular species. But Rare conservationists continue to work on precious areas by rallying the public around what they call a “charismatic species” that symbolizes specific areas that need protection. For instance, the Napoleon wrasse fish was the charismatic species in the waters surrounding the Togian Islands of Indonesia, which contain 262 species of coral and countless other species that depend on the coral.
James March … identity model. See March (1994), A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen, New York: Free Press, especially ch. 2, where March provides a beautiful contrast of consequence-based decision making and decision making through identity. For a longer treatment of this topic, see Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, New York: Random House, 2007, pp. 182–199, including the story of the hugely successful “Don’t Mess with Texas” antilittering campaign, which was a textbook application of identity.
Concerned about the rapid turnover among its nurses. For more on this story and on Appreciative Inquiry, see Tom Krattenmaker (2005), “Change Through Appreciative Inquiry,” in Managing Change to Reduce Resistance (pp.