Switch - Chip Heath [52]
But this isn’t one of those situations. No one was asking these maids how they felt or whether they perceived themselves to be healthier. The maids simply stepped onto a scale, and the scale reported a lower weight. Scales aren’t subject to placebo effects.
OK, but if you’ve suddenly discovered that you’re a good exerciser, might not that trigger some kind of mind-body effect? Couldn’t it kick your metabolism into overdrive or something? It’s not impossible, we suppose, but let’s be honest: If the power of thinking could indeed make you skinnier, that would be a scientific revelation on par with cold fusion (as well as a billion-dollar self-help book—Think Yourself Thin).
What’s much more likely is that we’re seeing a reflection of the car wash study. The maids were given a stamp card with two stamps on it. In other words, they were astonished to discover that, contrary to their own self-assessment, they were exercisers. They were 20 percent of the way to the destination, not 0 percent. And that was a tremendously motivating realization. I’m not a sloth—I’m an Exerciser!
Think about how you’d feel in their shoes. What if a scientist came to you and said that, unbeknownst to you, your white-collar job is an aerobic wonderland? With every click of the mouse, you burn 8 calories! Every time you check fantasy-baseball stats, you run a mile! Wouldn’t you feel a rush of satisfaction? Hey, look how good I’m doing!
And here’s the main thing—it almost certainly would change the way you behave from that moment forward. Once you realized that exercise could come from little things, maybe you’d be on the lookout for ways to get a smidgen more active.
Similarly, the maids, getting a jolt of enthusiasm from the good news, might have started scrubbing the showers a little more energetically than previously. Maybe they started making multiple trips back to their carts as they changed linens, just to add a bit more walking. Maybe they took the stairs to lunch rather than the elevator. And they exerted that extra effort because someone put two stamps on their exercise cards. Suddenly, they found themselves closer to the goal line than they ever imagined.
That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.
If you’re leading a change effort, you better start looking for those first two stamps to put on your team’s cards. Rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered. “Team, I know the reporting structure looks different, but remember that we already had some practice working in these groups on the RayCom account.” “Honey, losing forty pounds isn’t going to be easy, but you’ve already given up soda, and I bet that alone will knock off five pounds before the end of the year.”
A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over.
If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.
4.
If you’re like us, you love a clean house but dread housecleaning. And your dread mounts, because with each hour, each day, that passes between episodes of cleaning, the piles of paper in the office grow taller, the loads of laundry pile up, and the dust on the sideboards accumulates. As the problem gets worse, so does the dread, which deters housecleaning, which