Switch - Chip Heath [58]
7.
When you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It’s Elephant fuel.
Once people are on the path and making progress, it’s important to make their advances visible. With some kinds of change, such as weight loss, progress is easy to measure—people can step on a scale. Unfortunately, there’s no off-the-shelf scale for “new-product innovation” or “reduced carbon impact.” Where do you find a yardstick that can measure the kind of changes you’re leading?
Solutions-focused therapists, whom we mentioned in Chapter 2 in the Rider section, create their own yardsticks. Recall that they ask their patients the Miracle Question: “Imagine that in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens, and all the troubles you brought here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, how will you know?”
These therapists know that the miracle can seem distant to their patients and that they need to keep their patients motivated and hopeful en route to the destination. To do so, they’ve devised a way of quantifying progress toward the miracle. They create a miracle scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 10 is the miracle. In fact, in the very first session they often ask their patients where they’d score themselves. Patients often report back that they’re at 2 or 3, which prompts an enthusiastic response from the therapists. Wow! You’re already 20 percent of the way there! Sound familiar? The therapists are putting two stamps on their patients’ car-wash cards.
As the sessions continue, the therapists continue to track patients’ self-reported progress. The therapists are trained to celebrate every incremental victory—to react with delight when a patient reports advancing from 3 to 4. This response is counterintuitive for most of us. How many sales managers dance a jig upon hearing that their reps are 40 percent of the way to a quota? But this encouragement is critical, because it’s self-reinforcing. When you’ve celebrated moving from 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 3, you gain confidence that you can make the next advance.
The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let’s say you’re working with your junior-high-age son who is painfully shy. Maybe the miracle for your son would be the ability to ask a girl to the school’s homecoming dance. This feat is presently unthinkable to your son, but you and he have been able to talk about his shyness—he acknowledges it and dislikes it—and by virtue of that conversation, he may already be at 2 on the scale.
An SFBT therapist would ask your son, “What would it take to get you to 3? Let’s not talk about how we can pole-vault up to the miracle—we’re not there yet. Let’s talk about 3.”
Maybe for your son, reaching 3 would involve something simple like asking a grocery store employee where the toothpaste aisle is. If he did that, he’d prove that he could interact successfully with a total stranger, and in doing so, he’d get to see himself moving toward the miracle. The value of the miracle scale is that it focuses attention on small milestones that are attainable and visible rather than on the eventual destination, which may seem very remote. It’s like climbing a tall ladder and focusing on the next step rather than gawking up at the top. There may be many more steps to go, but you can take comfort that you’re making real progress in the right direction.
Notice, once again, how often Elephant appeals and Rider appeals can overlap. In this case, your son’s Rider is getting very clear direction—Ask the clerk about the toothpaste—at the same time as his Elephant is getting little boosts of hope—Maybe I don’t have to be so shy forever.
By using the miracle scale, you always have a clear idea of where you’re going next, and you have a clear sense of what the next small victory will be. You’re moving forward, and, even better, you’re getting more confident in your ability to keep moving forward.
8.
NFL coach Bill Parcells, who won two