Switch - Chip Heath [66]
Leaving aside the sleaze factor, the science of the billboard study says something pretty remarkable. It shows us that people are receptive to developing new identities, that identities “grow” from small beginnings. Once you start seeing yourself as a “concerned citizen,” you’ll want to keep acting like one. That’s tremendously good news for someone leading a change effort. It means, for example, that if you can show people why the environment is worth caring about, it won’t take years for them to think of themselves as “environmentalists.” It took only a few days for the home owners to think of themselves as “concerned citizens.”
7.
There is a problem, though. A new identity can take root quickly, but living up to it is awfully hard. For instance, it probably took a while before Brasilata’s employees were any good at inventing. At first, they probably struggled to come up with any suggestions for the company, and they might have felt like impostors calling themselves “inventors.”
We can empathize. At different times in our lives, both of us (Chip and Dan) were urged by our significant others to take salsa-dancing lessons. This was not our first choice of weekend activities, but we agreed to give it a shot. The fantasy was an attractive one—we could picture ourselves with our partners, full of passion and artistic flair, drawing envious glances from passersby. No question: This “dancer identity” had appeal.
It did not take us long to realize how deeply misguided our fantasies were. All too quickly, we discovered that salsa is a sadistic style of dancing created for the purpose of making middle-aged men feel ridiculous. Salsa requires an array of sensual hip movements that we found structurally implausible. We managed to perform this beautiful dance with all the seductive force of Al Gore giving a lap dance.
We did not continue with our salsa lessons.
Here’s the thing: When you fight to make your switch, especially one that involves a new identity, you and your audience are going to have Salsa Moments. (Don’t worry, we’re not going to adopt that as a buzz phrase.) Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure. You can’t learn to salsa-dance without failing. You can’t learn to be an inventor, or a nurse, or a scientist, without failing. Nor can you learn to transform the way products are developed in your firm, or change minds about urban poverty, or restore loving communication with your spouse, without failing. And the Elephant really, really hates to fail.
This presents a difficulty for you when you are trying to change or when you’re trying to lead change. You know that you or your audience will fail, and you know that the failure will trigger the “flight” instinct, just as the two of us fled our salsa lessons. How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road?
The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route. This notion takes us into a fascinating area of research that is likely to change the way you view the world.
8.
Read the following four sentences, and write down whether you agree or disagree with each of them:
You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.
No matter