Jenn Cross highlights three ways that common sense leads us astray:
Myth 1: Education will change behavior.
Myth 2: You need to change attitudes to change behavior.
Myth 3: People know what motivates them to take action.
Myth 1: Education will change behavior.
Most people think that if people just know about an issue, they’ll change. But knowing is not enough, says Cross. HOW we present information matters greatly. She says, for example, that the message has to be tangible and personalized.
Myth 2: You need to change attitudes to change behavior.
Cross notes that attitudes actually FOLLOW behavior. She says that if we survey people about attitudes, it won’t accurately predict behavior. Thus it’s important to set behavioral expectations and connect them to values that resonate with our audience(s).
Myth 3: People know what motivates them to take action.
Cross says that we think we know what motivates us, but we don’t really know. She notes that one of the greatest motivators is social norms. If we see someone doing something, we’re more likely to do it too.
In the Influencer: New Science of Leading change, Joseph Grenny (2013) and his colleagues point to the example of how the eradication of the Guinea worm was accomplished through three vital behaviors and the supporting six sources of influence. The Guinea worm is a parasite that infected 3 million people in 23,000 remote villages in 20 countries. The Guinea worm was spread through the water supply for all these villagers. Once the Guinea larva was ingested a Guinea worm would hatch out of the larva and start to work its way out of the host’s body in whatever way it chose. This caused immense pain that was temporarily lessened when the infected person immersed themselves in water. The worm would then inject thousands of eggs into the water perpetuating a cycle that had lasted for thousands of years.
The goal of Dr. Hopkins from the Carter center was to stop the spread of the Guinea worm and ultimately eradicate the this blight on humanity. For the sake of using this example in EDLD 5304 this goal would be referred to as the result.
Three vital behaviors were identified that would prove to lead to the near eradication of the disease:
People were required to filter their water.
An infected person must not make contact with the public water supply.
If a villager is not filtering water or becomes infected the villagers must confront them.
The Introductory section of Part 2 of the the book (pages 67-75 in the paperback version) offers a wonderful summary of the whole Guinea worm scenario and also provides a detailed explanation on how the six sources of influence came into play in helping to change behavior that ultimately lead the eradication of the Guinea worm.
This is a very helpful example to use in assessing your Guinea worm (your situation) and identifying:
Results you want to achieve and how you will measure them.
Vital behavior(s) you are trying to change.
Who are you organizational influencers.
Using this section of the book and the six sources of influence matrix from the 10x Your Influence Research Report should put you on the right path to building your own influencer strategy. So what’s your Guinea worm and what are you going to do about it?
Grenny, J., Patterson, K., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2013). Influencer: The new science of leading change (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill Professional.
Neal Martin explains why it is do difficult to make changes if you attempt to do so based solely on your conscious or rational mind. He also explains that we need to have our subconscious and conscious minds working together if we want to be successful in changing behavior. It is crucial for us to understand that habits are not cyclical but are springs and once loaded can work for or against us.
If we want to change behavior we must disrupt old habits while we create new ones. To disrupt old habits:
Don’t load the spring
Eliminate the cue
Reframe the feedback
To create new habits:
Translate goal into behavior
Establish a clear context
Develop a reliable cue
Create a powerful reinforcement
Repeat until it feels normal
If we consider how difficult it can be to change personal behaviors perhaps we can appreciate how difficult it can be to change behavior in organizations. These principles can be applied to organizations and through models like the Influencer and 4DX we can disrupt old organization habits with new ones. Not an easy task because “People who like this stuff…like this stuff” but it can be done.
If you really want to bring about change in people then you need to appeal their hearts and not to their heads. The sharing of more information or engaging in more rational discourse on its own doesn’t appear to help people to make significant change but an appeal to values, attitudes, and feelings first can motivate people toward making changes.
The two short videos below will clearly demonstrate this point but society still struggles with this notion and as you will see from the next few paragraphs I too will ironically address this first from the cognitive perspective. Why? Well…Isn’t that what good educators do?
Educational psychologist, learning theorists, instructional designers, educators and many more learning professionals refer to Blooms Taxonomy of Learning which looks at learning from three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
These domains are also commonly presented in the following relationship:
Bloom intended the taxonomy to be holistic and assumed that all three domains would be included when we develop learning environments. Unfortunately, this often isn’t the case in our educational systems and most other sectors of our society.
The head, is often overemphasized and rational thinkers are held in high esteem, the heart is relegated to artists, musicians or the irrational and those who work with their hands are necessary but are limited to building and keeping our infrastructure running. It only seems rational that if you want to bring about effective change then you just need to appeal to the head–or at least this is what those oriented toward the rational would argue.
But experience doesn’t always confirm this notion. The science community is beginning to recognize the importance of the affective domain. For example the scientists within the Geoscience program at Carlton University recognize that including the affective domain in their teaching can significantly enhance learning or if ignored can hinder or prevent learning. To promote the use of the affective domain they have developed a useful site called The Affective Domain in the Classroom that points to and annotates a wide assortment useful resources and research.
Source: http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/affective/index.html
This illustration of the two domains provides a good visual starting point for considering how the affective domain can be used in a scientific setting.
Enough of the head talk and onto the heart…
How to Change People Who Don’t Want to Change | The Behavioral Science Guys
I trust you will enjoy the irony of this TED talk that argues that TED talks don’t change peoples behavior.
Why TED Talks don’t change people’s behaviors: Tom Asacker at TEDxCambridge 2014
