[MUSIC] There's a joke that says how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is one, but it assumes that the light bulb really wants to change. It's a bit of a joke, of course, but the point is we have to first create the capacity for change, the willingness to change before we change. Now, there's many, many theories on change and we know that organizations are complex systems. The environment really affects what we do. However, I thought I'd just focus on some of the individual differences. So this is just one little perspective on change. I've named it the ABCs of change. This is really about taking those behaviors of the 3B model, from business, brand to behavior, and thinking about, which of these behaviors are off brand? Which ones are on brand? What should I do more of? What should I do less of? Should I stop doing something all together and start something all together? Each of those have different, if you will, challenges along with them. Now, the ABCs are the antecedents of change, the barriers to change, and the consequences. And they kind of work in a loop because the consequences then become the antecedents the next time around. If you think of antecedents, we talked about 6As model and part of that is about creating attention to the problem. And we're often blind to the problem. Think of Febreze. This is a fantastic product that a scientist at Procter & Gamble almost found by accident. He was a smoker and he had this chemical that actually neutralize the smell on him, so it literally neutralizes bad odors. Today, this is a large brand for P&G. It's over a billion dollars in sales worldwide. But from the beginning until today, they're still struggling with a problem that the key users of this product don't realize the problem. If your house smells like smoke or if you do, if your house smells like your cats, or if it smells like the fish you cooked for dinner, you've kind of adapted to that smell, so you're the least aware of these offending smells in some sense. So they actually have these humorous videos online, which is about noseblindness to get people to recognize the problem. But it was really for them to understand that they first have to make consumers aware of the problem before the consumers will be willing to take on the solution. So in terms of change management, we kind of have to first bring to life the problem that the current circumstances have. And there's a nice example from the Heart of Change. This is a book, and this is about the purchasing process. And they, in this example, the purchasing agent found that across this large organization, they were selling the same gloves for workers ranging from $5 per pair to $17. Now, that's a huge gap. It's literally the same type of gloves. Now, he could have put this in a report. He could have put this in Excel spreadsheet. Actually, he tried. It really didn't get attention. So what he did instead is he took all the different types of gloves with all their prices and made this huge mount on the conference table at a board meeting. That grabbed people's attention. So if you think about the 6As model, one of the antecedents is we really have to grab people's attention and imaginations. Now, this is not just with the problem, also with the rewards. So, a paper by my friend Bryan Wansink and his colleagues did a very clever experiment, and this is about the rewards. And he took Hershey's Kisses, these little chocolate Hershey's Kisses, and he put them in offices. And he either put them in a glass container, so people could see the reward, the chocolate inside, or an opaque container, where you couldn't see it. And there's also either place close or far away. So it was easier or harder to get the reward, if you will. Now, what he found is when the rewards were closer in terms of visual closeness, you could see them, or physically closer, the container of chocolates was consumed twice as quickly as when it was not. So if you think about the behavior that was being encouraged here, in this case, eating chocolates. But you can think of this from an organizational perspective, make sure in terms of the rewards that people get from inducing the change are visible and achievable or close. They're easy to get, so maybe not make the goal too large in the first place. And when it comes to goals, it's not just about the behaviors. So here's a study by psychologist Govitsa and his colleagues. There's many studies in this thing, and it's about implementation intentions. And I'll give you an example. So, I hope you're flossing your teeth, very, very important. The point is most people don't floss as often as they should. So you're probably not flossing as much as you should either. But what he did is he asked people, do you plan to floss? And then people either said yes or no, and that was kind of the condition. Or he asked them, when and where do you plan to floss? So people not just have to say yes or no, which is kind of the attitude. When we say, do you plan to floss? You say, well, flossing's a good thing, I should probably do that. But if you say when and where, you're getting into the action. You're starting to describe and bring to life the behavior of the people involved. Now, there are differences in those two questions. Very subtle difference in questions, but the difference in outcomes was absolutely dramatic. So if I ask you, do you plan to floss? This is the attitudinal question. People flossed 8 out of 28 days, and when they had to score whether flossing was sort of their habit, they scored it 2.5 out of 6. Well, the improvement when you said when and where do you plan to floss, this is not about the attitude, this is about the behavior, people floss 19 of 28 days, and they rated this 3.8 out 6 in terms of a habit. So dramatic difference when we plan for behaviors in terms of being specific. Now there has been some research done on this with organizations as well, and they looked at organizations that were leading or lagging. You can look at the details in this book, it's The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, the book. And we tend to think about driving change top down. Putting pressure on people top down. It turns out that literally, there was no difference. All management puts top down pressure, whether you're a leader or a laggard, that was the same. Now, when I thought about the goals though that I gave specific goals for results, again, no difference. Everybody got goals for results, but when I gave you goals for behaviors, that became very, very important. Now, results are often hard to achieve but behaviors are under my control. Results often are not. So it's all about having results defined in terms of the behaviors required, about having roles and responsibilities designed. So you're planning for action, very much like the flossing experiment. And it even was evident in terms of the vision that the businesses had defined, was this aligned with the business issues? This kind of gets back to the link between purpose and behavior. So that was a few examples on the antecedents. There's many more, but I just wanted to give you a taste of them. [MUSIC]
