How to Change Anything

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

The authors of Influencer: The Power to Change Anything claim that they can show you how to change anything. Well, nearly everything. They suggest that most of the time we cop out. We comfort ourselves with the Serenity Prayer and move on. Maybe it’s not the courage we lack but the skills to change the things we can.

The authors set about to do just that. “If you want to change the world, you eventually have to change how people behave. And if you want to change how they behave, you have to first change how they think.” The key idea is this: “A few behaviors change drive a lot of change.”

What that means is, if you want to effect change, then while casting a vision is important (that is, what you want people to achieve), what you need to focus on is behaviors—what you specifically want people to do. If you determine the foundational behaviors upon which everything you want changed stands, and change those things, then everything else changes with it.

Here are some points to consider:

• “People choose their behaviors based on what they think will happen to them as a result. If you want to change behavior, any behavior you have to change maps of cause and effect.”
• “When it comes to resistant problems, verbal persuasion rarely works. Verbal persuasion often comes across as an attack. People aren’t about to give up what gives them intense pleasure or what constitutes an important window into their view of self simply because of a well-turned phrase.” Instead, “come up with innovative ways to create personal experiences. Nothing changes a mind like the cold, hard world hitting it with actual real-life data.”
• “Stories can create touching moments that help people view he world in new ways.” Why? “Because stories help individuals transport themselves away from the role of listener who is rigorously applying rules of logic, analysis, and criticism and into the story itself.”

There is more than one way to influence and if you are only using one of them as a matter of habit, it may explain why you are having difficulty bringing complex and resistant problems to a solution. There are six sources of influence that drive our behavior divided between two domains—motivation and ability. They reason, “Virtually all forces that have impact on human behavior work on only two mental maps—not two thousand, just two. At the end of the day a person asks, ‘Can I do what’s required?’ and ‘Will it be worth it?’

Influencer presents a model that organizes influence in to 6 general strategies and clearly explains how to make use of these strategies in your own change issues.

They write, “Ineffective influencers compensate for their weak influence repertories by putting a megaphone to the one source they’ve already put into place.” If you feel you have to turn up the volume to get people to listen, it’s not them it’s you. Work on your strategy. This book will show you how.

Influencer is brought to you by the same group that produced such great books as Crucial Confrontations and Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.