ShareWhat was the most surprising discovery you made about change behavior?
That self-control is exhaustible, like a muscle.
We’ve all experienced this: You have a stressful day at work, and you come home and snap at your partner, or you have one drink too many. You burned up your self-control at work.
This is critical for change because all change requires self-control. Not just in the sense of resisting temptation, like a cookie or a drink, but in the sense that you have to manage your behavior deliberately.
So one implication of this is that you shouldn’t pile on too much change at once. Don’t pick six New Year’s resolutions, and don’t overhaul every aspect of people’s routines at once at work.
What did studying change across different disciplines reveal about change that has otherwise not been apparent?
If you go to the bookstore, you’ll see a long aisle of self-help books: how to diet, how to beat alcohol, and so on.
You’ll see parenting books. You’ll see “change management” books for executives. You’ll see “save the world” type books. And it’s like they’re all addressing unrelated problems.
But ultimately, for anything to change, somebody somewhere has to behave differently. And that’s why it was so easy to spot patterns among these different domains.
You can literally use the same change strategy whether you’re trying to change your son or change your neighborhood. It all comes down to behavior change.
The book says we often overcomplicate change. What do you mean by that?
When change doesn’t happen, we almost always blame it on people—people who are too “resistant” or “lazy.” But what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
For instance, we tell the story of a manager named Amanda Tucker who got poor ratings on “communication” from her employees. The problem was that when they’d come in her office, she’d often get distracted by e-mail and try to multitask while they were sitting there.
Is Tucker a bad manager? A poor communicator? Well, no. She rearranged her office one afternoon so she couldn’t see her monitor, meaning that she wouldn’t be distracted. And—poof—her communication scores went way up.
It wasn’t a problem with Amanda, it was a problem with her environment. And the environment was a lot easier to fix.
Next: Find 'bright spots’ to create change
