Just How Hard IS Change?

Good morning!

I’m coming back today to a book that cheered and energized me last week. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath & Dan Heath don’t tell us that change is ever easy, but they do make a convincing case that we can make change easier by approaching it differently.

Here’s how too many of us (yes, me, too), often react, when people aren’t making changes we want them to make:

“How can they be so stupid? And lazy! Can’t they see past their noses? Can’t they use their heads?” Sartre said (or, at least, is said to have said), “Hell is other people,” and who hasn’t felt frustration at the apparent intransigeance of other people? But every single one of us is an other. We meet face to face or online or over the phone: to me, you are the other. To you, I am. And that’s just how it is.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath – and I’m going to call them H&H from now on – cite numerous research studies and tell many true stories in every chapter. They are not simply “brainstorming” or speculating on how change might be made easier. Their tips and recommendations are clear and specific and backed up by results. And whether I want to change myself or someone else or a whole group of people, the basic empirical insights hold. H&H tell us story after story of changes that worked, changes initiated by people with no special authority or power other than an ability to see how to do things a different way.

Do human beings "stubbornly resist" change? Maybe the change they are asked to make isn’t clear to them. “What looks like resistance,” the authors say, “is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.”

For instance, “Eat a healthier diet” is not specific. – And here I have to interrupt myself to say I don’t at all like the authors’ example, because it has to do with buying and drinking milk with only 1% butterfat rather than whole milk, and I am not at all convinced that whole milk is unhealthy (in fact, it drives me crazy that most of the yogurt in the grocery store case is nonfat!), but that’s not the point. The point is to give clear, specific instructions, and make them easy to follow.

H&H also say, “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” All of us depend on routines and habits to get through the day, and if we have to think too much, uncertainty about what to do can be paralyzing. Too many possible choices or an ambiguous situation will make our minds anxious, and when anxious, we revert by default to a familiar path, seeking our comfort zone. If we can’t, studies have shown that operating outside a comfort zone for too long results in deteriorating task performance. The mere experience of applying willpower to not eating a plate of cookies left in the room with them resulted in subjects performing more poorly on a task than other subjects without the antecedent test of will. Self-discipline wears us out. We only have so much energy for it. So we’re better off devising little tricks to keep ourselves in line.

In order to brave a new path, we also need a motive. Emotion is the “elephant,” in the book’s terms, intellect the “rider,” though I’ve avoided that language here. The important point is that to effect change, in ourselves or others, we must appeal not only to the intellect but also to emotion.

Here’s an astonishing revelation from early in the book. Can you believe that of the 24 most commonly used English words for emotion, only six are positive? Our language, and probably our brain itself, is more alert to threats than to happiness, probably for reasons important to survival – but still, that’s what we see all too often in each other, even when it isn’t there. I see not what you’re doing right but what you’re doing wrong, not the good you’ve done but the good you’ve failed to do. And how motivated are you by criticism? Me, not very!

All the logic in the world does not induce people to change without emotional appeal. Argument and reason are good, often necessary, but by themselves insufficient. Okay, what kind of emotional appeal? How about fear? Fear is a strong motivator, H&H acknowledge, but works best in the short term. It doesn’t work all that well for problems requiring incremental change over the long term. Why would that be?

Well, fear is one of those negative emotions.

When you’re angry, your eyes narrow and your fists clench and you get ready for confrontation. When you’re disgusted, your nose wrinkles and you avoid whatever has grossed you out. When you’re afraid, your eyes grow wide and your body tenses up and prepares to flee. On a daily basis, then, negative emotions help us avoid risks and confront problems.

Narrowed eyes, clenched fists, tense body – that’s how we respond when we’re in the grip of a negative emotion. Fight or flight! says the mind. Don't confuse me with more options! But that narrowing effect also works on our thoughts and doesn’t help when what we need is a broader vision, when we need to innovate, and to grow.

The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.

Appeals, therefore, to positive emotions – excitement, hope, optimism – motivate people to embrace change.

One tip the authors give is to focus on success, however small, and build on it. They call it “finding the bright spots.” Say your son was failing all his junior high classes but this semester managed to get a B in one of them. Talk to him about that good grade, help him find out what made the difference in that class and how he might be able to extend his success into other subjects. In general, don’t look for problems but for what’s working.

Another is to shrink the change. Don’t ask for a big change all at once. Show people ways they have already, without being aware of changing, taken the first couple of steps, and it's like magic!

He's on his way!

It also helps to provide “environmental tweaks.” These, H&H say, “beat self control every time,” whether it’s my own behavior or someone else’s I want to change. One simple example (we’ve use this in our home) is to use smaller plates on the dinner table. Rearranging furniture is another way to tweak the environment and change the situation. Shaping the environment changes behavior, and it’s easier, more efficient, and more pleasant to shape new behaviors that way than by hectoring and scolding. You don’t even have to talk about it!

I’ve hardly done justice to this book, because I’ve been boiling down to prescriptions what the authors present in exciting stories of change. You just need to read it for yourself. Switch is written largely (not exclusively) from and with a business perspective, but the implications go way beyond. In fact, I can hardly think of a realm where they would not be appropriate.

So, from what I’ve said so far, let me ask what lessons you would draw from the H&H prescriptions when it comes to working for political change? ??? If you’re not feeling optimistic yet, blame it on me and not on the authors, go to the library, and give H&H a reading for yourself. (I’ll order the hardcover for anyone who requests it; unfortunately, the book was never issued in paper. I also have 2-3 used copies winging their the way to me.)

If you buy the book from me and read the whole thing and don’t feel the faintest glimmer of hope, I’ll cheerfully refund your money and take the book back, knowing that it will inspire someone else. What I hope for, really, is a community of energized, hopeful people ready to go at change in a whole new way. Maybe we can help each other? I’d love to travel hopefully into the future! Wouldn't you?

Book Review: THE UP SIDE OF DOWN

THE UP SIDE OF DOWN: WHY FAILING WELL IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS, by Megan McArdle

NY: Viking, 2014

(On sale February 11, 2014)

Hardcover $27.95

When teaching philosophy, I used to tell my students that getting a concept wrong, being confused, misunderstanding or misstating an idea or position were all positive signs. “It means you’re thinking, not just memorizing and regurgitating.” This is a lot of the message of Megan McArdle’s new book: failure can lead to learning, which can lead to growth and success.

One thing you should know, however, is that this is not a self-help book. You and your problems and issues (or me and mine) are not McArdle’s focus. Her canvas is much broader. And that broader vision is both the book’s strength and its weakness.

The big picture approach helps to situate personal experience and individual concerns in a broadly psychological and social context that allows the author to commend or criticize government and corporate policies and programs, as well as the aims and strategies of individuals. On the other hand, it is a weakness when examples drawn from disparate realms are tossed in with insufficient discussion (“punish” puppies to house-train them? How? “spank ... immediately” to discipline children? For what range of offenses, one instantly wonders with some alarm) or when huge global issues such as poverty are brought in for a brief paragraph, acknowledged with a nod, and then left by the side of the road.

Those are my caveats. Having issued them, I want to assure my readers that this book is well worth their attention, for as many reasons as the topics it addresses.

McArdle presents fascinating information from diverse disciplines and draws from it her own conclusions. She writes engagingly not only when recounting very personal experiences (the kind that don't usually make it into books on economics) but also because she brings an open mind to national debates, debates often rigidly polarized in American society at large and treated superficially in familiar sound bytes. The publisher identifies her as “an outspoken Libertarian,” yet time and time again McArdle acknowledges an active role for government, and never does she seem to be hewing to a party line –conservative, liberal, or libertarian. More than once her even-handed discussion reminded me of Aristotle: no one person or group is wrong (or right!) about everything, and she gives every position its due issuing her critique. Then, too, her criticism is based on empirical evidence, not personal opinion or blind ideology. Very refreshing!

What we need, this book implies, is more information, more experiments, and even more gadflies and whistle-blowers. Will that eliminate or even reduce failure?

In your dreams! 

Despite the most thorough market research, scientific research, psychological research -- at the end of the day the market is still made up of human beings, and human beings are and always will be unpredictable.

So why bother? 

Because we can do better. Because we can prevent failure from turning into disaster.

To manage failure and learn fast enough to stay clear of disaster, we must be aware of common errors in the way we process information. Because of the normalcy bias, it’s hard for us to see a crisis if everyone around us is acting as if things are all hunky-dory. (I think of this as the “Emperor’s New Clothes” bias, but really, someone does need to blow the whistle there, wouldn’t you agree?) Then, once we’re all convinced we’re going down the right road, the confirmation bias kicks in to reassure us and will even “bend the map” in order to discount information that would otherwise clue us in to the fact that we are lost. The lesson here, as we used to say to each other in grad school philosophy classes, reading one philosopher after another who started out with what he considered self-evident propositions, “It isn’t always obvious what’s obvious.” Too often we just see what we look for. And then there’s risk aversion, or what I always think of as the why-we-are-in-Vietnam syndrome: We’ve put too much into this! We can’t get out now! Throwing good money after bad makes for disastrous gambling, with ever-mounting losses. Excuse all my Memory Lane quotations today, but it’s true that “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

To anyone familiar with the work of Tversky and Kahnemann or Dan Ariely, news of the ways in which our reason is contaminated by irrationality is no news at all. The thing is, “knowing” as in “being able to choose the correct answer on a test asking about risk aversion facts or statistics" is not at all the same thing as knowing how to avoid the pitfalls, so any book that reminds us to double-check our thinking is probably a book we need to read. In one book I recently read but did not review, Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, the author, who never believed in fortune-telling in the first place visits a fortune-teller, focuses on how she’s doing what she’s doing, sees clearly what’s going on – and yet

Later that day, I caught myself brooding over what Stephanie said – that is, until I remembered the source and pushed these thoughts aside. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge them, they had a stubborn way of creeping back into my consciousness....  

One of the scariest things about mentalism is that even after you understand how it works, it still feels believable.  

- Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini (2012)

How scary is that?

Okay, I said that The Up Side of Down isn’t a self-help book, but McArdle does have a few words of advice for unemployed job-seekers, most of them good. Her take on why the long-term unemployed slack off on the searching is that the longer they have to look, the more anxiety and unhappiness they experience and that discussions on unemployment benefits should take this into account, to reduce job-seekers’ anxiety and keep them moving – presumably to wherever there are jobs. This was basically a good discussion, as far as it went, but the number of jobs that have gone overseas is left unaddressed, and the advice to spend time with others in the same boat, other unemployed people, for “support” didn’t convince me. After all, you won’t get job leads hanging out with other people who are out of work, and you might just get more depressed and feel more hopeless. I wonder if McArdle has read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch. I’d love to see Ehrenreich and McArdle onstage together, not debating, per se, but conversing these important issues at a deep and meaningful level.

There’s much more in this book than what I’ve covered here. For instance, Chapter 8, “Blame,” begins with the way human brains work, brains looking for patterns, causes, and agency – brains jumping, therefore, from accident to intent, positing intention and design to what may be random events, assigning blame where there may not even be responsibility. Just as having control reduces stress, so believing we have control reduces stress. -- But if we’re all in control, designing events to conform to our intentions, isn’t someone always guilty? -- Not so fast!!! We may have only imagined the intention....

The following chapter, “Punishment,” may surprise many readers (and I know from teaching undergraduates that there will be strong resistance here), because in it the author lays out the well-supported claim that visiting vengeance on criminals (‘vengeance’ usually called in this context by the milder term ‘retribution’) is usually counterproductive. She does not argue against punishment in general but says that the consequences, to be both effective and cost-effective, must be immediate and inevitable. No letting small violations slide and then, unpredictably, crashing down with harsh verdicts. Actually, the harsher the verdicts, the more 3-strikes-you’re-out, “the higher the incarceration rate, the less it discourages....” The probation program she introduces to us mainlanders is from Hawaii, called HOPE, and the judge’s message to his probationers, people who have failed usually several times in many different ways, is that everyone wants them to succeed, that the focus from here on in will on the future, not the past.

Closely monitoring probationers costs less than keeping criminals in prison. Likewise, providing free housing to homeless people, even if they are alcoholics and/or drug addicts, is cheaper than the myriad costs to society of homelessness.

With bankruptcy, as with criminals and homelessness, this libertarian author takes a surprising position, namely that choosing bankruptcy can make much more sense than remaining under the crippling burden of debt year after year. Bankruptcy lets people start over. And since so many entrepreneurial endeavors fail, it’s important that people willing to take the risks of starting new businesses should have the opportunity to try again after failing.

In so many ways, in so many realms, forgiveness costs much less than punishment. This should be a wake-up call to individuals, voters, and government officials.

Realizing that McArdle's book originated as essentially ten separate magazine features (the author is a long-time blogger and a writer for Bloomberg View, The Atlantic, The Economist, and Newsweek) helped me make sense of the variety of topics brought together in a single book under one umbrella title. It isn’t the book I expected, but it brought together many intriguing issues, and I look forward to future books from Megan McArdle.