Chapter Two Notes from the Influencer Book

For Chapter Two I have just copied the summary verbatim.  I would be interested in any comments that come to your mind as you read this summary.

Erica

 

Chapter Two (Search for Vital Behaviors) Summary (page 43 - 44)

Search for Behaviors:  Take care to ensure that you're searching for strategies that focus on behavior.  Don't let experts pass off outcomes as behaviors.  You already know what you want to achieve:  not you want to learn what to do.  Be leery of vague advice.  If you can't immediately figure out what the expert is telling you to do, then the advice is too abstract and could imply a number of possible behaviors - many of them wrong.

Search for Vital Behaviors:  Master influencers know that a few behaviors can drive big change.  They look carefully for the vital behaviors that create a cascade of change.  No matter the size of the problem, if you dilute your efforts across dozens of behaviors, you'll never reach critical mass.  If your problem is common, odds are the research has already been done for you.

When behaviors must be customized to your personal or local circumstance, look for vital behaviors by studying positive deviance.  Look for people, times, or places where you or others don't experience the same problems and try to determine the unique behaviors that make the difference.

Search for Recovery Behaviors:  People make mistakes, and yet find some way to quickly get back on track rather than sink further into despair.  Henry, for example, learned that failure to follow his dietary plan one day should cue him to look for where he went wrong and then to take corrective action - and not to take the one-time failure as a sign that he won't be able to succeed and that therefore he should give in to his cravings.

Until Henry identified this and similar recovery behaviors, he was constantly taking two steps forward, followed by three steps back.  Now when he runs into a problem, he stops his backward fall by using his mistake as a data point for learning and not as an indicator that he ought to give up.  Recovery behaviors make up an important part of every change master's influence strategy.

Test Your Results:  Finally,  if you've conducted your own research and found candidates for what you think are high-leverage vital behaviors, test your ideas.  Implement the proposed actions and see if they yield the results you want.  Don't merely measure the presence or absence of the vital behaviors; also check to see whether the results you want are happening.

To make it easy to both surface and test vital behaviors, conduct short-cycle-time experiments.  Don't hypothesize forever or put massive studies into place.  Instead, develop the habit of conducting rapid, low-risk mini experiments.

Whether you conduct best-practices studies on your own, search for positive deviance, conduct mini experiments, or simply look for those who have already identified the vital behaviors for you, the point is the same.  Don't glance around, take the first piece of advice from a friend, or rely on a hunch.  Instead, follow the lead of influence geniuses everywhere.  Conduct a genuine search for vital behaviors.  If you don't, it won't be long before you'll be searching for serenity.