What’s the easiest change for people to make?
The Change Question: What’s the easiest change for people to make?
I hope you’re ambitious for your change process.
We’re here, you’re here, to make a difference after all.
So why not dream big?
In a book of mine, How to Begin, I say “we unlock our greatness by working on the hard things,” and I believe that to be true.
But perhaps you, too, have felt the disappointment of the grand dream poorly realized. I’ve certainly been a victim of trying to shift my jazz-handing, big-talking, horizon-seeking dreams and strategies (I’m a “big thinker,” yes I am!) to more tangible ways of getting it done.
There’s nothing at all wrong with big dreams. Just don’t confuse that with needing grand strategies to execute them. In fact, more often, it’s small, steady, tactics and experiments that are required to make consistent progress.
In last week’s conversation with Roy Baumeister, the most influential voice on willpower, I was very struck with this piece of research he shared.
You have a limited stock of willpower, and it's used for all the same things. So each time you spend some willpower doing one thing, you make it less likely that you'll succeed at the others.
So start with the easiest change, because self-control is like a muscle. As you exercise it, you get stronger and you get better.
One of my former PhD students, Mark Moravian, worked with people trying to quit smoking, and that's the graveyard of psychological theories. Hardly anything works.
But he had people just practice strengthening their self-control for a couple of weeks with simple things. Like if you have the habit of opening the door with your right hand, well, use your left hand instead — little things like that. And he tripled the success rate of people quitting smoking.
I’m getting two a-has when I think of this.
First, it’s increasingly clear to me that the real, deeper role of a change agent is to build change capacity in your organization.
If you don’t have people who are curious, who have some self-control, who feel some agency, who have courage … it doesn’t matter how good your plans are, how enthusiastic your sponsors are, how large your budget is. Baumeister teaches us that small interventions, easy things to achieve, can help build great capacity for change.
Secondly, it’s a reminder that change is a complex, unpredictable, and emergent process. It always is.
That’s annoying for those of us who’d like something more predictable, something more “I’ll pull this lever, work this process, trigger this mechanism, and voila! I’ll get what I am hoping for.” I’m one of those people, by the way
But what is liberating about knowing this is that small changes can create big differences in a system. “The Butterfly Effect” is the title of the very first chapter of the very first book I read about complexity, James Gleick's forty-year-old Chaos: Making a New Science.
Hold big dreams for the changes you want to make. Find the story and the purpose in the work you do.
But realize that small and often easy habits, practices, tactics and experiments are how you’ll keep moving forward.
