Under the Influencer

I’ve read three books this year that have made me rethink approaches to teaching and presentation: Made to Stick, Brain Rules, and now Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Influencer is about sources and strategies of influence that effect significant change in people and communities. Teaching is influencing. The application of the ideas in this book to leading and learning is potent.

Influencer is threaded with stories that reinforce the authors’ ideas. The most powerful story is that of the Delancey Street Foundation, a “self-help organization for substance abusers, ex-convicts, homeless and others who have hit bottom.” Their successes are all the more inspiring for the enormity of the challenges and intractable behaviors to be overcome. The challenge of training library staff and guiding them through change seems totally attainable by comparison.

You really need to read the book to get the full development of the processes. I’ll just highlight some key takeaways, with a few Delancey Street examples.

Outcome is good but behavior is vital

This was a light bulb revelation for me—that focusing on outcomes is not the best way to achieve them. Outcomes are certainly desirable but they’re not concrete enough. For someone who is trying to kick a drug habit, the outcome is to become drug-free. That’s a noble goal, but it so often succumbs to failure. A person needs a whole lot more than the target outcome to achieve success; he has to know exactly what to do. The individual must learn the day-to-day, minute-to-minute behaviors that need to change every step of the way between addicted and clean.

Strong influencers take the focus on behavior a step further and identify the vital behaviors that are pivotal to unlocking a flood of change. Changing just a few key behaviors can cause problems to “topple like a house of cards.”

At Delancey Street, “the hardest thing we do here is to get rid of the code of the street. It says: ‘Care only about yourself, and don’t rat on anyone.’ If you reverse those two behaviors, you can change everything else.”

When deviance is desirable

An effective method for identifying those vital behaviors is to look for “positive deviance.” Who is achieving success against the odds and what are they doing that differs from the norm? Once the unique behaviors are filtered out, test them to see if they can be replicated with other communities.

Get personal

“Personal experience is the mother of all cognitive map changers.” Great teachers and presenters can certainly be verbally persuasive, moving an audience to open their minds and think differently about a topic. But real learning involves some actual change in behavior, and that happens most readily from direct experience. At Delancey Street, any attempt at preaching values or making eloquent verbal appeals may be met with a reactive volley of profanity. Residents make progress by doing, by putting into practice new behaviors before they even understand the full intent of what they’re doing and what they’re supposed to be learning from their actions.

Eat the elephant one bite at a time

The phrase is becoming a cliché but I still love the image it conjures. When the challenge to change looks enormous, when the learning curve looks impossibly steep, just get out your fork and dig in one bite at a time. For Delancey Street residents, the bite of the elephant may be as small as learning to set a table—first get the fork in the right place, then the knife ….

You can sign up for a free account with the Influencer website and download the Influencer Worksheet to help plan your next training initiative. However, it probably won’t make enough sense until you’ve read the book. If every library trainer reads and implements Influencer ideas, will we be riding on the top of a tidal wave of positive change?

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