Have you tried to convince someone to change their behaviour or viewpoint lately? It happens more often than you think. Whether it be giving feedback at a performance appraisal, discussing which projects to cut at an annual review, or just getting your child to eat their vegetables. Did it work?
Jonah Berger (@j1berger) gives you a framework to try the next time you fail to get someone to change. His latest book the Catalyst introduces the REDUCE framework :-
He also has some great case studies to illustrate these points. I highlight the example of a rabbi persuading the leader of the local Klu Klux Klan to resign.
These, and more, are useful lessons if you are in business, or in business school.
Have you tried to convince someone to change their behaviour or viewpoint lately? It happens more often than you think. Whether it be giving feedback at a performance appraisal, discussing which projects to cut at an annual review, or just getting your child to eat their vegetables. Did it work?
Jonah Berger (@j1berger) gives you a framework to try the next time you fail to get someone to change. His latest book the Catalyst introduces the REDUCE framework :-
He also has some great case studies to illustrate these points. I highlight the example of a rabbi persuading the leader of the local Klu Klux Klan to resign.
These, and more, are useful lessons if you are in business, or in business school.
You are listening to the Book Judge, a podcast about books that you should read if you are interested in business. I am your host, Conrad Chua and I will review books that cover the usual business school disciplines like strategy, marketing, innovation but also some professional development books and even fiction.
For this first episode, I will be introducing the latest book by Jonah Berger called the Catalyst, How to Change Anyone’s mind. Berger teaches marketing at Wharton and I read his earlier work Contagious where he examined how some products and ideas catch on. I learnt a lot from that book about how things go viral, and how social behaviours and attitudes can change very quickly when you least expect it.
In the Catalyst, Jonah takes a different tack. He examines how we can change minds and behaviours, one person at a time. And this is a very relevant issue in business where if you are a leader, you are always persuading and changing people’s behaviours, whether that be your employees or customers or investors. One of Jonah’s main points is that very often, we fall into the trap of pushing the subject. So if a client is not buying, we send them more brochures and more slide decks. If an employee is not changing their behaviour, we send them more facts or issue veiled threats at the next performance appraisal. When my daughter does not eat her vegetables, I go from telling her veggies are good for her to taking away that sweet drink until she finishes her broccoli.
But as any parent or leader knows, this approach doesn’t work even if you have the best of intentions. People just harden their attitudes and dig deeper into their positions. I end up eating my daughter’s leftover broccoli.
Jonah suggests a different approach. The catalyst. Just like a catalyst causes a chemical reaction by offering an alternative pathway, Jonah suggests you can change minds by removing roadblocks and lowering the barriers to taking action.
He starts with the story of how a hostage negotiator persuades a suspect from the Russian mob to give himself up, not through threats of violence or incarceration, but by listening, getting into the suspect’s shoes, easing the pressure and getting them to see that their best option is to come up with their hands in the air.
Like many of these books, the Catalyst has a central framework that Jonah puts together into an acronym, REDUCE. According to him, Catalysts reduce Reactance, the R, ease Endowment the E, shrink Distance the D, alleviate Uncertainty, the U and find Corroborating Evidence, CE hence REDUCE. As these business acronyms go, this is quite a clever one since the book is all about REDUCING barriers to change. I am not going to go through all this, You still need to read the book but I wanted to share one example.
And this is where Jonah Berger did a great job throughout the book. He separated a case study at the end of each book so it is clear that he is using the case study to elaborate on his arguments. Too many times I find authors who weave case studies into their text and you get the feeling they are trying to generalise principles from specific cases.
Anyway back to the case study. It involves a rabbi and his wife, Michael and Julie Weisser, who had moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to head the Jewish congregation there. They soon receive anti-Semitic and Nazi literature through their letterboxes and get calls at night threatening violence if they did not leave. The perpetrator was a man by the name of Larry Trapp. Trapp had grown up in a white supremacist family and was well-known as the leader of the local Klu Klux Klan. The Weissers improved their home security and took precautions when leaving the house but they knew this was not sustainable.
Instead, the Weissers started to learn more about Larry Trapp. They found out that Trapp was almost blind and had both legs amputated because his diabetic condition was not treated when he was a child. They started calling him and leaving messages, appealing to his faith and pointing out that the Nazis passed laws against the disabled like Larry. But all the messages were full of hope that Larry could change. Larry eventually picked up the phone and was shocked when the rabbi offered to help him with the groceries knowing that it might be difficult for Larry in his wheelchair. Larry did not take up that offer that day but it did start a long process that ended with Trapp resigning from the Klan. He apologised to all the people he had hurt and he eventually converted to Judaism.
So how does this case fit into the REDUCE framework? The book explains that people like to feel they have control over their choices and will push back when someone interferes with their autonomy. This creates a state that Berger calls reactance. This is the R in the REDUCE framework It is a bit like the forbidden fruit syndrome, or how teenagers rebel against parental control.
So to reduce reactance, Michael and Julie Weisser did not tell Larry what to do but encouraged Larry to convince himself that he needed to change. In the end, Trapp was not doing something that the Weissers told him to do, but something that he wanted to do.
This was definitely the most powerful case study in the book. And if an extremist could change his mind and behaviour, then anyone can.
<Cue Did you Know music> This is the part of the podcast where I place the spotlight on one part of the book that you can use immediately in your business, or in an interview, or just to impress your business school friends. I call this the Did You Know section.
In the book, Jonah mentions 4 ways companies can reduce customer uncertainty towards adopting a new product or service. They are 1) harness freemium; 2) reduce up-front costs; 3) drives discovery and 4) make it reversible. Harnessing freemium is like how Dropbox gives you some storage for free but then charges you if you want more. The key of course is not to make the free storage so little that it is not worth it for anyone to even try it; while not making it so much that no one has any incentive to pay for the premium service.
Reducing Upfront costs is like how Zappos, the e-commerce shoe company got people to try their products by offering free shipping. It’s hard for me, as an Amazon prime fan, to remember a time when there was no free shipping but it was a bit of a revolution when Zappos started to offer this. As a new company, they faced the challenge that people wanted to try shoes before buying them and to overcome the reluctance to shop online, they offered free shipping. And it worked. The average order size actually increased.
Driving discovery is about getting the word out because people don’t know your product exists.
And last one is making it reversible which is self-explanatory. But I can tell you this is not an easy thing for an organisation to pull off. It is one thing to get your logistics right in terms of shipping a product to customers. It is quite another to handle returns, or reverse logistics. So Zappos did not just offer free shipping, they offered free returns. And you also have money back guarantees.
So the next time you are asked to launch a product or you’re in a case interview, you can use these options.
<cue Did you Know music>
Of course, if you are actually launching a product, the big challenge is getting all this through your organisation. And from my own experience, the sure-fire way of torpedoing all progress is to tell everyone you are applying some framework you read in a book. Nonetheless, there is a lot you can learn from this book the Catalyst about how you can persuade your boss, your colleagues to accept your proposals. It all comes down to that acronym REDUCE.
While most business books or so-called gurus sell an acronym that promises quick results, it is clear that Jonah Berger’s REDUCE is going to take a lot of time, whether you are convincing an 8 year old, a colleague, your boss, or millions of potential customers. I have to admit that one of my motivations for reading this book was to see if there was any quick fire way to get my daughter to obey my orders but the Catalyst showed me that’s not the way to think about things.
<Cue Harp Music> For every book I introduce, I have this segment called the author question. One question that I could ask the author. And my question for Jonah Berger is everything you write makes a lot of sense but you need a lot of patience to carry out the plan. But in many cases, you don’t have the luxury of time. For example, your boss is under pressure to deliver quarterly results, or you have a product launch deadline. What happens if you don’t have the time to follow the REDUCE framework? I am going to tweet this question to Jonah and hopefully he replies and I can share his answer.
That’s all for this first episode of the Book Judge.
If you have comments, you can tweet me @ConradChua16, or DM me on Instagram. I am chuakh there.
Till next time this is your Book Judge, Conrad Chua