[Home]

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler

Part of this assignment was to take the assessment available from the authors' website, www.influencerbook.com. The results of my assessment are listed below:

The three lowest scores were found in those areas highlighted in yellow above. Based on these results, my areas of focus should begin with sections 1, 5 and 8. Although in reading the text, I began to find some very useful nuggets even in those areas where I scored highest. For this assignment, I've chosen to address my lowest score and read section 8, Change the Environment. I found myself caught up in the possibilities it entailed from the very first example, William Foote Whyte's means to address the conflict that pervaded the post-WWII restaurant industry.

This particular example showed the benefit of an alternative approach to conflict resolution. Rather than trying to change people's behaviors, he chose instead to change people's environment. As a result, behaviors changed in response to their environmental change, and this indirect, non-confrontational approach was far more effective and scalable than working with individual behaviors. It got me to thinking about classrooms and what types of things we might change to make learning "environments" more effective in order to change behaviors either in our staff or our students. Pat Hensley, a colleague of mine with a background in special education from South Carolina, recently visited a Boeing plant in Washington state and shared her thoughts on environmental change in her blog post, "The Assembly Line Classroom." It's not what you might think. One of the most telling statements she shared was this:

"I also saw that office work stations were right there next to the plane. The tour guide told me that all of the people involved with that project worked right there instead of going back to far away offices. Then if there was a concern, it was easy to go up to that person and say, “hey, I need for us to look at this” and they both could walk right up to the plane and check it out."

She went on to ask what our schools would be like if we applied this environmental approach to addressing the needs of our students from a holistic perspective. What would happen if our resources were designed to compliment rather than to compete with one another?

Much like the subtle, pervasive attacks on our subconscious by advertising agencies, we find ourselves attuned to cues received by our environment. The red power tie, the garishly grand offices of executives, the distances and barriers we create between ourselves and those we thought we served. All of these contribute to an environment that is often unhealthy and even at odds with our own goals and objectives.

So where do we start? I like the following quote as one place to begin:

Learn to Notice

"If it's true that we rarely notice the impact of the physical environment that surrounds us because we simply don't think to look at it, it's time we change. The more we watch for silent forces from the physical world, the better prepeared we'll be to deal with them. Equally important, the more we note how we fall prey to simple, silent "things that surround us, the more likely it is that we'll extend our vigilance to other domains of our life."

Here are a few more:

• Make the invisible Visible
• Mind the data stream
• Make it easy
• Make it unavoidable

[Next Information Brief]