Page 271 - The Power to Change Anything

260 INFLUENCER

they wanted, the leaders often concluded that they could select
from the various strategies we were recommending like so
many items in a catalog. They wanted to purchase influence
on the cheap, but the changes they were attempting to bring
about couldn’t be had at bargain-basement prices.
But desperate times lead to desperate actions, and people,
more often than not, seek simplistic solutions, even when
they’re studying the world’s best influencers. For example, Dr.
Silbert explains that over the past three decades she has invested
a great deal of time with people who have traveled halfway
around the world to learn what she’s done to help criminals and
drug addicts become productive citizens. Silbert tells those
who visit Delancey Street the whole story—emphasizing each
of the elements required to make the venture succeed. She clar-
ifies the exact vital behaviors the organization tries to encour-
age. She notes how she purposely creates direct and vicarious
experiences to help residents change their minds. She goes to
great pains to ensure that the influence strategy makes good use
of all six sources of influence.
More often than not, the travelers leave Delancey Street
filled with hope. Then they go home and select one idea to add
to their existing ineffective effort. Of course, this single element
rarely adds enough horsepower to create change, so their “new
and improved” strategy fails, and the earnest change agents
wonder why their effort didn’t work.
These cafeteria-style change efforts—where people pick
only a few elements from a broader array—happen all the time.
For example, if you look at the diffusion of the North Carolina
second-chance strategy we described earlier, you’ll find that it
follows a predictable and lamentable path. Remember the
clever crime-reduction strategy where soon-to-be-arrested drug
dealers were brought into a room filled with pictures of them
committing crimes? At one point the local district attorney
shows a video montage made up of criminal scenes taken of
each of the subjects in action and then asks the subjects to raise