Page 42 - The Power to Change Anything

Find Vital Behaviors 31

change, but how do you know if they’ve really found the high-
leverage actions that lead to the results you care about?
Fortunately, the science of identifying which actions lead to key
outcomes—no matter the domain—has already been carefully
developed by those who study “best practices.” To learn what
to watch for as you study the best practices others have uncov-
ered, consider the following case.

MEET ETHNA REID

To see how one of these best-practice studies is completed, we’ll
visit Dr. Ethna Reid in Salt Lake City. She’ll teach us how to
identify which behaviors, from a list of hundreds, separate suc-
cessful people from everyone else. The technique she routinely
applies to schoolteachers sets the standard for how to search for
vital behaviors.
Forty years before we met Dr. Reid, soon after she had com-
pleted her doctoral work and was teaching prospective educa-
tors how to improve students’ poor reading habits, she turned
to her academic mentor and asked, “Does any of what you’re
teaching me actually work?”
Her mentor explained that he didn’t know for sure. He sus-
pected it did. It certainly made sense. But nobody had actually
studied the effects of the accepted methods.
Dr. Reid decided it was time to find out.
She began by calling a local school district and asking if
anyone had records tracking, say, reading comprehension. The
district experts actually had 20 years of data. Better still, they
had conducted studies that were quite informative—and tragic.
Based only on the first year’s testing, researchers could predict
how well students would do in the third year, the seventh, and
so on.
“The model is highly predictive,” explained the voice on
the other end of the phone. Reid was thunderstruck. With cold,
scientific precision, the researcher explained to her that the