Page 55 - The Power to Change Anything

44 INFLUENCER

and not to take the one-time failure as a sign that he won’t be
able to succeed and that therefore he should give in to his
cravings.
Until Henry identified this and similar recovery behaviors,
he was constantly taking two steps forward, followed by three
steps back. Now when he runs into a problem, he stops his
backward fall by using his mistake as a data point for learning
and not as an indicator that he ought to give up. Recovery
behaviors make up an important part of every change master’s
influence strategy.

Test Your Results. Finally, if you’ve conducted your own
research and found candidates for what you think are high-
leverage vital behaviors, test your ideas. Implement the pro-
posed actions and see if they yield the results you want. Don’t
merely measure the presence or absence of the vital behaviors;
also check to see whether the results you want are happening.
To make it easy to both surface and test vital behaviors, con-
duct short-cycle-time experiments. Don’t hypothesize forever
or put massive studies into place. Instead, develop the habit of
conducting rapid, low-risk mini experiments.
Whether you conduct best-practices studies on your own,
search for positive deviance, conduct mini experiments, or sim-
ply look for those who have already identified the vital behav-
iors for you, the point is the same. Don’t glance around, take
the first piece of advice from a friend, or rely on a hunch.
Instead, follow the lead of influence geniuses everywhere.
Conduct a genuine search for vital behaviors. If you don’t, it
won’t be long before you’ll be searching for serenity.