Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
This is one of those books that was published in 2021. I didn't find it until 2023 and I can imagine my life without it. If you were working in an enterprise or a large company, this book should be required reading.. Like with all of my other books, I put them on my Kindle so that I can take highlights as I'm reading the book which then become my Notes bookmarks for me to explore the topic further or references that I wanna look up and site sources that I wanna read the volume of highlights that I make in a book usually correlates to how much I like it this book push the limits of Kindle highlight and have over 100 highlights, most of which are good things that I wanna know several of which are studies that were cited or other books that were talked about that I am going to continue reading I can't stress enough how much I have gotten out of this book how relevant it is to the work of change management and organizational change. Many of the concepts discussed in the book things that I'm already doing with my team and my clients, but put in a new way of framing the conversation at the end of the book and I put here for the reader are Damon's seven strategies of change. The seven strategies of change align nicely with the goals of ProSci’s ADKAR methodology, as well as other change, methodology frameworks.
💡 Max Planck darkly confessed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
7 Strategies of Change
Strategy 1: Don’t rely on contagiousness. Social change does not spread like a virus. A viral advertising campaign doesn’t enable new ideas to take hold. Simply attracting eyeballs will not suffice. Not only that, it can backfire. If word of an innovation reaches everyone but nobody adopts, the unintended effect is to make the innovation look undesirable. Think of Google+. A negative stigma arising from a widely publicized failure can undercut future efforts. To make your change initiative successful, do not rely on the contagious spread of information to solve the problem. Use strategies that are designed to grow support for complex contagions, which will allow behavior change to take hold and take off.
Strategy 2: Protect the innovators. Non-adopters are often countervailing influences. Any social-change effort that requires legitimacy or social coordination depends as much on limiting skeptical signals from non-adopters as it does on creating reinforcing signals from adopters. Think about hybrid corn. Innovations that face entrenched opposition from established norms can spread more effectively when early adopters have less exposure to the entire network. This is a matter of balance between being protected and being connected. You need to create enough wide bridges to allow the innovators to work together to spread the new idea, while giving them ample reinforcement from one another so that they do not get overwhelmed by countervailing influences. A good way to do this is to target social clusters in the network periphery.
Strategy 3: Use the network periphery. Highly connected influencers can be a roadblock for social change. This is because they are connected to a vast number of countervailing influences—that is, people conforming to the status quo. The key to initiating social change is to target the periphery. Think of the Arab Spring. The network periphery was associated both with greater propagation of activist messages and with greater turnout at protest events. Stop looking for special people, and focus instead on special places. Think of the spread of contraception in Korea. Your resources are precious.
Strategy 4: Establish wide bridges. A narrow bridge typically consists of a single weak tie between groups. Narrow bridges have reach but lack redundancy, which is necessary to spread complex contagions. To spread a new behavior from one group to another, wide bridges are essential for establishing the necessary trust, credibility, and legitimacy. Think of the growth of Black Lives Matter. Any attempt to coordinate a large and diverse population should be based on establishing wide bridges between different subgroups
Strategy 5: Create relevance. There is no magic bullet for creating relevance, no single defining trait that is always influential. However, a few general principles are helpful for understanding how relevance gets established from one context to another:
PRINCIPLE 1: When behavior change requires that people be given social proof that a particular innovation will be useful for them, similarity with the adopters is a key factor for creating relevance.
PRINCIPLE 2: When behavior change requires a degree of emotional excitement or feelings of loyalty and solidarity, then, once again, similarity among the sources of reinforcement will help to inspire behavior change.
PRINCIPLE 3: When behavior change is based on legitimacy—that is, believing that the behavior is widely accepted—then the opposite is true: diversity among reinforcing sources of adoption is key for spreading the innovation. Think of the equal-sign campaign on Facebook. When it comes to creating relevance, context is king. Deciding whether the key factor is diversity or similarity (and what kind of similarity
Strategy 6: Use the snowball strategy. Clustering is key to triggering tipping points. Strategically target locations in the social network where early adopters can reinforce one another’s commitment to your initiative. Remember Malawi. The snowball strategy creates stable pockets of legitimacy for an innovation. The emphasis here, again, is on special places, not special people. Incubator neighborhoods allow a new behavior to compete against an established norm. Contrary to the lessons learned from decades of research on simple contagions, too much exposure to non-adopters early on is counterproductive.
Principle 1: Know the community and its boundaries. Is your target community composed of farmers in Iowa, homeowners in Germany, or villagers in Zimbabwe? Who are the people you want to reach, what do they believe, and what are the social norms you want to change? To tip a social norm, you must first determine the boundary of the community that you want to change. Is it a neighborhood, a state, or a nation? Is it an online chat group or a political party?
Principle 2: Target bridging groups. Bridging groups are social clusters that establish wide bridges between divisions. Think of a group working between the engineering team, the design team, and the sales team. Bridging groups are special because they are the most centrally located groups in a social network.
Strategy 7: Design team networks to improve discovery and reduce bias. Networks are not neutral. They either foster innovation or they hamper it. They either promote knowledge transfer across groups or they reduce it. The right contagion infrastructure spurs teams to be more creative, and groups to be more cooperative; the wrong one can thwart creativity and cooperation. Familiar ideas and biased opinions are simple contagions. They are easy to understand and easy to follow. They will spread if you let them. In centralized networks, social stars are effective for spreading these simple contagions. True innovation requires protecting people from influences that reinforce the status quo. Breaking free of old ideas and discovering new common ground
Author’s Video
Highlights from my Kindle
Through the hidden power of social influence, the network around us shapes how we respond to an innovation, causing us either to ignore it or to adopt it. This much-deeper process of social spreading is called complex contagion, and it has given rise to a new science for understanding how change happens—and how we can help make it happen.
But the idea at its heart is a simple one: successful social change is not about information; it’s about norms. Social networks are not merely the pipes through which ideas and behaviors flow from person to person. They are also the prisms that determine how we see those behaviors
This is an example of what sociologists call a coordination problem. Any kind of social gesture you might adopt—from a high-five to a handshake—is a behavior that depends on coordinating with other people.
These countervailing influences send a silent but remarkably strong social signal. They tell us how accepted an innovation is, and how likely it is to be seen as legitimate (or illegitimate) by our peers. Which is to say, a well-connected leader will be much more influenced by the countervailing influences coming from the overwhelming majority of her non-adopting contacts than by the positive signal coming from a small number of early adopters.
The more people in the periphery who adopt your innovation, the stronger the signal will be for everyone else. This is how social change gains momentum. Once an innovation starts to spread through the periphery, it can grow large enough that even highly connected influencers will be forced to sit up and pay attention.
While completing his PhD at the University of California, San Diego, he examined more than thirteen million tweets to see whether a common pattern connected Egypt, Libya, and Morocco to all the other places where revolution had erupted. As it turned out, one did: in every case, whenever social-media activity translated into real social activism—that is, people marching in streets—the bulk of messages did not come from the highly connected stars in the social network. Instead, the greatest predictor of activism was coordinated online activity in the network periphery.
We can now say with confidence that the crucial networks of social change are not the hub-and-radiating-spoke patterns that surround highly connected “influencers,” but rather the interlocking ties that permeate the network periphery. If social change is going to gain traction, it has to start there—among people who face the same choices and challenges that we do, people whose coordination and acceptance form an invisible but essential part of our daily routines. The network periphery is a powerful place. It is where the strong, broad currents of social change take hold and expand.
“The Strength of Weak Ties.” This study has been so influential that it is the most-cited scientific paper today in the entire field of sociology.
Redundancy will not help to spread the measles. You can’t get infected twice—it takes only one contact to do it. But when it comes to a new idea, the experience of being exposed to it from two, three, or four people within your network of strong ties—that changes the idea into a norm. It changes how you think and feel about it. And that is the overlooked power of redundancy.
Cultural and social norms embedded in our networks can create enduring opposition to change. The story of change is not only a story of pioneering social innovations that disrupt markets and challenge the powerful. Remarkably, it is also a story of how the people who are most in need of new solutions often resist them.
The problem is that the dynamics of simple contagions apply only to the spread of simple ideas. Beliefs-and-behavior change spreads in a different way, and through different channels. Any change that involves real risk—financial, psychological, or reputational—requires more than simply coming into contact with a single random adopter or “carrier.”
People need to receive reinforcement (or “social proof”) from multiple adopters to be convinced—and for the new behavior to propagate. The more resistance there is to a new idea or behavior, the more social reinforcement is needed to persuade people to adopt it.
They are complex because they involve risk. The higher the stakes of a decision and the greater the uncertainty, the more “proof” people require—in the form of confirmation from multiple peers—before taking the plunge.
Coordination: Some innovations are appealing only if people use them together. If the value of an innovation or behavior depends on the number of other people who adopt it, then it requires social reinforcement to spread.
Credibility: Some innovations encounter skepticism about their effectiveness or safety. The more people who adopt a behavior, the more social proof there is that it is not as risky as we might have feared.
Legitimacy: Some innovations require social approval before they will be adopted. The barrier here is the risk of embarrassment or a tarnished reputation. The more people who adopt a behavior, the greater the expectation that others will approve of the decision to adopt and the lower the risk of embarrassment
Excitement: Some innovations and behaviors are appealing only when people are emotionally energized by one another. The more people who adopt a behavior, the more excited other people become about adopting it. This is how social effervescence grows. It is what fuels the spread of participation
It’s the same for new communication technologies, from videoconferencing to email: you need several contacts to adopt the technology before its social value becomes clear to you. But once a communication technology is widely used it becomes a social necessity, making it hard to abandon. The takeaway here looks like a paradox: innovations that encounter the greatest resistance—because people are sensitive to issues of legitimacy, coordination, or social proof—are often the ones people are most committed to once they finally adopt them. This is what sociologists call entrenchment.
People who received reinforcing messages from several peers were much more likely to adopt the innovation. And once they did, their signals added to the chorus of reinforcing messages for their neighbors, resulting in still more adoption.
Sprague and House’s remarkable findings change how we think about spreading on social media. Whereas viral memes achieve their rapid expansion by spreading across weak ties, complex contagions can also grow rapidly. But they require social redundancy in order to do so. This insight is useful not only for understanding past successes but also for predicting future ones.
Narrow bridges speed information over weak ties. Wide bridges bear social change over strong ones.
Wide bridges are not about reach but redundancy. They allow people on both sides of the bridge to hear the opinions and recommendations of multiple peers and colleagues, and to discuss and debate ideas with them. Wide bridges mean stronger ties.
The Three Rules of Relevance When we think about people our own age and gender, with similar educational and cultural backgrounds and jobs and family situations, seeing life through their eyes—otherwise known as perspective-taking—feels effortless. We intuitively understand their decisions because we understand—and likely share—their core beliefs and values. The more that people are like us, the more easily we can empathize with them, and the more inclined we are to take their choices seriously. Conversely, the more someone differs from us—the less similar their core commitments, concerns, circumstances, and so on are to our own—the more difficult it can be to understand why they do what they do.
Principle 1: When people need social proof that a particular innovation will be useful for them, then similarity with earlier adopters is a key factor for creating relevance.
Principle 2: When behavior change requires a degree of emotional excitement, or feelings of loyalty and solidarity, then—once again—similarity among the sources of reinforcement will help to inspire behavior change. For instance, the Pals Battalions campaign in World War I mobilized citizens to action through emphasizing people’s sense of solidarity with recruits from the same hometown as them. Principle 3: When behavior change is based on legitimacy—that is, believing that the behavior is widely accepted—then the opposite is true: diversity among reinforcing sources of adoption is key for spreading the innovation. For instance, people’s willingness to join the equal-sign campaign on Facebook depended on seeing it adopted by peers from diverse social circles, who could establish the movement’s broad legitimacy.
Wittgenstein’s second treatise. Wittgenstein continued to believe that language was the key to understanding the world. But he no longer believed that logic was the key to understanding language. Rather, language was social. The secret to understanding language was to understand how people play coordination “games” with one another.
Many other studies have shown the same effect. People often explain other people’s choices as a desire to conform to social norms but rarely believe it about themselves. When it comes to their own decisions, most people are certain that their choices are based on intelligent reasoning and personal preferences. This observation has since become known as the introspection illusion.
Snowball strategy. Compared with the reach and scale of the shotgun and silver-bullet strategies, the snowball strategy seems relatively pedestrian. But although it’s not glamorous, this strategy has legs. Instead of targeting special people who can spread an innovation far and wide, the snowball strategy is based on targeting special places in the social network where an innovation can take hold. The goal of the snowball strategy is not to convince everyone to adopt at once. Rather, it is to incubate support for your innovation. It is to grow a critical mass. To use the snowball strategy for the Korean contraception initiative, you would select ten change agents and give each of them one dollar to adopt and promote birth control, just as in the shotgun strategy. However, unlike the shotgun strategy, instead of picking ten people who are dispersed far and wide in the network, you would choose ten change agents who are all part of the same social cluster. The key to the snowball strategy is that all of your change agents know one another.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Malawi experiment is the number of change agents they used. How many change agents do you think they had in each village? In our thought experiment in Korea, we imagined there were ten change agents in each village. In Malawi, there were only two! How could such a small number of change agents have such strikingly different effects in each group of villages? The answer is social redundancy.
Such is the nature of uncertainty. When people are scared, they hold on to what they know. For the spread of complex contagions, even at the turn of the twenty-first century, innovations still gain legitimacy, credibility, and social currency by being reinforced within people’s close social networks.
Festinger used the term motivated reasoning to describe the way an individual’s psychological and political biases can significantly skew their interpretation of otherwise neutral information. As he put it: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” Echo chambers are exactly what organizational scholars refer to as silos. Silos emerge when there are no bridges between groups, preventing valuable information from traveling between them. As you saw in chapter 6, a narrow bridge can spread information, but it is often not enough to transfer knowledge between groups. That requires wide bridges.
By contrast, contentious ideas that challenge a group’s biases are complex contagions: these ideas face strong opposition and are therefore unlikely to emerge from highly connected individuals facing a sea of countervailing influences. New ideas that challenge the status quo emerge more commonly from the moderately connected network periphery—where everyone’s voice is equally heard, and where new ideas can be reinforced among peers and protected from too many countervailing influences.
The natural asymmetry in the influence of influencers—they’re good at spreading simple contagions but poor at spreading complex ones—can be particularly consequential for the spread of misinformation that exploits a community’s biases. In 2020, a groundbreaking study of this phenomenon, led by Nancy Keating of Harvard Medical School, showed that physicians’ willingness to use new biologic therapies to treat cancer patients depends crucially on the social networks within their medical community. Keating and her team examined the treatment decisions of more than 800 physicians, across 432 practices, located in more than 400 different medical communities. Over the course of their four-year study, starting in 2005, Keating’s team examined the reasons why physicians switched their cancer patients from traditional chemotherapy treatments to the new biologic therapy, bevacizumab. Keating found that neither the nature of a patient’s illness nor the characteristics of a physician’s background and experience could explain why some patients received the new treatment while others did not. Even the size of a physician’s practice did not seem to matter. Clinically identical breast-cancer patients—treated by similarly trained physicians with similar pedigrees and in similar kinds of practices—were receiving starkly different treatments.
Other Books to Explore:
Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman, OK: The University Book Exchange, 1961).
Douglas McAdam and Ronnelle Paulsen, “Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 640–667;
Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]).
Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book
