Maxim #39
Better to sell aspirins than vitamins
Dan and Chip Heath, best-selling authors of “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” as well as “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” wrote an interesting article in the November 2010 issue of Fast Company. In it they discuss this maxim. They attribute the expression to venture capitalists in explaining what entrepreneurs need in order to be successful. The basic idea is that vitamins are a nice idea, where as aspirins are a “must-have” and fix an immediate pain. The difference between possible future gratification versus immediate certain gratification is a key principle that comes into play when we work with companies to try to manage change.
People are more prone to take action if the consequences of that action are immediate, certain, and affect them personally. Conversely, people are less prone to take action if the consequences are sometime in the future, less certain, and may not affect them personally. This is why it is hard to get people to change their behavior in a company by trying to sell them on the notion that the company will be more profitable as a result. The consequences to them individually are in the future, uncertain, and may not benefit them personally. Not a very powerful motivator.
Studying processes and systems can be largely academic. You can get smart people in a room to study a process map and they will come up with some good ideas. However getting managers or employees to actually change the way they behave on a day-to-day basis is much more difficult. When we work with organizations we have to spend a great deal of time and effort trying to understand why people behave in a certain way. People develop patterns of behavior for a reason and they are not easy to alter. To change those patterns you need to convince them that it will fix a specific pain, not just that it will make them a “better” manager or employee.
