To be successful with innovation and encourage the kind of behavior change you need, you need to motivate the elephant. As you will remember, the elephant is the emotional component of the behavior change equation. So, the elephant is motivated by pleasure and reward. The elephant is instinctual, and the elephant weights six tons, so the elephant does whatever it wants. Some ways that you can help to get people's elephants motivated. Well first, you want to be sensitive that self-control is not one of the strong points of elephants. Self-control is an exhaustible resource, and when you run out of it, you lose the mental muscles needed to stick to the plan. One person who was successful with this was used in an example in the book Switch, which is all about making change when change is hard. So this person at a big company discovered that there was a great opportunity to save costs, and the cost-saving opportunity was with gloves. Dozens of different departments were ordering dozens of different kinds of gloves that were somewhat similar. Probably just a few different kinds that were needed, but instead, they had dozens of different kinds being ordered. They're missing this opportunity to order in bulk and save some money. Now, she could have just presented this as a report and shown some statistics, to hope that the organization, the company would change the policy on it. Instead, she went around to each department and got a pair of each of the different kinds of gloves, put them in a box, brought them to the meeting, and dumped them in the middle of the table, and showed everybody. And she created this great feeling amongst them of oh my gosh, this is ridiculous. There's so many different kinds of gloves, I see it now. You found the feeling here. Yes, let's change this, let's save some money. Another way is by shrinking the change. So you can help motivate the elephant by reducing the size of the change so it's less intimidating. The example they use in the book is of the five minute room cleaning. If you look at your house, your apartment, or even the room you're in and say gosh, I really need to clean it, I know I do. But it's gonna require so much work, it can be really demotivating to the elephant. So instead, try setting a timer for five minutes. Give yourself permission to clean and then stop after five minutes. You'll find that it's much easier to get some cleaning done. If you say, listen, I'm gonna clean for five minutes and then I'm going to watch TV again, you're more likely to clean at all, and that's what's really required to clean your house. Another great example in the book is the example of the St Lucia parrot. This is an endangered species on the island of St Lucia, and it was endangered because its habitat was being destroyed. They needed a new policy to prevent the logging of those forests, those areas, and help preserve that habitat. It wasn't happening very quickly, so this campaigner came up with this idea to increase people's pride in the parrot. They started connecting it to things, phone calling cards, and t-shirts. He showed images of the American bald eagle and the St Lucia parrot together. Look at this beautiful bird we have. We should be really proud of it. This is our bird. What kind of people are we? We're the kind of people who protect our own. The parrot is one of our own. Let's protect our parrot. They're threatening our parrot. We can't let them do that. The people of St Lucia started to say, yeah. This is our parrot. Protect our parrot. And now the parrot is no longer endangered. This beautiful parrot only appears in the world on that island. It's been saved because this person understood how to motivate the elephant. So please remember, self-control is an exhaustible resource. You can help motivate people's elephants by finding the feeling, shrinking the change, and growing your people.
