literature, using behavioral science to build new training techniques that could safely deescalate a crisis.1
For the last few decades, negotiators like Greg have relied on a different model—one that works. Whether trying to convince an international terrorist to let hostages go or to change someone’s mind about committing suicide. Even when talking to someone who just killed his family, who’s locked himself up in a bank with hostages, who knows he’s talking to a police officer, who knows the consequences and knows his life is going to change. Nine out of ten times he comes out by himself.
And he comes out just because someone asks.
The Power of Inertia
Everyone has something they want to change. Salespeople want to change their customers’ minds and marketers want to change purchase decisions. Employees want to change their bosses’ perspective and leaders want to change organizations. Parents want to change their children’s behavior. Start-ups want to change industries. Nonprofits want to change the world.
But change is hard.
We persuade and cajole and pressure and push, but even after all that work, often nothing moves. Things change at a glacial pace if they change at all. In the tale of the tortoise and the hare, change is a three-toed sloth on his lunch break.
Isaac Newton famously noted that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, while an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Sir Isaac focused on physical objects—planets, pendulums, and the like—but the same concepts can be applied to the social world. Just like moons and comets, people and organizations are guided by conservation of momentum. Inertia. They tend to do what they’ve always done.
Rather than thinking about which candidate represents their values, voters tend to pick whoever represents the party they voted for in the past. Rather than starting fresh and thinking about which projects deserve attention, companies take last year’s budget and use that as a starting point. Rather than rebalancing financial portfolios, investors tend to look at how they’ve been investing and stay the course.
Inertia explains why families go back to the same vacation spot every year and why organizations are wary of starting new initiatives but loath to kill off old ones.
When trying to change minds and overcome such inertia, the tendency is to push. Client not buying the pitch? Send them a deck of facts and reasons. Boss not listening to the idea? Give them more examples or a deeper explanation.
Whether trying to change company culture or get the kids to eat their vegetables, the assumption is that pushing harder will do the trick. That if we just provide more information, more facts, more reasons, more arguments, or just add a little more force, people will change.
Implicitly, this approach assumes that people are like marbles. Push them in one direction and they will go that way.
Unfortunately, that approach often backfires. Unlike marbles, people don’t just roll with it when you try to push them. They push back. Rather than saying yes, the client stops returning our calls. Rather than going along, the boss says they’ll think about it, which is a nice way of saying “Thanks, but no way.” Rather than coming out with their hands up, a suspect holes up and starts shooting.
So if pushing people doesn’t work, what does?
A Better Way to Change Minds
To answer this question, it helps to look to a completely different domain: chemistry.
Left to itself, chemical change can take eons. Algae and plankton turning into oil, or carbon being gradually squeezed into diamonds. For reactions to occur, molecules must break the bonds between their atoms and form new ones. It’s a slow and painstaking process that happens over thousands if not millions of years.
To facilitate change, chemists often use a special set of substances. These unsung heroes clean the exhaust in your car and the grime on your contact lenses. They turn air into fertilizer and petroleum into bike helmets. They speed change, enabling molecules that might take years to interact to do so in seconds.
Most intriguing, though, is the way these substances generate change.
Chemical reactions usually require a certain amount of energy. Turning nitrogen gas into fertilizer, for example, usually requires heating things up to over 1000°C. Adding enough energy, through temperature and pressure, to force a reaction.
Special substances speed up the process. But rather than upping the heat or adding more pressure, they provide an alternate route, reducing the amount of energy required for reactions to occur.
At first glance, this seems impossible. Like magic. How can faster change happen