If You Want to Make Big Behavior Changes You Need to Start Small

We’re all familiar with the idea of a “ripple effect.” Literally, it describes the circles that emanate from an object dropped in water, but is applicable across many applications. For instance, look at Amazon. In 1995, during the earliest days of the internet, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookstore. By 2017, Bezos was one of the richest men in the world, having redefined retail. How did he accomplish this feat? By applying the ripple effect to his business strategy and mastering a niche – books – before expanding into other areas like CDs and DVDs, toys, electronics, groceries, and even into services.

Not every organization has the kind of longevity and growth of Amazon (but every organization can—if they do the right things), but Bezos’ strategy of securing your place before expanding into new avenues is the same strategy anyone can adopt when attempting to engineer behavior transformation in their organization. Leaders need to ask “which fewest people changing which narrowest set of behaviors will allow us to achieve our strategic outcomes?” Just like Bezos started with books and expanded, we must start with our own behavior and cascade down to the behaviors of critical groups, silos, functions and roles that need to change.  

This approach has many supporters. Stanford Psychologist and Researcher, BJ Fogg's work on the ripple effect, has found that the most effective way to initiate change is to begin with a narrow focus and build on that. He says that “To create a real lifelong habit, the focus should be on training your brain to succeed at small adjustments, then gaining confidence from that success.” “To do that, one needs to design behavior changes that are both easy to do and can be seamlessly slipped into your existing routine. Aim for automaticity."

Fogg’s behavior change approach, which focuses on behavioral engineering through changing narrow behaviors, is a cornerstone of our coaching at Ferrazzi Greenlight. Through our own engagements across different industries, we’ve learned that the only way to affect a large shift in behavior across tens or hundreds of thousands of people is to find the right small group who will create that first ripple into the rest of the organization.

Putting It Into Action

Before any organization can start down their own path, though, we introduce them to our High-Return Practices that they can build upon. One of the practices we use with our clients is known as Dial Up/Dial Down; it’s an exercise in self-reflection and is one of the foundational elements of behavior change in the Going Higher Together team methodology.

Simply put, it is the practice of examining what is limiting your current level of performance and committing to take action to do more (Dial Up) or do less (Dial Down) of a specific behavior or behaviors in order to grow personally and professionally.

In this way, it takes advantage of the ripple effect of behavior change and allows behavioral engineering to occur and be unleashed throughout an organization. You start small, build confidence, and then keep iterating. Then others do the same, and the overall impact is significant.

Dial Up/Dial Down is about making a commitment to your personal growth and declaring to your team the actions you will take so they can hold you accountable to going higher together.

In the same way that businesses expand from a narrow focus outward, so too does behavior; leaders should harness the power of the ripple effect and focus on changing the narrowest set of behaviors possible that will help them achieve their strategic outcomes. Dial Up/Dial Down is a practice that organizations can implement to make behavior change an integral part of their operations.

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