In a few weeks my family and I will be moving from our current home (a small, fairly new, rural-suburban place) to an old farmhouse in the country on 50 acres of land. Before we can live there, the place needs some work: right now it has the ability to handle 60 amps of electricity, only has electrical sockets in one room, has no real working heat source and inadequate plumbing. The floors are bad: what was once beautiful hardwood has been covered up with layers of other things that are in bad shape. One of the upstairs bedrooms has a leak in the ceiling, the floors are crooked and unstable, the stairs a bit shaky. The front porch has no railing. It does have a bathroom—but that was just recently added in the room that used to be the kitchen pantry. We are in for it, aren’t we? Thankfully my job will be packing up this house—the farmhouse will be the place my husband (and a team of other people: electricians, plumbers, floor people, etc.) will spend time until everything is in good enough order. (Yes, I said good enough. This was not my idea but the reasons we’re doing this are best left for another blog.)
The first time we visited the house I was overwhelmed with how much there was to do. While I loved the place—it really is beautiful and has spectacular views of the Peaks of Otter—I couldn’t imagine having the time, money, expertise, or energy to do all that would be needed for it to be livable. Then I kept visiting. The more time we spent in the house, the more we understood about what it needed in order for us to be able to live there, to let our almost-two-year-old son actually sleep in it. We also began to understand where we should start. We knew what our own limits were (like we aren’t okay living in a house with no heat and only enough electricity to have one lamp on.) We can live with crooked floors and even the leaky ceiling upstairs (for now, we’ll live on the first floor), but the electricity and heat need attention. Now. Before we move in. Once all this is done, the painting, floor repair, and moving in can finally happen.
It is easy to get so overwhelmed by the enormity of something that we are unable to get started. It’s true with farmhouses, with families and it’s true with programs or systems. Families come to us with issues in what seem like all parts of life: they’re involved in the criminal justice system, they are abusing substances, the kids aren’t going to school, there is domestic violence and they are unemployed. Programs are ineffective: we have waiting lists, staff who lack proper training and support, inefficient processes, and poor outcomes (if we measure them at all). We begin to think mom is resistant, that our boss just sucks, and that nothing’s going to change.
“What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.” This quote was taken from a new book, Switch, which will hit the shelves later this month. It’s written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath and addresses how to change things when change is hard. The first chapter provides an overview of three surprises about change, one of them being that people aren’t so much resistant as they are unsure what to do next. They tell the story about researchers in West Virginia who wanted to persuade people to eat a healthier diet and knew that people were more likely to change behavior when they had clear expectations about what they should do next. To tell people to “eat a healthier diet” was not clear enough, they were sure. There are a million ways to eat healthier, to try to lose weight. They decided to start with milk: since most Americans drink milk and since milk is the single largest source of saturated fat in most people’s diets, it was a good place to start. They launched a campaign in two communities in West Virginia to convince consumers to switch to 1% or skim milk. They tried to change what folks bought, thus changing what they drank and their fat intake. It worked—before the campaign, the market share of low-fat milk was 18 percent. After, it was 41 percent. Six months later it held at 35 percent.
“What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. Before this study, we might have looked at these West Virginians and concluded they were the kind of people who don’t care about their health. But if they were indeed ‘that kind’ of people, why was it so easy to shift their behavior?” (p. 9)
Summary? If you want people to change, show them where to start. Me? I’m on my way to the ABC store: I hear they have great boxes for packing. J
