Changing behaviours

“People usually act for their own reasons, not someone else’s reasons. If they do change a behavior because of something someone else has said, most of the time that change won’t stick. The secret of Instant Influence is that it helps people discover their own reasons for doing something, even something they thought they didn’t want to do.

Here are the six steps that will allow you to achieve Instant Influence [Ed: ie questions to ask the influencee]:

Step 1: Why might you change?
Step 2: How ready are you to change – on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means “not ready at all” and 10 means “totally ready”?
Step 3: Why didn’t you pick a lower number? (Or if the influencee picked 1, either ask the second questions again, this time about a smaller step toward change, or ask, what would it take for that 1 to turn into a 2?)
Step 4: Imagine you’ve changed. What would the positive outcomes be?
Step 5: Why are those outcomes important to you?
Step 6: What’s the next step, if any?”

Michael Pantalon in his book, Instant Influence.

There are so many ways of implementing an OSS, so there always going to be reasons put forward by some people for not wanting to change. Change Management is such an important part of OctopOSS implementation, but it is invariably overlooked when planning a new project. As such, I’m always on the lookout for methods to help with the change management process and organisation-wide agreement on scope.

I’ll admit that I haven’t tried Pantalon’s 6 step process above to help a customer reach a decision that is important to them for their own reasons on their OSS, but it does sound entirely plausible.