Change, dammit!

If you want to innovate, excell, or initiate change, you're going to get a fight. Often, this comes from the people who have much to gain from the change. We've found the most successful ladder over this is to align with peoples innate moral benchmarks, their intrinsic value system. This stuff runs deep. Very. People don't change because of factual circumstance--they adapt, then revert when the coast is clear. They don't change for long because of emotional urges -- emotions ebb and flow. People change in sustainable, meaningful, personal ways for symbolic reasons. You can fight them and lose, or you can go deeper and find these symbols, and win. Or help them help themselves, often in spite of themselves. Which is the same as winning. An example (not a client) used in a recent presentation:



Watch this first , if you can manage the download [2 mb.mov]

Why is this spot so effective? Not because it shows cute kids, or a mom who cares, or repeats what we already know: Smoking's bad for you and your kids.

Its power lay in the subtle way it hones in not on your mortality or that of your kids but, before you and beyond them. You know you're going to die eventually, but your kids will carry forward the legacy for you. You know once you're gone and they grow old, they will die too. That's not the point. That lone child, looking out to sea doesn't symbolize far horizons and boundless opportunities, it doesn't even represent the boy-child. It symbolizes loneliness, yes. But even more, it ellicits a sense of unfinished business deep in our R-complex. That boy IS the mother, even when she's gone of natural causes. He is she, by proxy, as are his kids and their kids. If she cannot insure his preparation for the continuation of her genes, her journey, she fails to be or to matter. If she dies young, he dies young. She will have "ended" prematurely because SHE broke the chain. She failed her primal, ancestral obligation, as much as she will have failed her kids. She didn't matter.

I really like this spot.

Next time: Flipping death The Finger. How to press Legacy and Hope into service when you've just learned you have cancer and the only person you can count on is YOU.