Understanding people is the key to changing anything

How can we spark real change when traditional methods fall short? Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst, tackles one of the most universal challenges: influencing behavior. Drawing from his experience with leading companies, he offers a new path to overcome inertia and drive meaningful transformation.

Hello Jonah Berger, why did you write this book, and why now?

Jonah Berger: After my first book Contagious came out, I had the chance to work with a wide range of companies—big players like Google, Nike, and Apple, but also small startups and everything in between. And what struck me was that everyone had the same issue: they wanted to change something.
– Marketers and salespeople wanted to change customers’ minds.
– Employees wanted to change their boss’s view.
– Leaders wanted to change their organizations.
– Startups wanted to shift industries.
– Nonprofits wanted to change the world.
But change is hard. We push, pressure, and persuade—and still, nothing happens. So I asked myself: is there a better way? That question led me to write The Catalyst—to explore how change actually works across various fields, and how we can all become more effective change agents.

An extract from your book that best represents yourself?

The Power of Inertia

Everyone has something they want to change. Salespeople want to change the customers’ mind and marketers want to change purchase decisions. Employees want to change the bosses’ perspective and leaders want to change organizations. Parents want to change their child’s behavior. Startups 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 slow, glacial pace, if they change at all. In the tale of the Tortoise and the Hare, change is the 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 school 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 whomever 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 allocation 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 to 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, however, 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 the 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?

Which current trends do you find most interesting or promising?

J.B.: One of the things I’m most excited about right now is the potential to extract insights from textual data. So much of what we do involves language—social media posts, customer service calls, news articles, movies, and music.
New tools in natural language processing and automated text analysis let us mine that language for insights. We can learn more about consumers, organizations, and even societal biases. These tools open the door to powerful discoveries and real impact.

If you could give just one piece of advice to someone trying to drive change, what would it be?

J.B.: Start with understanding. Whether you’re trying to change a boss, a colleague, a consumer—it all begins with empathy. Too often, we’re focused on the outcome we want and forget to really understand the person we’re trying to influence.
But if we know more about them—their needs, their fears, their perspective—we can be much more effective. That’s the foundation of meaningful change.

What’s next for you? What topics are you exploring?

J.B.: I’m diving deeper into the power of language. How can we use words to motivate ourselves and others? How can we persuade more effectively, at work and at home? Why do some phrases or ideas go viral? These are the questions that excite me, and they’ll be the focus of my next projects.

Thank you Jonah Berger

Thank you Bertrand Jouvenot

The book: The Catalyst, Jonah Berger, Simon & Schuster, 2020.