Introduction
As a case agent for the FBI, Greg Vecchi specialized in international drug trafficking, money laundering, and extortion. Many of his targets were hardened, violent career criminals. The kinds of guys who sold helicopters to the Medellín drug cartel or tried to buy old Russian submarines to sneak cocaine into the United States from Colombia.
To corner one suspect from the Russian mob, Greg led a three-year wiretapping effort, painstakingly collecting information and building a case. When the warrants were ready, Greg called in a SWAT team: dozens of stocky guys in full body armor who would then storm in, neutralize the bad guys, and collect the evidence.
As he briefed the team, he outlined the various concerns. Greg emphasized that the suspect might be armed and was certainly dangerous. The SWAT team formed an arrest plan that left no room for error. They needed to get this just right or things could turn violent in a hurry.
At the end of the briefing, everyone left the room except for one guy. Greg had spotted him earlier. In a room full of commandos, this guy looked out of place. Fat, short, and bald, he was nowhere close to the chiseled picture of SWAT material.
“Tell me about your guy,” the man asked. “I want to know more.”
“Not sure what you mean,” said Greg. “I just did. I said I’ve got this whole file of—”
“No. No, no, no,” went the guy. “I don’t mean his criminal history. I don’t mean his violent past and all the other stuff. You’ve been on the wiretap, right?”
“Yeah,” Greg replied.
“What is he like?” the man asked.
“What do you mean, ‘What is he like’?”
“What does he do? What are his hobbies? Tell me about his family. Does he have any pets?”
Does the suspect have any pets? Greg thought to himself. We’re about to send a paramilitary unit after a guy, and you want to know whether he has any pets? What a bunch of crap. No wonder this guy got left behind by the rest of the SWAT team.
Greg dutifully provided the information and started to collect the briefing documents he’d laid out.
“One last question,” the guy said. “The suspect is there now, right?”
“Yeah,” said Greg.
“Well, give me his phone number,” the guy said, before walking out the door.
* * *
When it came time for the arrest, the SWAT team was ready. Stacked in a line outside the building, one behind the other, waiting to kick in the door. Dressed in black from head to toe, they had their shields out and guns drawn. “Get down! Get down! Get down!” they’d yell before rushing in and grabbing the suspect.
But as the seconds ticked by, the SWAT team still hadn’t gone in. A few minutes passed. Then a few more.
Greg started to worry. He knew the suspect better than anyone. He’d listened to him talk with his friends and associates. The guy was bad news. He would kill people. He’d been in a Russian prison and he wasn’t scared of a fight.
Then all of a sudden the door opened up.
And out into the open came the suspect. With his hands up.
Greg was dumbfounded. He’d been in law enforcement for a long time. Years as a special agent in the U.S. Army and the Department of Agriculture. He’d worked undercover across the United States and done anti-corruption work on the Mexican border. He had a good chunk of experience. But a guy coming out of his own accord and getting arrested without incident? He’d never seen anything like it.
Then he realized: that short, bald guy he’d been talking to? That guy was a hostage negotiator. And the hostage negotiator convinced the suspect to do something no one thought possible: turn himself over to the authorities, in broad daylight, without a fight.
Shit, Greg thought. I want to be that guy.
* * *
Since then Greg has spent more than twenty years as a hostage negotiator. He’s dealt with international kidnappings, interviewed Saddam Hussein after his capture, and headed the FBI’s legendary Behavioral Science Unit. From talking down bank robbers to interrogating serial killers, he’s changed people’s minds under seemingly impossible conditions.
Crisis negotiation emerged after the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, where terrorists took hostage and then killed eleven Israeli Olympians. Previously, the focus had often been on force, telling people, “Come out with your hands up or we’ll shoot!” But after Munich and a number of other very public failures, it became clear that bullying people into submission wasn’t working. So practitioners turned to the psychology literature, using behavioral science to build new training techniques that could safely deescalate a crisis.1
For the last few decades, negotiators like Greg have relied on a different model—one that works. Whether trying to convince an international terrorist to let hostages go or to change someone’s mind about committing suicide. Even when talking to someone who just killed his family, who’s locked himself up in a bank with hostages, who knows he’s talking to a police officer, who knows the consequences and knows his life is going to change. Nine out of ten times he comes out by himself.
And he comes out just because someone asks.
The Power of Inertia
Everyone has something they want to change. Salespeople want to change their customers’ minds and marketers want to change purchase decisions. Employees want to change their bosses’ perspective and leaders want to change organizations. Parents want to change their children’s behavior. Start-ups 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 glacial pace if they change at all. In the tale of the tortoise and the hare, change is a 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 social 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 whoever 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 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 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.