273. What Taylor Swift can teach leaders about workplace change, with Hollywood screenwriter turned organisational psychologist, Lindsey Caplan

0:00A lot of my lessons come from comedy, as we've talked about. And I often think about this quote from Stephen Colbert, who says that influencing a group is like hooking up jumper cables to the audience. Right. And so our job is to figure out how to produce that charge. And that comes from not just what we say, but creating the conditions so that the group has a collective feeling and takes collective action.

0:23Leanne:Our guest today, Lindsay Kaplan, is a former Hollywood screenwriter turned organisational psychologist who discovered that the most expensive change initiatives fell for one simple reason. Yeah, Lindsay worked on shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Malcolm in the Middle, and she learned something pretty crucial there. The same techniques that keep millions of people glued to their screens can make your employees actually care about change. Today, we're discovering what Taylor Swift knows about engagement that most CEOs don't, and the framework Lindsay created called the Moved Model, that helps you stop informing people and start influencing them.

1:01This could change how you think about every presentation from now on.

1:07Leanne:Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Lindsay Kaplan has an unusual background. She went from writing comedy in Hollywood to studying organizational psychology, and that combination led her to spot something most change management consultants miss. She realized that companies spend fortunes trying to move people through information dumps, when actually, what works is the same thing that makes us binge Netflix shows or buy Taylor Swift concert tickets.

1:48Perhaps not me, but certainly for some.

1:50Leanne:I would. She's developed something called the Moved Model, which breaks down exactly how to influence groups of people, not manipulate them, but genuinely move them to care about change. And it's based on two simple axes, push versus pull and one size fits all versus personalized. And the best part of this is that none of this requires charisma or a huge budget. it. It's about small choices that create big effects. So after this break, we'll discover why the phrase, I'm really excited about this change, is killing your initiative and what to say instead. See you in a sec. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers.

2:30And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn.

2:34Leanne:Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content, but with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish. Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content in just a fraction of the time. The results? 30 % more page views and visitors now spend 27 % more time on their site. If you're ready for impossible growth like this, visit HubSpot.com.

3:07My name is Lindsay Kaplan and I am a screenwriter turned organizational psychologist and I help organizations design the high stakes messages and moments that move people emotionally and behaviorally. What am I famous for? I'm famous, I guess, for a model that I created called the Moved Model, which teaches folks how to influence at scale and move people in some way. Tell me, what is it about your background in Hollywood, you think, that taught you how to keep people's attention? Oh, a lot. I mean, I think we're taught, you know, how to engage people on a page, how to keep people paying attention.

3:48There's a few things that stand out. You know, one is this idea of stakes. And so what do we engineer so that people care about the character and care about what happens to them? So what's at stake for them? An example might be if you ever watch Schitt's Creek, which is one of my favorite shows. The Rose family, we learn in the first episode, has lost all of their worldly possessions. So immediately there's something at stake for them. So one of the first things we learn is how to raise the stakes, how to get people to care. Another is this idea of a clear motivation, a clear want. So every character has a need or an engine that propels the story forward.

4:27So an example from Severance might be in the first episode, we learn that Mark wants to know what's happened to his wife. So these are examples of, you know, structural pieces or constructs that we use to help people not just pay attention, but want to stay and keep engaging towards the very end and care about the people that they're watching on screen. There are a lot of copywriters who will talk about Joseph Campbell and the seven somethings. What am I talking about here? Like the hero's journey piece? Exactly. So is that just a load of rubbish or a majority of films? the majority of films are based around that.

5:05Oh, it's not rubbish at all. I mean, so much of what we aim to write has a very clear structure behind it. And I remember, I studied screenwriting as an undergrad at Northwestern University in Chicago. And I remember once I learned the structure, I was like, oh, it's ruined it for me. I can never watch a movie again because now I know at page 75, there it comes. But actually, no. So it's not a load of rubbish. There's a clear structure and kind of rules to follow. And the point is that once you learn the rules, you can break them like anything else. You talk about group influence, I believe. So at what point did you realize that group influence was a different problem to solve than just straight communication?

5:48Well, I mean, so after I left Hollywood and screenwriting, I kind of went in a couple of different paths. I found my way into learning and development where I I was scripting learning experiences for folks to educate or to build leadership skills or soft skills, etc. And then I got my master's degree in organizational psychology. So thinking about behavior change at scale across an entire organization. So that kind of planted the seeds for me. The central question of how do we move people, not just on a page, but in a room, is something I've been studying for a really long time. but I think we'll talk about this in a second but it's a distinct skill to not just communicate or influence one person but to influence many and I think we're probably familiar with folks like Dale Carnegie who taught us how to influence one-to-one but I you know my argument is this is a different skill that we can learn and I'll talk about why and how but more specifically there were a few experiences I had where I realized the challenge people were having was they were focusing on what information to say, how to inform, but not how to influence.

6:52And that was the gap between not just getting people to listen, but to care, to act, to change, to move. And that kind of led me on this journey of figuring out how to teach this skill and help companies do it better. You've just said there's something really interesting. You said there's a difference between, and what were your exact words? Different between communication and what did you just say there? There's a difference between informing people and influencing them. That was it. And going back to this keyword you said at the beginning, stakes, is that something to do with those? Yeah. Absolutely.

7:25I mean, I think we're probably familiar with the classic change management ism, which is what's in it for me. And understanding that for our audience or the folks that we want to move. It's very similar here in the idea of influencing people. You know, we can call it raise the stakes. We can figure out what matters to them. What do they care about? you know having empathy designing with the end user in mind it's all a similar way of saying if we want to move people we have to know why they would be moved all to say motivation is a huge part of the equation here and again that's the difference between informing and influencing we might not be considering the notion of motivation i sense that designing a scene for an audience in a movie theater is kind of similar to designing a presentation for a company going through change.

8:16You know, the most important thing I tell every single client I work with is we want to start with the end, which is very similar to what we do when we're writing, you know, a play, a movie, a television show. We begin with the end in mind. So what happens at the end of the movie? What happens to the character? If we don't know that, we don't really know how or write the story. Similar for our change efforts. What I mean by that, I think most companies start with the topic they wanna share or kind of what the change might be, right? But more specifically, what I help them understand is what do we need from the people we're trying to affect?

8:50What's the change that we're after? So questions like, you know, what would people think, feel or know differently? That's a basic one. Other questions might be, you know, how would you know that this was successful? What would you see through a camera lens that would tell me that that change happened? So the more observable, the better. Can you tell me a story about the before and after? What matters to these people? Why would they be affected? And we'll get into this a little bit, but specifically, what kind of influence are we wanting? Are we wanting them to just comply? Are we wanting them to be informed, to be entertained, or to be engaged?

9:26What level of movement do we need from people? And then how do we design the communication, the experience, the change effort in order to achieve that outcome? That's what I mean by influence. I sense that a lot of the corporate world are going to spend a lot more time on the message and not really take into account any kind of emotion or anything around that. I have a feeling you've got a thought on that. I mean, I'm nodding my head vigorously, of course. listen when I say spend time on the emotion or you say that I could see folks rolling their eyes right like emotion ew I don't want to do that and that's a really big miss you know for various reasons one of them being most of our decision making is guided by emotions by what we feel and emotionally connecting to what's being shared is the key to getting someone to do something long term.

10:24So the thesis statement that I use in my work is that we're not changed by content. We're changed when we are affected by that content, when we're moved by it, right? And so that's, again, the difference between informing and influencing. And that's what we're trying to get people to do. And I can walk you through specifically how to do that. But that is the shift. It's not just what we say, it's how we say it so that people care, engage, and act. And that's the skill. Just one anecdote quickly, we've talked about a little bit the difference between influencing one-to-one and one-to-many or influencing a group.

11:00A lot of my lessons come from comedy, as we've talked about. And I often think about this quote from Stephen Colbert, who says that influencing a group is like hooking up jumper cables to the audience, right? And so our job is to figure out how to produce that charge. And that comes from not Not just what we say, but creating the conditions so that the group has a collective feeling and takes collective action. And to double click on Stephen Colbert, because why not? When he started doing The Late Show, there were a lot of interviews with him where he was saying that something wasn't clicking.

11:37People were laughing, but they weren't really, I guess, moved, for lack of a better word. And what he discovered, that the trick was not just to share kind of the facts of the day, but to share how he felt about them. and that was what helped his audience connect with him more. And so I often cite that with clients and I say, yeah, we're giving your town hall updates, but people could watch that on their own, right? Or they could read about that in an email. The idea of influencing many people at once, especially in a live setting, is people wanna know how you feel about it, right? So they wanna connect to you more.

12:07So we can, I often borrow lessons from my background in entertainment and education and obviously business to help people kind of see the difference and then hopefully have, you know, more long-term success. I wonder, when leaders are trying to get change through, what are they getting wrong? Is it this connection or is the more they're getting wrong? Um, I'm going to not use the word wrong, just so people are more motivated to listen to me, right, might be my own influence trick. I think there's a few things to highlight. One is just kind of the basic assumption that the people that they're trying to influence are already as motivated and bought into the changes they are, right?

12:54That they're in the company, they bought a ticket, they're in the seat, they already care. And that is often not true. And so I think that's really the first thing to recognize is that their job is to take what's kind of pull and personalize to them. And I'll get to that language in a second and make it pull and personalize to everybody else. And that is what leads to long-term change. So let's give a concrete example. Let's say you are a company, 10 ,000 people, and you want everyone to adopt a new technology. That's the large change that you want to enact across your organization. And what I often say, let's first decide, again, what is our desired effect?

13:33What do we need from the people that we're trying to affect? And there's typically four different things that we could get. We could get compliance where people just take an action. We could get them to be informed where we drive awareness. We could entertain them. They feel delighted. Maybe they give us their momentary attention. Or we could get engagement, which means that the people that we're trying to affect in this change are bought in long term. They have ownership. The behavior change. They're not just singing the song on their own, but they're sharing it with somebody else. And so the first thing that I do with folks or any client is clarify, what is the type of influence or movement that you need?

14:09That's the very, very first step. And then once we figure that out, I help them kind of move in that direction or change their strategy to achieve that desired effect. It could be, you know, a whole change management strategy. It could be in a town hall. It could be a leadership program. It could be a set of experiences in an all company summit. There's many different ways that we could influence at scale. the reason I say experience is that inside our companies the way that I'm used to people influencing a bunch of people at once is say I'm going to put you in a room and I'm going to give you a piece of content I'm going to poof change you that's the thing so many of us are used to and that's the I think that is one of our highest stakes opportunities to influence more effectively I don't want to put words in your mouth but I have a sense that your move model sort of helps us understand it all a little bit easier.

15:02So talk us through it. Yeah. So let's dive into concrete tactics and things that folks can do, but I want to anchor us first in this common language. So I described the four different ways that you can move people. Let's imagine a two by two. Let's put our business book brains on and just a lovely two by two. And on the vertical axis is push and pull. So push and pull asks, who's in control? Is my audience or employees, are they passive or are they active? Is this being done with them? Pull or is it being done at them? Push. And on the horizontal axis is one size fits all and personalized. So is it made for anyone or is it made about me?

15:42Which, you know, we can sort of plot where we are on that axis to create one of these four effects. So in the top right quadrant is engagement, which means it's pull and it's personalized. In the lower left, it's compliance, it's push and one size fits all. And the point of this is that, well, two points. One, we can plot and diagnose where we are now in an easier way. And then two, as a company, we can share a common language about what might be needed to move people in a different way without making it super personal or placing blame. We can just share this common language, hopefully a layman's language, that makes all this theory and kind of behavioral science a bit more easier to apply.

16:26I'm going to ask you more about pull and push in a second, but I just want to understand with this model. So we've got four quadrants. Is there a quadrant that we do not want to be in? No. I mean, choose the quadrant that makes the most sense for you and your organization and what fits your culture. So I'm working with a client right now and we're working on a large change management project to move the entire enterprise to adopt a new technology. Now, you might say, well, that feels like compliance is enough. The challenge is that that organization is not a compliance culture. They are an engagement culture.

17:01Every change they make is engagement. Employees want buy-in. They want to know what's going on. They want ownership. Previous changes that tried to be in compliance didn't stick. And therefore, we've diagnosed, we've defined, we need to have this change be with an engaged approach. So it really just depends what's best for your organization and what will stick long term. But there isn't a wrong quadrant. So I've got down the bottom, I've got push and one size fits all is that right lower left that's right yeah so in that situation what would my behavior look like as a leader compared perhaps to the pull personalized essentially what push in one size fits all means that the change effort is being done at people and about anyone and so you know it's probably i'll give you an example i worked in an organization a long time ago where they announced new company values, which is a big change for a company because you're wanting hundreds or thousands of people to care about something and engage in a different way, behave in a different way.

18:13And they stood on a stage and called the whole company together and made a quick announcement. Here's the new values. Here's what they mean. And that was it. That was it. And I think the expectation unintentionally was they'll comply, They'll get it and they'll do it. Guess what happened? It flopped. It completely flopped. Not only did people not remember the values, but they didn't spread. They didn't stick. No one cared. And then a year later, we redid the entire process with a pull and personalized approach. That company went on to be acquired for a large sum, which I'm not saying the values had anything to do with it, but that would be nice if we told that story.

18:57The values still stick today. What is it? Nine years later, eight years later, because I believe the approach really led to that long term adoption of this change. So, you know, I think we probably can all feel the compliance, which is we're just told to do something because we have to do something. and I believe at least right now many of us have a collective allergy to being told to do something because they said so. So there's often a better way that doesn't involve just pushing and announcing and expecting that poof people do what you want them to do. So an instinct where a leader might be trying to push a change you're telling us we should move up towards pull in most situations.

19:41How do we actually do that? Yeah, there's many ways to shift from push to pull. And again, what we're saying here is that we want this to be done with people and not at them. And the reason that that's important is it pulls on people's motivation. And motivation is a key reason why we change long term. So I'll give you a couple of practical ways to pull instead of push. One of the most powerful ways is to give people a role or ownership in the change. many many many ways to do that you can invite a group of change ambassadors to support you in the change you can um you can share something unfinished and ask for feedback if you're doing a town hall you can put a question on the screen that gets people thinking about the day's topic or what it might mean to them billion dollar moves hosted by sarah chen spellings is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination of business professionals join venture

20:36Leanne:capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures and hard lessons of the creme de la creme so you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business and in life. Maybe start with episode 124 where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube define leadership. Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

21:03I'm really trying to get my head around this idea of pushing and pulling you got any kind of examples so i can see when someone's pushing when someone's pulling absolutely um as you said that another example came to mind just from life in general maybe when we go to see a our favorite artist uh play and they're like oh come on come on chicago get louder and that to me is like an immediate push it's like a car on a car or your hand on a car horn like pushing you to get louder. Whereas in pull, someone might say, you know, we're so glad you're here tonight. Your audience, your enthusiasm really helps us, right?

21:44It's kind of an immediate sign that they need us, that they're doing this with us. And so I listen for language a lot because it can tell us about the mindset between push and pull. But more specifically in a corporate setting, when we think about push and pull, the difference is it's being done with us, not at us, which drives motivation, which is a long-term ingredient for change. So a couple of practical ways to pull instead of push. One is to think about how can you give people a sense of ownership or a role. In organizational development, we often talk about how involvement leads towards commitment, which is so important to long-term engagement and buy-in and change.

22:24So think about how you can give people a role. It might be, can you solicit feedback about something that's not finished? Can you put a question on the screen that gets people thinking about that town hall topic before you even show it? Can you invite people in to support you in the change effort as a change ambassador? Can you talk to them about how important their efforts are and why you need their help. How do we pull people in and give people a role is really important. Another way to do this, or borrow this from my old life as a screenwriter, is to use a central question. So we talked about the TV show Severance.

23:05The central question of Severance is what is Lumen Industries? What the heck is going on? Or if we watch White Lotus, the central question is who dies at the end? Or pick your favorite television show or movie. there's a central question that keeps us interested and motivated and wants us to pay attention. The same is true of our change efforts. So when you think about pulling instead of pushing, ask yourself, what is the central question of this change effort? What is the question that people will want to stay or care or work towards to find the answer? Not to trick them, but to pique curiosity.

23:42So many, many ways to pull instead of push, but those are a couple. Fabulous answer. And by the way, you've just made me think then, the old days in the 80s, the Stadium Rock, they used to say, hello, Chicago. And then everyone would go mad. Whereas now Sabrina Carpenter, I think, she incorporates a particular lyric, which is relevant to the town she made. I could go on and on and on about what we can learn from musicians about this. And to segue here, I went to see the Arrows tour, Taylor Swift, last year. I called it research. Yeah, I was like, oh, this is research. Um, one of the ways that she gave people a role, and I think Coldplay does this too, a lot of bands do this too, is they give you a light up bracelet when you, when you enter.

24:23And that bracelet lights up different colors, depending on the song. And at one point the bracelet formed a heart. And the reason that she does this is it gives people a role. It shows them that she can't do the show without them. Right? So again, similarly, we're not Taylor Swift and we're not speaking to a stadium of people. but whether our room is five people or 50 ,000 how can you give people a sense that this is being done with them and that you need them musicians and performers that's why you know um but people need an audience as a comedian because they show them how important um uh their laughter is to the success of the show so so much we can learn from entertainment in the pull regard but i completely agree with you so how do we be more swift see i don't even know the vernacular that could be more swifty but i think those are the fans how do we if we've got a room of 10 people and we want to introduce a new i don't know a new computer system i'm not going to give everyone bracelets but is i feel there's a lesson that i could learn there's a lot um so i know we didn't all go to the aero tour, but I'll take you inside.

25:35One of the best things that she did when she started the show was she described the structure. So I'm going to take you through all eras one by one, right? And so this was a way that she gave the audience a sense of what to expect, and it helped us trust the driver, right? Not that we didn't trust Taylor from the beginning, but we can borrow this tactic too. And I don't just mean an agenda slide, right? I mean, show me exactly what the structure is for, you know, the town hall or the training program or whatever it is, so that we know where you're taking us and why. She, you know, every single night, one of the dancers would, you know, say a phrase in the native language or a sort of vernacular of that town.