We hosted Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School and an international best-selling author. He has published over 50 articles in top-tier academic journals. He teaches Wharton’s highest-rated online course, and over a million copies of his books are in print in over 35 countries around the world.

I’m going to start with your newest book Catalyst, which is focused on change, changing minds, changing opinions, changing behaviors. Let’s start here. Why is change just so difficult?

That was the question I wrestled with my myself for a long time. We all have something that we want to change. The marketers, the salespeople listening may say, “I want to change a client or a customer’s minds.” Employees want to change their bosses’ minds. Leaders want to transform organizations. I can’t tell you how many events I go to where a CEO or someone else speaking before me says, “We need to take more risks. We need to be more ambitious. We need to think differently. We need to go beyond,” and everyone goes, “Yes, yes.” Everyone basically goes back to what they were doing before, because everyone wants change. It’s clear we want to achieve change, but it’s often really challenging to get there.

There are a number of reasons why. Part of it is what’s called the status quo bias. We tend to be attached to things that we’re doing already. Things that we’re doing are familiar, new things are unfamiliar. Old things seem safe, new things seem risky. It’s also part of the way we try to create change and the way we enact change. I lead a lot of executive education programs at Wharton. When I talk about this stuff, I often ask the audience, I say, “Write down something that you want to change. It can be whatever you want, and then write down one thing you do or have done to try to change that thing.” People think about it. They write down various things they might want to change.

What we find is over 98% of the time, people list some version of what I’ll describe as pushing. They say, “Look, I’ll provide more information. I want to change a client’s mind, I’ll make another presentation. I want to change a boss’s mind, I’ll send over one more PowerPoint deck. I’ll have one more phone call, one more pitch meeting. If I just explained to the person why they should come around, they’ll do it. Some people talk about information. Some people talk about emotion, but in all cases, it’s some version of pushing.” That’s still why we think pushing is good? If there’s a chair in the middle of a room and we want to move that chair, pushing it is a great way to get it to go the direction we want it to go.