We live in a quick-fix world where people look for easy solutions to solve complex problems. This goes for both business and personal problems. We want one trick to get employees to adopt behavior that improves quality and causes customers to gush with appreciation, or one trick to help us shed 30 unwanted pounds. Unfortunately, most quick fixes don’t work because the problem is rarely fed by a single cause. Usually, there is a conspiracy of causes.

If you want to confront persistent problem behavior, you need to combine multiple influences into an overwhelming strategy. In management and in their personal lives, influencers succeed where others fail because they “overdetermine” success.1 Instead of looking for the minimum it will take to accomplish a change, they combine a critical mass of different kinds of influence strategies.

We have documented the success of this multipronged approach across organizational levels (from C-level managers to first-line supervisors) and across different problem domains (from entrenched cultural issues in companies to leader-led change initiatives to stubborn personal challenges like stopping smoking and getting fit). And while the results are impressive, they do not rely on an obscure calculus — if anything, they are built on simple arithmetic. Effective influencers drive change by relying on several different sources of influence strategies at the same time. Those who succeed predictably and repeatedly don’t differ from others by degrees. By combining multiple sources of influence, they are up to 10 times more successful at producing substantial and sustainable change.

This claim is based on three studies. (See “About the Research.”) We began by looking at nagging organizational problems, such as bureaucratic infighting, lack of collaboration and low compliance with quality or safety standards. Although more than 90% of the executives we interviewed described their problems as powerfully “destructive,” even “cancerous,” few had done much to confront them. We got similar results when we surveyed executives and senior managers. About 40% of these executives had made some attempt to influence change in these destructive behaviors. In doing so, however, the vast majority had employed only one influence strategy — for example, they offered training, redesigned the organization or held a high-visibility retreat. A handful — fewer than 5% — had used four or more sources of influence in combination. The differences in outcomes were astounding.

Study participants who used four or more sources of influence in combination were 10 times more likely to