The Small Ask

Recently I’ve written on such topics as  fractals and Boykin and Noguera’s opportunity to learn. This week the idea is smaller but it’s actually the piece that ties the other two together, and it started with a question about persuasion research, not education research. It is what psychologists call ‘the small ask’.

Here’s the finding that stuck with me. Back in 1966, researchers went door to door asking homeowners to sign a small, harmless petition about safe driving. Weeks later, a different researcher came back and asked those same homeowners, along with a new group who’d never been approached before, to do something much bigger: put an enormous, ugly “Drive Carefully” sign in their front yard. Among the new group, who’d never been asked for anything before, only about 17 percent agreed. But among the people who’d signed the little petition weeks earlier? Fully 76 percent agreed to the sign! That’s more than four times the new group. Nothing about the sign got prettier or easier. Saying yes previously to something small had somehow shifted how they saw themselves. Now they see themselves as someone who does this kind of thing, who’s involved, who helps, and that identity is what carried them into the much bigger yes. It’s the same mechanism underneath the fractal pattern from a few weeks ago: a small shape, repeated and reinforced, becomes the shape of the whole thing.

I think this is the piece leaders skip when they’re trying to create the opportunity to learn, Boykin and Noguera describe. We tend to hand people the big ask first - the stretch project, the new title, the seat at the table - and then wonder why their self-efficacy wasn’t there to meet it. But self-efficacy isn’t something you announce into existence with a big enough opportunity. It’s something you build, one small, low-risk "yes" at a time, until the person standing in front of The Big Ask has already quietly become someone who says yes to hard things. The most courageous thing a leader can do for someone’s growth might not be handing them the moonshot leap. It might be handing them the small, unremarkable first step, and then getting out of the way long enough for them to notice they took it.

Leaders tend to think of the small ask as being about trust, or momentum, or just easing someone in gently. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy suggests something more concrete is actually happening. Bandura found that mastery experiences (which are about actually succeeding at something, especially something that once felt intimidating) are the single most powerful source of a person’s belief in their own capability, more powerful than encouragement, more powerful than watching someone else do it well. That’s what a small ask really is. It isn’t just a foot in the door. It works like a manufactured mastery experience.  It is small-scale proof of exactly the kind of person the leader is hoping they’ll believe themselves to be, long before the big ask ever arrives.