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Are you persuading an empty fridge?

Published 19 days ago • 1 min read

Run the Room

The minister believes you

↓

Lat week we talked about how—and how not—to persuade a senior decision-maker.

But what if she already agrees with you?

Nearly two thousand caregivers in Brazil were recently asked why their child wasn’t fully vaccinated.

Fear of the vaccine (refusal, side effects, things read on the internet) accounted for 1.7%.

Couldn't get there, because the clinic was far or open only during the hours you are at work: 7.9%.

And the largest group, 16.4%, had turned up at the clinic and been sent home again. No stock, or they had the wrong paperwork.

The parents who didn’t believe were the smallest group, by a factor of nearly ten.

Now I'm not saying that persuasion isn't necessary. The WHO’s vaccine-uptake framework, for example, has four parts of which "what people think and feel" is the first.

It just wasn’t first in Campinas.
And it may not be first in your conflict either.

So before you spend another year making the case, be sure to test.

Because the thing stopping the person you want to act might be an empty fridge.

Try this

Pick a thing your organisation wants to happen.

Then find out how many of the people who could be doing it, are doing it.

Then ask the others: “What’s stopping you?”

Not rhetorically—ask them directly!

It sounds obvious. But, like the researchers in Brazil, you may discover you’ve spent years trying to change a belief when the real problem was a missing piece of infrastructure.

🌿 Check the fridge.

Want to unlock action?

Most organisations trying to change behaviour make the same mistake: they assume low uptake means people need more motivation, training, or persuasion.

Often, they don’t.

The real blockage may be somewhere in the system: a missing resource, broken process, unclear ownership, bad timing, procurement constraint, or lack of access.

When that happens, leaders spend time trying to persuade people who may already be willing to act, while the actual constraint remains untouched.

Then the initiative stalls. Adoption stays low. And another round of messaging, training, meetings, and strategy gets commissioned to solve a problem that was never properly diagnosed.

I specialise in finding the bottleneck behind low uptake and identifying the practical changes needed to remove it, turning stated intentions into actual behaviour at scale.

The result is less wasted effort, clearer priorities, faster implementation,.

In other words: stop guessing what’s holding your work back. Find the constraint, then fix it.

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Run the Room

Get in the room. Run it. Change what happens when you leave. That's the work I do with senior leaders moving standards from concept to institutional adoption. My work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, The Lancet, and Foreign Policy. Each Saturday, one short note on making it easy to move decisions that matter—three minutes to read, used in next week's meeting.

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