Book Notes: Switch

This the best book I have ever read on change (and I have read a lot). You need to buy the book to get the most out of it. tons of examples.

Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard
By Chip Heath and Dan Heath

For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?

Analogy borrowed from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis
Imagine a person riding an elephant. Rider is our Rational side. Elephant is our emotional side. Rider has reins, but when elephant disagrees, the elephant wins.

You must do three things:
• Direct the Rider
• Motivate the Elephant
• Shape the Path


Direct the Rider: Follow the Bright Spots

Search for bright spots in the current culture!!! (successful efforts worth emulating) What’s working and how can we do more of it? (instead people usually ask, “What’s broken and how can we fix it? NO!) Clone the bright spots.

Knowledge does not change behavior. People need to act their way into a new way of thinking. Help them to see that they can do it.

Too much analysis can doom the effort. In tough times, the Rider sees problems everywhere.

Direct the Rider, show them where to go, how to act, what destination to pursue.

Relatively small changes had a big impact on a big problem. Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions.

Rider’s have a problem focus, when they need a solution focus.


Direct the Rider: Script the critical moves

Decision paralysis – more options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan. The more choices the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets.

Change brings new choices that create uncertainity. Ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider- you may not know what options are available. Anxiety rises.

Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change- the paralyzing part- is precisely in the details.

Suggest a good place to start. Script the critical moves. Crystal-clear guidance.

You can’t script every move. It’s the critical moves that count. FOCUS on the critical.

Focus on what you can control- inputs. For instance, set some behavioral goals (ie: team will meet once a week and do…. Each salesperson will make 125 client calls each day.)


Direct the Rider: Point to the Destination

Destination postcard- a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible. (inspirational, feeling) They show the Rider where you’re headed and they show the Elephant why the journey is worthwhile.

Need a gut-smacking goal!

When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle of the journey (it will be different anyway). Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.


Motivate the Elephant: Find the Feeling

Find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.

Sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.

Do they need to understand (rider) or be enthused (elephant)? Failure to change usually isn’t an understanding problem; it’s a feeling problem.


Motivate the Elephant: Shrink the Change

Make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought (people hate being at the starting line). Remind people of what has already been accomplished.

Shrink the change, lower the bar.

Starting an unpleasant task is always worse than continuing. Get people to try something small and if they like they will continue. (tell kids: 5-minute room clean-up, they will most likely work longer)

Think of small wins (victory motivates us to keep going). Hope builds! Make the advances visible. Celebrate incremental victories. “How can we move from a 2 to a 3?” (not: “how can we move from 2 up to 10”) Next step in the right direction. Seek small improvement one day at a time.

Big changes come from a succession of small changes.


Motivate the Elephant: Grow Your People

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure.

Show them that they should aspire to a different self image. People are receptive to developing new identities. He may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing.

Identities grow from small beginnings. Start with a baby step. It will increase the likelihood that they will go for bigger step later.

Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure. Elephants hate to fail. Create the expectation of failure- not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route.

People with a growth mindset- those who stretch themselves, take risks, accept feedback, and take the long-term view- can’t help but progress in their lives and careers.

Praise/compliment effort rather than skill- “You really worked hard on that” instead of “You’re so good at”

To create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.

We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down- but throughout, we’ll get better, and we’ll succeed in the end.

Reframe failure as a natural part of the change process. Failure as learning.

The Elephant has to believe it’s capable of conquering the change (need confidence and you can do that by shrinking the change and/or growing your people)


Shape the Path: Tweak the Environment

If you want people to change, you can provide clear direction (rider) or boost their motivation and determination (elephant). Alternatively, you can simply make the journey easier.

Often what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

Make the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder.


Shape the Path: Build Habits

Habits shifted when environment shifted.

Action triggers can have a profound power to motivate people to do the things they know they need to do. Preload the decision so that there is no cycle of conscious deliberation. (examples- call important client when you pour first cup of coffee each day. Go to gym after dropping off daughter at school.) Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness. Action triggers create an instant habit. Habits are behavioral autopilot.

A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”

Checklists simply make big screwups less likely.


Shape the Path: Rally the Herd

We try to fit in. Behavior is contagious.

Publicize the group norm.

Free-space: Small-scale meetings where reformers can gather and ready themselves for collective action without being observed by members of the dominant group. If you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together. They need free space. They need time to coordinate outside the gaze of the resisters.

You’ve got to let your organization have an identity conflict. For a time, at least, you’ve got to permit an “us versus them” struggle to take place. It’s necessary.

Have members of your team rehearsed how they’ll react when they meet resistance from your organization’s “old guard”?

Every culture is shaped powerfully by its language.


Keep the Switch Going

Reward each tiny step toward the destination.
Reinforce positive behaviors.
Look for little rays of sunshine and celebrate.
Change isn’t an event; it’s a process.
To lead a process requires persistence.
Once the change started, it seemed to feed on itself. Snowballing
The more people are exposed to something, the more they like it.
Big changes can happen with very small steps.

As people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

The people who change have clear direction (rider), ample motivation (elephant), and a supportive environment.

In our lives, we embrace lots of big changes- not only babies, but marriages and new homes and new technologies and new job duties.

Personal “supervised” behavior (making intentional choices, doing new things) is an exhaustible resource (we get tired, change is draining). Automatic behavior (non-change, routine) doesn’t sap our energy nearly as much. The bigger the change you’re suggesting, the more it will sap people. Change is hard because people wear themselves out. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

Once you break through to feeling, things change. Make audience feel the need for change.