Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

first surprise about change: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.

To change someone’s behavior, you’ve got to change that person’s situation.

For individuals’ behavior to change, you’ve got to influence not only their environment but their hearts and minds.

The conventional wisdom in psychology, in fact, is that the brain has two independent systems at work at all times. First, there’s what we called the emotional side. It’s the part of you that is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure. Second, there’s the rational side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It’s the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future.

Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider.

Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose.

When change efforts fail, it’s usually the Elephant’s fault, since the kinds of change we want typically involve short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs.

if you’re contemplating a change, the Elephant is the one who gets things done.

The Rider tends to overanalyze and overthink things.

If you want to change things, you’ve got to appeal to both. The Rider provides the planning and direction, and the Elephant provides the energy.

psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource.

When people try to change things, they’re usually tinkering with behaviors that have become automatic, and changing those behaviors requires careful supervision by the Rider. The bigger the change you’re suggesting, the more it will sap people’s self-control.

And when people exhaust their self-control, what they’re exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration or failure. In other words, they’re exhausting precisely the mental muscles needed to make a big change.

Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

if you reach your colleagues’ Riders but not their Elephants, they will have direction without motivation.

Once you break through to feeling, though, things change.

If you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity

Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.

Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can’t get his way by force for very long. So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.

Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the “Path.” When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and Elephant.

To change behavior, you’ve got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

bright spots solve the “Not Invented Here” problem. Some people have a knee-jerk skeptical response to “imported” solutions. Imagine the public outcry if an American politician proposed that the United States adopt the French health care system. (Or vice versa.) We all think our group is the smartest.

Those people aren’t like us. Our situation is more complicated than that. Those ideas wouldn’t work here.

The Rider part of our minds has many strengths. The Rider is a thinker and a planner and can plot a course for a better future. But as we’ve seen, the Rider has a terrible weakness—the tendency to spin his wheels. The Rider loves to contemplate and analyze, and, making matters worse, his analysis is almost always directed at problems rather than at bright spots.

that’s why bright spots are so essential, because they are your best hope for directing the Rider when you’re trying to bring about change.

(“solutions-focused therapy

Solutions-focused therapists, in contrast, couldn’t care less about archaeology. They don’t dig around for clues about why you act the way you do. They don’t care about your childhood. All they care about is the solution to the problem at hand.

After all, it worked before. These “exceptions” are just like Jerry Sternin’s bright spots. Just as there were some kids in the Vietnamese village who managed to stay healthy despite the poverty, there are some moments in an alcoholic’s life when he is sober despite the cravings. Those bright spots are gold to be mined.

if you’re trying to change things, there are going to be bright spots in your field of view, and if you learn to recognize them and understand them, you will solve one of the fundamental mysteries of change: What, exactly, needs to be done differently?

You are simply asking yourself, “What’s working and how can we do more of it?” That’s the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?

for a wide range of human behavior and perception, a general principle holds true: “Bad is stronger than good.

Leslie Fiedler once said, lots of novelists have achieved their fame by focusing on marital problems, but there’s never been a successful novel about a happy marriage.

A particular strain of this “bad is stronger than good” bias is critical when it comes to tackling change. Let’s call it a problem focus

consider this situation: Your child comes home one day with her report card. She got one A, four B’s, and one F. Where will you spend your time as a parent?

Our Rider has a problem focus when he needs a solution focus

“What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?

Even in failure there is success.

These flashes of success—these bright spots—can illuminate the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible.

decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan,

As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, “we become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out.

Ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider, because the Rider is tugging on the reins of the Elephant, trying to direct the Elephant down a new path. But when the road is uncertain, the Elephant will insist on taking the default path, the most familiar path, just as the doctors did. Why? Because uncertainty makes the Elephant anxious. (Think of how, in an unfamiliar place, you gravitate toward a familiar face.) And that’s why decision paralysis can be deadly for change—because the most familiar path is always the status quo.

Clarity dissolves resistance.

We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible.

When you describe a compelling destination, you’re helping to correct one of the Rider’s great weaknesses—the tendency to get lost in analysis.

Goals in most organizations, however, lack emotional resonance. Instead, SMART goals—goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely—have become the norm.