Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

Brian Wansink, the author of the study, runs the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, and he described the results in his book Mindless Eating:

People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period.”

If you want people to eat less popcorn, the solution is pretty simple: Give them smaller buckets. You don’t have to worry about their knowledge or their attitudes.

Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?

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 problem is this: Often the heart and mind disagree. Fervently.

University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his wonderful book The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.

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.

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

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

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

Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction. (Think 1% milk.) 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. (Think of the cookies and radishes study and the boardroom conference table full of gloves.) 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. (Think of the effect of shrinking movie popcorn buckets.)

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

Finding bright spots, then, solves many different problems at once. That’s no surprise; successful change efforts involve connecting all three parts of the framework: Rider, Elephant, and Path.

They didn’t walk in with the answers. All they had was a deep faith in the power of bright spots.

the therapist poses the Miracle Question: “Can I ask you a sort of strange question? Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, ‘Well, something must have happened—the problem is gone!’?”

The Miracle Question doesn’t ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened.

Once they’ve helped patients identify specific and vivid signs of progress, they pivot to a second question, which is perhaps even more important. It’s the Exception Question: “When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?”

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.

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.”

Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.

To spark movement in a new direction, you need to provide crystal-clear guidance. That’s why scripting is im-portant—you’ve got to think about the specific behavior that you’d want to see in a tough moment, whether the tough moment takes place in a Brazilian railroad system or late at night in your own snack-loaded pantry.

First, follow the bright spots.

Next, give direction to the Rider—both a start and a finish.

In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought. In other words, when change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Rider.

Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You’re presented with evidence that makes you feel something. It might be a disturbing look at the problem, or a hopeful glimpse of the solution, or a sobering reflection of your current habits, but regardless, it’s something that hits you at the emotional level. It’s something that speaks to the Elephant.

Two professors at Harvard Business School, writing about organizational change, say that change is hard because people are reluctant to alter habits that have been successful in the past. “In the absence of a dire threat, employees will keep doing what they’ve always done.” As a result, the professors emphasize the importance of crisis: “Turnaround leaders must convince people that the organization is truly on its deathbed—or, at the very least, that radical changes are required if the organization is to survive and thrive.” In other words, if necessary, we need to create a crisis to convince people they’re facing a catastrophe and have no choice but to move.

When executives talk about the need for a “burning platform,” they mean, basically, that they need a way to scare their employees into changing.

To create a burning platform is to paint such a gloomy picture of the current state of things that employees can’t help but jump into the fiery sea. (And by “jump into the fiery sea,” what we mean is that they change their organizational practices. Which suggests that this use of “burning platform” might well be the dictionary definition of hyperbole.)

In short, the “burning platform” is a great, uplifting tale for your people: “Team, let’s choose a dangerous plunge into the ocean over getting...

To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.

One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they’re already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.

If you’re leading a change effort, you better start looking for those first two stamps to put on your team’s cards.

Shrink the change. Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory.

You can’t count on these milestones to occur naturally. To motivate change, you’ve got to plan for them.

When you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It’s Elephant fuel.

Psychologist Karl Weick, in a paper called “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” said, “A small win reduces importance (‘this is no big deal’), reduces demands (‘that’s all that needs to be done’), and raises perceived skill levels (‘I can do at least that’).” All three of these factors will tend to make change easier and more self-sustaining.

Here is the way Al-Anon explains the “one day at a time” mantra: “In most cases, we cannot anticipate every possible turn of events, and no matter how diligently we are prepared, we are eventually caught off guard. Meanwhile, we’ve expended so much time and energy trying to predict future events, soothe future hurts, and prevent future consequences that we have missed out on today’s opportunities. And the magnitude of the task we have set for ourselves has left us drained, overwhelmed, and distraught.”

March says that when people make choices, they tend to rely on one of two basic models of decision making: the consequences model or the identity model.

In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions when we have a decision to make: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Notice what’s missing: any calculation of costs and benefits.

How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?

Read the following four sentences, and write down whether you agree or disagree with each of them: You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are. If you agreed with items 1 and 3, you’re someone who has a “fixed mindset.” And if you agreed with items 2 and 4, you tend to have a “growth mindset.” (If you agreed with both 1 and 2, you’re confused.)

The most effective teams tended to adopt what Edmondson called a “learning frame.” Members of these teams pictured MICS as something that would be difficult at first but would get easier over time if they were open to changing how they behaved and communicated.

Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.

He called this deep-rooted tendency the “Fundamental Attribution Error.” The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.

You know you’ve got a smart solution when everyone hates it and it still works—and in fact works so well that people’s hate turns to enthusiasm.

As the Romano story shows, one of the subtle ways in which our environment acts on us is by reinforcing (or deterring) our habits.

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?”

You are doing things because you see your peers do them.