Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

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

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

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

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.

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

If the Rider isn’t sure exactly what direction to go, he tends to lead the Elephant in circles. And as we’ll see, that tendency explains the third and final surprise about change: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

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

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

search the community for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating.

Those bright spots are gold to be mined. (Notice again that bright spots provide not only direction for the Rider but hope and motivation for the Elephant.)

“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?”

And that’s why decision paralysis can be deadly for change—because the most familiar path is always the status quo.