Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

One study analyzed people’s success in accomplishing “easy” goals or “hard” goals. With easy goals, the use of action triggers increased success only slightly, from 78 to 84 percent. But with hard goals, action triggers almost tripled the chance of success—goal completion skyrocketed from 22 to 62 percent.

Gollwitzer says that, in essence, what action triggers do is create an “instant habit.” Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s exactly what action triggers are setting up.

even though action triggers aren’t perfect, it’s hard to imagine an easier way to make an immediate change more likely.

Instant habits. This is a rare point of intersection between the aspirations of self-help and the reality of science. And you can’t get much more practical. The next time your team resolves to act in a new way, challenge team members to take it further. Have them specify when and where they’re going to put the plan in motion. Get them to set an action trigger. (Then set another one for yourself.)

Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s why they’re such a critical tool for leaders. Leaders who can instill habits that reinforce their teams’ goals are essentially making progress for free. They’ve changed behavior in a way that doesn’t draw down the Rider’s reserves of self-control. Habits will form inevitably, whether they’re formed intentionally or not. You’ve probably created lots of team habits unwittingly. If your staff meetings always start out with genial small talk, then you’ve created a habit. You’ve designed your meeting autopilot to yield a few minutes of warm-up small talk. The hard question for a leader is not how to form habits but which habits to encourage.

clear and efficient communication was essential. Every morning, General Pagonis held a meeting that started at 8 a.m. and ended at 8:30. No great innovation there, but Pagonis made two changes to the routine. First, he allowed anyone to attend (and he required that at least one representative from each functional group be present). That way, he could ensure a free and open exchange of information across the organization. Second, he required everyone to stand up during the whole meeting.

What’s exciting here is not the existence of the habit, but rather the insight that the habit should serve the mission.

How can you create a habit that supports the change you’re trying to make? There are only two things to think about: (1) The habit needs to advance the mission, as did Pagonis’s stand-up meetings. (2) The habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace. If it’s too hard, then it creates its own independent change problem.

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?”

So far, as we’ve discussed how to shape the Path, we’ve encountered two strategies: (1) tweaking the environment and (2) building habits. There’s a tool that perfectly combines these two strategies. It’s something that can be added to the environment in order to make behavior more consistent and habitual. That tool is the humble checklist. We discuss it with some trepidation, because we know the associations buzzing in most readers’ heads: mundane, routine, bureaucratic. “Use a checklist,” we admit, sounds like advice a dad would give a college student, along with some tips on tire-pressure gauges and not charging beer to his Exxon card. But bear with us, because your perceptions are about to change. What if we asserted that checklists can be game-changing, that checklists can save lives?

How can something so simple be so powerful? Checklists educate people about what’s best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something. (That means that checklists are effective at directing the Rider.)

Even when there is no ironclad right way to do things, checklists can help people avoid blind spots in a complex environment. Has your business ever made a big mistake because it failed to consider all the right information? A checklist might have helped. Cisco Systems, one of the largest internet hardware companies, uses a checklist to analyze potential acquisitions: Will the company’s key engineers be willing to relocate? Will we be able to sell additional services to its customer base? What’s the plan for continuing to support the company’s existing customers? As a smart business development person, you’d probably remember to investigate 80 percent of these critical issues before any deal is struck. But it would be inadvisable to recall the other 20 percent after the close of a $100 million acquisition. (Whoops! Those hotshot engineers refuse to leave the snow in Boulder.) Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence.

The average individual brainstormer came up with 30 percent of the best solutions, which is pretty good for a solo effort. Here’s what’s not so good: The brainstormers confidently predicted that they’d identified 75 percent of the best ideas. (We all know people who believe that the world’s accumulated wisdom only adds an incremental 25 percent to their own contribution. You may have married one of them.) A checklist could have helped these people. Imagine if you’d provided them with a list of “solution categories” to guide their thinking, reminding them to think about “solutions that raise the cost of parking” and “solutions that help more cars park in the same amount of space” and so on. That list would have served the same role as Cisco’s acquisition categories; it would have sparked their thinking and kept them from forgetting key areas of consideration.

People fear checklists because they see them as dehumanizing—maybe because they associate them with the exhaustive checklists that allow inexperienced teenagers to operate fast-food chains successfully. They think if something is simple enough to be put in a checklist, a monkey can do it. Well, if that’s true, grab a pilot’s checklist and try your luck with a 747.

sometimes in times of change, nobody knows how to behave, and that can lead to problems.

It’s clear that we imitate the behaviors of others, whether consciously or not. We are especially keen to see what they’re doing when the situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous. And change situations are, by definition, unfamiliar! So if you want to change things, you have to pay close attention to social signals, because they can either guarantee a change effort or doom it. When you’re leading an Elephant on an unfamiliar path, chances are it’s going to follow the herd. So how do you create a herd?

Well aware of the power of contagious behavior, a group of social psychologists persuaded a hotel manager to test out a new sign in the hotel bathrooms. The sign didn’t mention the environment at all; it simply said that the “the majority of guests at the hotel” reuse their towels at least once during their stay. It worked—guests who got this sign were 26 percent more likely to reuse their towels. They took cues from the herd.

When the norms are against you, what can you do to rally the herd?

Ironically, operations people are supposed to be the folks who make the trains run on time—they deal with logistics and bottlenecks and supply chains and cycle times. For a psychology journal to outperform an operations journal—that’s as disgraceful as Michael Phelps being trounced in the 100m freestyle by Dr. Phil.

“I knew there was a collective goal that I could appeal to,”

Second, he appealed to identity. We’re operations people, for Pete’s sake. We should be leading the way on efficiency and turnaround time!

Third, he defined a clear behavior: Every reviewer had to submit feedback within five weeks.

It probably will not surprise you that behavior also is contagious at the societal level

What follows is the story of a guy who, at the end of the day, changed the way a society behaved.

How do you create a social norm out of thin air? Winsten’s inspiration was that you could make the behavior contagious by repeatedly exposing people to it, in many different contexts, even if those contexts were fictional.

“Jay’s crusade was one that we could do something about fairly easily, unlike a lot of other worthwhile causes,” said Grant Tinker, then a vice president of NBC, who introduced Winsten to dozens of writers at all the major networks. Winsten always requested just “five seconds” of dialogue featuring the designateddriver idea, not a whole episode or even a whole scene. “Considering the simplicity of it all,” said Tinker, “it was very hard for us to feel our independence was being challenged.”

Notice how smart Winsten was: He used the power of the Path to change the public’s behavior, but he used the power of the Rider and the Elephant to change the network executives’ behavior. With his five-second requests, he was directing the Rider by describing a simple action that could help on a complex problem, and he was motivating the Elephant by shrinking the change.

three years after the campaign launched, nine out of ten people were familiar with the term designated driver. And they wer...

Rackspace changed individuals by changing their environment, their culture. But that was one company. Was it possible to change the social atmosphere in an entire country?

We needed to find a way to make Tanzanians feel comfortable discussing something uncomfortable, a way to disarm the conversation. And someone blurted out: “We need people to be able to laugh at this! We need humor!”

Advice: 1. Can you create a new habit so the Rider doesn’t constantly have to wrestle the Elephant? 2. Set an action trigger. Preload your decision by imagining the time and place where you’re going to act differently. 3. Use Natalie Elder’s strategy of creating a routine for the morning that eliminates the old, bad behavior. 4. The old pattern is powerful, so make sure to script the critical moves, because ambiguity is the enemy. ALL railroad came up with four simple rules to work its way out of financial distress.

Advice: 1. Shrink the change so you can start today. 2. If you can’t start today, set an action trigger for tomorrow. 3. Make yourself accountable to someone. Let your colleagues or loved ones know what you’re trying to change, so their peer pressure will help you.

How can you tweak your environment so that you’re “forced” to change? 4. Behavior is contagious. Get someone else involved with you so that you can reinforce each other.

Advice: 1. Focus on building habits. When you create habits, you get the new behavior “for free” (think of the stand-up meetings), and you’re less likely to backslide. 2. Motivate the Elephant by reminding people how much they’ve already accomplished (like putting two stamps on their car-wash cards). 3. Teach the growth mindset. Every success is going to involve rough patches. Recall the IDEO example, which warned people not to panic when the going got tough.

Advice: 1. Shrink the change until it’s not too much. Don’t give the Elephant an excuse to give up. 2. Start developing the growth mindset. Progress doesn’t always come easily—achieving success requires some failures along the way. Don’t beat yourself up when those failures occur.

Why do we have such a hard time making good choices? In recent years, many fascinating books and articles have addressed this question, exploring the problems with our decision making. The biases. The irrationality. When it comes to making decisions, it’s clear that our brains are flawed instruments. But less attention has been paid to another compelling question: Given that we’re wired to act foolishly sometimes, how can we do better?

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: “Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.”

Imagine walking into a courtroom where the trial consists of a prosecutor presenting PowerPoint slides. In 20 pretty compelling charts, he demonstrates why the defendant is guilty. The judge then challenges some of the facts of the presentation, but the prosecutor has a good answer to every objection. So the judge decides, and the accused man is sentenced. That wouldn’t be due process, right? So if you would find this process shocking in a courtroom, why is it acceptable when you make an investment decision? Now of course, this is an oversimplification, but this process is essentially the one most companies follow to make a decision. They have a team arguing only one side of the case. The team has a choice of what points it wants to make and what way it wants to make them. And it falls to the final decision maker to be both the challenger and the ultimate judge. Building a good decision-making process is largely ensuring that these flaws don’t happen.

A better decision process substantially improves the results of the decisions,

The discipline exhibited by good corporate decision makers—exploring alternative points of view, recognizing uncertainty, searching for evidence that contradicts their beliefs—can help us in our families and friendships as well. A solid process isn’t just good for business; it’s good for our lives. Why a process? Because understanding our shortcomings is not enough to fix them. Does knowing you’re nearsighted help you see better? Or does knowing that you have a bad temper squelch it? Similarly, it’s hard to correct a bias in our mental processes just by being aware of it.

The only decision-making process in wide circulation is the pros-and-cons list. The advantage of this approach is that it’s deliberative. Rather than jump to conclusions about Clive, for example, we’d hunt for both positive and negative factors—pushing the spotlight around—until we felt ready to make a decision.

When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavour to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a reason Pro equal to some two reasons Con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons Con equal to some three reasons Pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies; and if after a day or two of farther consideration nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly.

When we’re presented with a choice, we compare the pros and cons of our options, and then we pick the one that seems the most favorable. The pros-and-cons approach is familiar. It is commonsensical. And it is also profoundly flawed. Research in psychology over the last 40 years has identified a set of biases in our thinking that doom the pros-and-cons model of decision making. If we aspire to make better choices, then we must learn how these biases work and how to fight them (with something more potent than a list of pros and cons). Prepare to encounter the four most pernicious villains of decision making—and a process that we can use to counteract their influence.