Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

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

all change efforts have something in common: 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?

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.

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.

Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

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

The Rider loves to contemplate and analyze, and, making matters worse, his analysis is almost always directed at problems rather than at bright spots.

In tough times, the Rider sees problems everywhere, and “analysis paralysis” often kicks in.

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!’?”

Solutions-focused therapists believe that there are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let’s replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? Were you smiling? Did you make eye contact? And that analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Even successes can look like problems to an overactive Rider.

anytime you have a bright spot, your mission is to clone it.

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?”

Imagine a world in which after a husband forgot his wife’s birthday, she gave him a big kiss and said, “For thirteen of the last fourteen years you remembered my birthday! That’s wonderful!” This is not our world.

If you are a manager, ask yourself: “What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?”

More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan, which in this case was a painful and invasive hip-replacement surgery. This behavior clearly is not rational, but it is human.

The more choices the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets.

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.

It’s easier to make a long journey when you’ve got a herd around you.)

Clarity dissolves resistance.

BHAG: a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.

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.

Destination postcards do double duty: They show the Rider where you’re headed, and they show the Elephant why the journey is worthwhile.

We’re all loophole-exploiting lawyers when it comes to our own self-control.

You need a black-and-white (B&W) goal. A B&W goal is an all-or-nothing goal, and it’s useful in times when you worry about backsliding.

When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.

First, follow the bright spots.

Next, give direction to the Rider—both a start and a finish. Send him a destination postcard (“You’ll be a third grader soon!”), and script his critical moves (“Buy 1% milk”).

In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.

the test of a great developer isn’t the quality of his or her first-draft code; it’s how well the developer codes around the inevitable roadblocks.

Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings.

In fighting for change, we’ve got to find the feeling.

“In the absence of a dire threat, employees will keep doing what they’ve always done.”

if necessary, we need to create a crisis to convince people they’re facing a catastrophe and have no choice but to move.

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.

Rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.

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

They create a miracle scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 10 is the miracle. In fact, in the very first session they often ask their patients where they’d score themselves. Patients often report back that they’re at 2 or 3, which prompts an enthusiastic response from the therapists. Wow! You’re already 20 percent of the way there! Sound familiar? The therapists are putting two stamps on their patients’ car-wash cards.

“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”