Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

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

In studies like this one, psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource.

Self-control is an exhaustible resource.

Much of our daily behavior, in fact, is more automatic than supervised, and that’s a good thing because the supervised behavior is the hard stuff. It’s draining.

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

We’ve deliberately left out lots of great thinking on change in the interests of creating a framework that’s simple enough to be practical.

You can cajole, influence, inspire, and motivate—but sometimes an employee would rather lose his job than move out of his comfortable routines.

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.

Rule 1: Money would be invested only in projects that would allow ALL to earn more revenue in the short term.

Rule 4: Reusing or recycling existing materials was better than acquiring new materials.

These rules, taken together, ensured that cash wouldn’t be consumed unless it was being used as bait for more cash. Spend a little, make a little more.

Every barrier that’s removed makes the Path clearer.

We’ve seen that one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel “big” relative to the challenge.

Wood and Davis decided not to investigate why so many nurses were leaving. Instead, they began to explore why other nurses were staying.

You can shrink the change or grow your people (or, preferably, both).

Many smokers, for example, find it easier to quit when they’re on vacation, because at home, every part of their environment is loaded with smoking associations.

A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”

“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you.”