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.

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.

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.

When change efforts fail, it’s usually the Elephant’s fault,

So if you reach the Riders of your team but not the Elephants, team members will have understanding without motivation. If you reach their Elephants but not their Riders, they’ll have passion without direction. In both cases, the flaws can be paralyzing. A reluctant Elephant and a wheel-spinning Rider can both ensure that nothing changes. But when Elephants and Riders move together, change can come easily.

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, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

“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!’?”

This seems like a clever framing for other kinds of "what does success look like?" questions

Solutions-focused therapists learn to focus their patients on the first hints of the miracle—“What’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think the problem was gone”—because they want to avoid answers that are overly grand and unattainable: “My bank account is full, I love my job, and my marriage is great.”

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. And this asymmetry is why the Rider’s predilection for analysis can backfire so easily.

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?”

When people learn bad stuff about someone else, it’s stickier than good stuff. People pay closer attention to the bad stuff, reflect on it more, remember it longer, and weigh it more heavily in assessing the person overall.

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?”

Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is precisely in the details.

to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.

When you want someone to behave in a new way, explain the “new way” clearly. Don’t assume the new moves are obvious.

The specificity of SMART goals is a great cure for the worst sins of goal setting—ambiguity and irrelevance (“We are going to delight our customers every day in every way!”). But SMART goals are better for steady-state situations than for change situations, because the assumptions underlying them are that the goals are worthwhile.

SMART goals presume the emotion; they don’t generate it.

“Effective visions expressed values that allow employees to identify with the organization…. One manager at a glass company suggested, ‘it’s hard to get excited about 15% return on equity.’”

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.

As you analyze your situation, you’re sure to find some things that are working better than others. Don’t obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes.

the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings. This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.

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.

Trying to fight inertia and indifference with analytical arguments is like tossing a fire extinguisher to someone who’s drowning. The solution doesn’t match the problem.

Bottom line: If you need quick and specific action, then negative emotions might help. But most of the time when change is needed, it’s not a stone-in-the-shoe situation.

People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one.

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.

A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over.

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.

Once people are on the path and making progress, it’s important to make their advances visible.

Any important change is not going to feel like a steady, inevitable march toward victory. It won’t simply be an unbroken string of small wins.

You want to select small wins that have two traits: (1) They’re meaningful. (2) They’re “within immediate reach,” as Bill Parcells said. And if you can’t achieve both traits, choose the latter!

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.

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure.

How do people identify themselves at work? Discipline, product, org?

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

Davis and Wood found that the nurses who stayed at the hospital were fiercely loyal to the profession of nursing. In other words, their satisfaction was an identity thing—the

When you think about the people whose behavior needs to change, ask yourself whether they would agree with this statement: “I aspire to be the kind of person who would make this change.” If their answer is yes, that’s an enormous factor in your favor. If their answer is no, then you’ll have to work hard to show them that they should aspire to a different self-image.

Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure. You can’t learn to salsa-dance without failing. You can’t learn to be an inventor, or a nurse, or a scientist, without failing. Nor can you learn to transform the way products are developed in your firm, or change minds about urban poverty, or restore loving communication with your spouse, without failing. And the Elephant really, really hates to fail.

How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road? The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure—not

A growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill: “I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project!”

The growth-mindset students were taught that the brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise—that with work, they could get smarter.