Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

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.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

You want to change how others are acting, but they get a vote.

Some is not a number; soon is not a time.

In Sternin’s judgment, all of this analysis was “TBU”—true but useless.

“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!’?”

“What’s working and how can we do more of it?” That’s the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

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.

Change begins at the level of individual decisions and behaviors, but that’s a hard place to start because that’s where the friction is.

Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch.

SMART goals presume the emotion; they don’t generate it. In looking for a goal that reaches the Elephant—that hits people in the gut—you can’t bank on SMART goals.

your first mission would be to remove this false sense of comfort. The ambiguity in the goal is allowing rationalization to creep in.

marry your long-term goal with short-term critical moves.

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.

You can’t count on these milestones to occur naturally. To motivate change, you’ve got to plan for them.

Recall that they ask their patients the Miracle Question: “Imagine that in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens, and all the troubles you brought here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, how will you know?”

That’s the paradox of the growth mindset. Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down—but throughout, we’ll get better, and we’ll succeed in the end. The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process.

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

One IT group adopted the “sterile cockpit” concept to advance an important software project.

Or you could focus on the Path, in which case you would disregard hearts and minds entirely. In fact, suppose you stipulated outright that your workers are hopeless, that they’re irredeemable daredevils who are determined to waggle their fingers in the machine’s danger zone for the sheer sport of it. Could you still keep them from dismembering themselves?

Get them to set an action trigger. (Then set another one for yourself.)

Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence.

In this entire book, you might not find a single statement that is so rigorously supported by empirical research as this one: You are doing things because you see your peers do them.

With the online tracking sheet, Cachon was using the hotel-towel strategy. He was publicizing the group norm. Other people are getting their work done on time. Why won’t you?

he didn’t need to create new believers so much as he needed to unleash the believers he already had.

So, yes, a long journey starts with a single step, but a single step doesn’t guarantee the long journey. How do you keep those steps coming?

We need to be looking for bright spots—however tiny!—and rewarding them.

once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting.

The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment.