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by
Chip Heath
Read between
April 26 - June 17, 2014
And that’s the first surprise about change: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
To change someone’s behavior, you’ve got to change that person’s situation.
The problem is this: Often the heart and mind disagree. Fervently.
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.
If the Rider isn’t sure exactly what direction to go, he tends to lead the Elephant in circles. And as we’ll see, that tendency explains the third and final surprise about change: 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. (Think 1% milk.) Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can’t get his way by force for very long. So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperative. (Think of the cookies and radishes study and the boardroom conference table full of gloves.) Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the “Path.”
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Big changes can happen.
direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.
“TBU”—true but useless.
“Knowledge does not change behavior,”
What makes it more remarkable is that they weren’t experts. They didn’t walk in with the answers. All they had was a deep faith in the power of bright spots.
In tough times, the Rider sees problems everywhere, and “analysis paralysis” often kicks in.
understanding a problem doesn’t necessarily solve it—that knowing is not enough.
Miracle Question: “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!’?”
Miracle Question doesn’t ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened.
Exception Question: “When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?”
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.
What, exactly, needs to be done differently?
What’s working and how can we do more of it?” That’s the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.
Even successes can look like problems to an overactive Rider.
anytime you have a bright spot, your mission is to clone it.
There is a clear asymmetry between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution. Big problem, small solution.
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?”
Across multiple domains—work and politics and sports and personal life—people were more likely to spontaneously bring up (and attempt to explain) negative events than positive ones.
When the Rider sees that things are going well, he doesn’t think much about them. But when things break, he snaps to attention and starts applying his problem-solving skills.
Our Rider has a problem focus when he needs a solution focus.
We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing.
These flashes of success—these bright spots—can illuminate the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible.
decision paralysis. 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. Decisions are the Rider’s turf, and because they require careful supervision and self-control, they tax the Rider’s strength.
The more choices the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets.
The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, “we become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”
decision paralysis can be deadly for change—because the most familiar path is always the status quo.
what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.
Behring’s four rules were focused on financial triage. He didn’t have the luxury of long-term planning. He needed his people to move, immediately, in a new direction, in hopes that they could buy ALL enough time to make a fuller transformation.
By staying focused on the critical moves, he made it easier for his people to change direction.
Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch. To create movement, you’ve got to be specific and be concrete.
what looks like stubbornness or opposition may actually be a lack of clarity.
They’d calculated that if Howard residents spent just 10 percent more of their disposable income at home, they would boost the local economy by $7 million.
Clarity dissolves resistance.
We want a goal that can be tackled in months or years, not decades.
We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible.
You have a choice about how to use the Rider’s energy: By default, he’ll obsess about which way to move, or whether it’s necessary to move at all. But you can redirect that energy to helping you navigate toward the destination. For that to happen, you need a gut-smacking goal, one that appeals to both Rider and Elephant. Think of Esserman’s “under one roof” vision or of Crystal Jones’s challenge to her kids to become third graders.
SMART goals presume the emotion;
they don’t generate it.
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.
