Switch Quotes

“You can’t count on these milestones to occur naturally. To motivate change, you’ve got to plan for them.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“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.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Don’t obsess about the failures. Instead, investigate and clone the successes. 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”).”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“If you’re worried about the possibility of rationalization at home or at work, you need to squeeze out the ambiguity from your goal. 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.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“You can’t script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It’s the critical moves that count.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24 jams.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“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?”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Once they’ve helped patients identify specific and vivid signs of progress, they pivot to a second question, which is perhaps even more important. It’s the Exception Question: “When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Here’s how one couple in marital therapy answered the Miracle Question posed by their therapist, Brian Cade of Sydney, Australia: WIFE: I’d be happy, feeling at ease at last. I’d be more pleasant to Bob, not jumping down his throat all the time. CADE: What will you do instead? WIFE: Well, there would be more understanding between us. We’d listen to what each other was saying. HUSBAND: Yes. At the moment, we don’t really listen to each other. We just can’t wait to get our own point in. CADE: How could you tell that the other was really listening? WIFE: In the face, I think. We’d perhaps make more eye contact. (Pauses, then laughs.) We’d nod in the right places. Yes. We’d both respond to what the other was saying rather than just attacking or ignoring it.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“To change behavior, you’ve got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path. If you can do all three at once, dramatic change can happen even if you don’t have lots of power or resources behind you.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Any new quest, even one that is ultimately successful, is going to involve failure.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“They think if something is simple enough to be put in a checklist, a monkey can do it. Well, if that’s true, grab a pilot’s checklist and try your luck with a 747.”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“How can you create a habit that supports the change you’re trying to make? There are only two things to think about: (1) The habit needs to advance the mission, as did Pagonis’s stand-up meetings. (2) The habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace. If it’s too hard, then it creates its own independent change problem. For”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“The value of the miracle scale is that it focuses attention on small milestones that are attainable and visible rather than on the eventual destination, which may seem very remote.”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“You have to back up your destination postcard with a good behavioral script. That’s a recipe for success. What you don’t need to do is anticipate every turn in the road between today and the destination. It’s not that plotting the whole journey is undesirable; it’s that it’s impossible. To think that you can plot a turn-by-turn map to the end, like a leader’s version of Mapquest, is almost certainly hubris. 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.”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible. That”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“In tough times, the Rider sees problems everywhere, and “analysis paralysis” often kicks in. The Rider will spin his wheels indefinitely unless he’s given clear direction. That’s why to make progress on a change, you need ways to direct the Rider. Show him where to go, how to act, what destination to pursue. And that’s why bright spots are so essential, because they are your best hope for directing the Rider when you’re trying to bring about change.”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“(Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)”
― Chip Heath, Switch

“marry your long-term goal with short-term critical moves.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“It can sometimes be challenging, though, to distinguish why people don’t support your change. Is it because they don’t understand or because they’re not enthused? Do you need an Elephant appeal or a Rider appeal?”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“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. You’ve got to emulate 1% milk and flee from the Food Pyramid.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“self-evaluation involves interpretation, and that’s where the Elephant intrudes.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Our struggles with e-mail are a bit pathetic, but the larger topic is worth considering: Is it possible to design an environment in which undesired behaviors—whether yours or your colleagues’—are made not only harder but impossible? As it turns out, lots of people actually make their living contemplating how to wipe out the wrong kinds of behaviors.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“To be clear, it’s not so much that you’re a brilliant predictor; it’s that he’s a lousy self-evaluator. We’re all lousy self-evaluators.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“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!’?”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Finding bright spots, then, solves many different problems at once. That’s no surprise; successful change efforts involve connecting all three parts of the framework: Rider, Elephant, and Path.”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard