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Book Notes

“Switch”, Chip and Dan Heath

This is a fantastic book on creating change in your personal life, community, or organization. It presents a simple yet powerful formula, supported by plenty of examples from various fields. The final chapters, which focus on building habits and adjusting the environment, reminded me of my favorite book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Here are my notes and favorite quotes from Switch by Chip and Dan Heath.

The rider, the elephant, and the path

  • 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.
  • The Rider tends to overanalyze and overthink things. Chances are, you know people with Rider problems: your friend who can agonize for twenty minutes about what to eat for dinner; your colleague who can brainstorm about new ideas for hours but can’t ever seem to make a decision. 
  • The Elephant isn’t always the bad guy. Emotion is the Elephant’s turf—love and compassion and sympathy and loyalty. That fierce instinct you have to protect your kids against harm—that’s the Elephant. That spine-stiffening you feel when you need to stand up for yourself—that’s the Elephant.
  • If you want to change things, you’ve got to appeal to both. The Rider provides the planning and direction, and the Elephant provides the energy. 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.
  • The third and final surprise about change: What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
  • If you want people to change, you don’t ask them to “act healthier.” You say, “Next time you’re in the dairy aisle of the grocery store, reach for a jug of 1% milk instead of whole milk.” It’s so the Rider doesn’t spin his wheels. If you tell people to “act healthier,” think of how many ways they can interpret that—imagine their Riders contemplating the options endlessly.

The basic three-part framework we will unpack in this book, one that can guide you in any situation where you need to change behavior:

  • 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.” When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and Elephant. (Think of the effect of shrinking movie popcorn buckets.)
  • Self-control is an exhaustible resource. This is a crucial realization, because when we talk about “self-control,” we don’t mean the narrow sense of the word, as in the willpower needed to fight vice (smokes, cookies, alcohol). We’re talking about a broader kind of self-supervision. Think of the way your mind works when you’re giving negative feedback to an employee, or assembling a new bookshelf, or learning a new dance. You are careful and deliberate with your words or movements. It feels like there’s a supervisor on duty. That’s self-control, too.
  • So when you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that’s just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

On December 14, 2004, he gave a speech to a room full of hospital administrators at a large industry convention. He said, “Here is what I think we should do. I think we should save 100,000 lives. And I think we should do that by June 14, 2006—18 months from today. Some is not a number; soon is not a time. Here’s the number: 100,000. Here’s the time: June 14, 2006—9 a.m.”

Direct the rider

Find the bright spots

  • The Rider loves to contemplate and analyze, and, making matters worse, his analysis is almost always directed at problems rather than at bright spots.
  • 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.
  • 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?”
  • It is the rare parent who would say, instead, “Honey, you made an ‘A’ in this one class. You must really have a strength in this subject. How can we build on that?” (Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)

Script the critical moves

  • Decision paralysis – more options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan. This behavior clearly is not rational, but it is human.
  • The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out. You have your routines, your ways of doing things. For most of your day, the Rider is on autopilot. But in times of change, autopilot doesn’t work anymore, choices suddenly proliferate, and autopilot habits become unfamiliar decisions.
  • 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. If you are leading a change effort, you need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change.
  • Inertia and decision paralysis will conspire to keep people doing things the old way. To spark movement in a new direction, you need to provide crystal-clear guidance. That’s why scripting is important—you’ve got to think about the specific behavior that you’d want to see in a tough moment, whether the tough moment takes place in a Brazilian railroad system or late at night in your own snack-loaded pantry.
  • The Rider has to be jarred out of introspection, out of analysis. He needs a script that explains how to act, and that’s why the successes we’ve seen have involved such crisp direction. Clarity dissolves resistance.

Point to the destination

  • In creating change, though, we’re interested in goals that are closer at hand—the kinds of things that can be tackled by parents or middle managers or social activists. We want a goal that can be tackled in months or years, not decades. BHAG: a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. Henry Ford’s BHAG early in the twentieth century was to “democratize the automobile;”…
  • We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible. That’s the missing piece of what we’ve discussed so far. We’ve seen the importance of pursuing bright spots, and we’ve discussed ways of instructing the Rider how to behave, but we haven’t answered a very basic question: Where are we headed in the end? What’s the destination?
  • Goals in most organizations, however, lack emotional resonance. Instead, SMART goals—goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely—have become the norm. A typical SMART goal might be “My marketing campaign will generate 4,500 qualified sales leads for the sales group by the end of Q3′09.″ But SMART goals are better for steady-state situations than for change situations, because the assumptions underlying them are that the goals are worthwhile.
  • Destination postcards do double duty: They show the Rider where you’re headed, and they show the Elephant why the journey is worthwhile. 
  • 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.
  • If you worry about the potential for inaction on your team, or if you worry that silent resistance may slow or sabotage your change initiative, B&W goals may be the solution. But, to be clear, you won’t always need a goal that’s so unyielding.
  • 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.
  • 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.

The Rider’s strengths are substantial, and his flaws can be mitigated. When you appeal to the Rider inside yourself or inside others you are trying to influence, your game plan should be simple. First, follow the bright spots. 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. 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”). When you do these things, you’ll prepare the Rider to lead a switch. And you’ll arm him for the ongoing struggles with his reluctant and formidable partner, the Elephant.

Motivate the elephant

Find the feeling

  • 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 thoughts.
  • 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. It’s something that speaks to the Elephant.
  • “Turnaround leaders must convince people that the organization is truly on its deathbed—or, at the very least, that radical changes are required if the organization is to survive and thrive.” In other words, if necessary, we need to create a crisis to convince people they’re facing a catastrophe and have no choice but to move. 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. 
  • The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.
  • Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don’t look like burning-platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.

Motivate the elephant

Find the feeling

  • 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 thoughts.
  • 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. It’s something that speaks to the Elephant.
  • “Turnaround leaders must convince people that the organization is truly on its deathbed—or, at the very least, that radical changes are required if the organization is to survive and thrive.” In other words, if necessary, we need to create a crisis to convince people they’re facing a catastrophe and have no choice but to move. 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. 
  • The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.
  • Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don’t look like burning-platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.

Shrink the change

  • One way to motivate action 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. If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.
  • it almost certainly would change the way you behave from that moment forward. Once you realized that exercise could come from little things, maybe you’d be on the lookout for ways to get a smidgen more active.
  • That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.
  • If you’re leading a change effort, you better start looking for those first two stamps to put on your team’s cards. Rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.
  • When you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It’s Elephant fuel.
  • But this encouragement is critical, because it’s self-reinforcing. When you’ve celebrated moving from 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 3, you gain confidence that you can make the next advance. The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. By using the miracle scale, you always have a clear idea of where you’re going next, and you have a clear sense of what the next small victory will be. You’re moving forward, and, even better, you’re getting more confident in your ability to keep moving forward
  • “When you set small, visible goals, and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed. They break the habit of losing and begin to get into the habit of winning.”
  • No one can guarantee a small win. Lots of things are out of our control. But the goal is to be wise about the things that are under our control. And one thing we can control is how we define the ultimate victory and the small victories that lead up to it. You want to select small wins that have two traits: (1) They’re meaningful. (2) They’re “within immediate reach”. And if you can’t achieve both traits, choose the latter!
  • Big changes come from a succession of small changes. It’s OK if the first changes seem almost trivial. The challenge is to get the Elephant moving, even if the movement is slow at first.

Grow your people

  • 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. The identity model explains the way most people vote, which contradicts our notion of the “self-interested voter.”
  • 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.==
  • In times of change, we need to remind ourselves and others, again and again, of certain basic truths: Our brains and our abilities are like muscles. They can be strengthened with practice. We’re not born skateboarders or scientists or nurses; we must learn how to skateboard, do science, or care for sick people. And our inspiration to change ourselves comes from our desire to live up to those identities.
  • 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. 
  • You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route. Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment. 
  • The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that’s critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.
  • The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubt, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum.

Classroom mentors asked the students to think about skills they already had learned—Remember when you first stepped onto a skateboard or played Guitar Hero?—and to recall how practice had been the key to mastering those skills. Students were reminded that “Everything is hard before it is easy,” and that they should never give up because they didn’t master something immediately. In total, the students in the growth-mindset group received two hours of “brain is like a muscle” training over eight weeks. And the results? Astonishing.

Shape the path

Tweak the environment

  • The following two chapters are similar to the “Atomic Habits” message by James Clear: ==”You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” ==
  • The third element of our framework, the Path, is so critical. If you want people to change, you can provide clear direction (Rider) or boost their motivation and determination (Elephant). Alternatively, you can simply make the journey easier. Create a steep downhill slope and give them a push. Remove some friction from the trail. Scatter around lots of signs to tell them they’re getting close.
  • What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. And no matter what your role is, you’ve got some control over the situation.

Build habits

  • 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.
  • Two strategies: (1) tweaking the environment and (2) building habits. There’s a tool that perfectly combines these two strategies. It’s something that can be added to the environment in order to make behavior more consistent and habitual. That tool is the humble checklist. Checklists educate people about what’s best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something. (That means that checklists are effective at directing the Rider.)
  • Even when there is no ironclad right way to do things, checklists can help people avoid blind spots in a complex environment. Has your business ever made a big mistake because it failed to consider all the right information? A checklist might have helped. 

What does your organization need to do in every product cycle? What do you need to check for in every contract or negotiation? What does your family need to do to prepare for each new school year? Put these things in a checklist. You may not save a life, but you’ll sure avoid a painful blind spot.

Rally the herd

  • As a leader, you can help prod them to create this language, to find ways to articulate what is different and better about the change you seek.
  • Counterintuitively, you’ve got to let your organization have an identity conflict. For a time, at least, you’ve got to permit an “us versus them” struggle to take place. We know this violates our “we’re all on the same team,” Kumbaya-ish instincts. It’s not desirable, but it’s necessary. Think of it as organizational molting.
  • To encourage this molting in your culture, think of all the tools we’ve built up in the Path section. First, you need to tweak the environment to provide a free space for discussion. Second, you should build good habits. Recall the idea of action triggers—visualizing when and where you are going to do something important. 

Keep the switch going

  • Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. There is no moment when a monkey learns to skateboard; there’s a process. There is no moment when a child learns to walk; there’s a process. And there won’t be a moment when your community starts to invest more in its school system, or starts recycling more, or starts to beautify its public spaces; there will be a process. To lead a process requires persistence. A long journey requires lots of mango.
  • These are encouraging realizations: Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball. But this is not the same as saying that change is easy. If it were, we wouldn’t see around us so many struggling alcoholics and troubled marriages and lagging companies and thwarted social change efforts. Change isn’t always easy and it isn’t always hard. In some ways change is ubiquitous; in others it’s unlikely.
  • When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment. In other words, when change works, it’s because the Rider, the Elephant, and the Path are all aligned in support of the switch.

How to make a switch

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture that person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things:

→ DIRECT the Rider

  • FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it.
  • SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors.
  • POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it.       

→ MOTIVATE the Elephant

  • FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something.
  • SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant.
  • GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset.

→ SHAPE the Path

  • TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation.
  • BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits.
  • RALLY THE HERD. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread.

Common problems (excerpt)

Problem: We should be doing something, but we’re getting bogged down in analysis.

Advice: 1. Don’t overanalyze and play to the weaknesses of the Rider. Instead, find a feeling that will get the Elephant moving. 2. Create a destination postcard. That way, the Rider starts analyzing how to get there rather than whether anything should be done. 3. Simplify the problem by scripting the critical moves: What’s your equivalent of the 1% milk campaign?

Problem: I’ll change tomorrow.

Advice: 1. Shrink the change so you can start today. 2. If you can’t start today, set an action trigger for tomorrow. 3. Make yourself accountable to someone. Let your colleagues or loved ones know what you’re trying to change, so their peer pressure will help you.

Problem: I know what I should be doing, but I’m not doing it.

Advice: 1. Knowing isn’t enough. You’ve got an Elephant problem. 2. Think of the 5-Minute Room Rescue. Starting small can help you overcome dread. What is the most trivial thing that you can do—right at this moment—that would represent a baby step toward the goal? 3. Look for Path solutions. How can you tweak your environment so that you’re “forced” to change? 4. Behavior is contagious. Get someone else involved with you so that you can reinforce each other.