SWITCH by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

• Bigger container = more eating.
• What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
• For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.
• Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?
• 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 built-in schizophrenia is a deeply weird thing, but we don’t think much about it because we’re so used to it.
• The unavoidable conclusion is this: Your brain isn’t of one mind.
• The conventional wisdom in psychology, in fact, is that the brain has two independent systems at work at all times. First, there’s what we called the emotional side. It’s the part of you that is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure. Second, there’s the rational side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It’s the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future.
• Self-control is an exhaustible resource.
• Much of our daily behavior, in fact, is more automatic than supervised, and that’s a good thing because the supervised behavior is the hard stuff. It’s draining.
• The bigger the change you’re suggesting, the more it will sap people’s self-control.
• Change is hard because people wear themselves out.
• What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
• You don’t need to change drinking behavior. You need to change purchasing behavior.
• If you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.
• What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
• 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.)
• 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.
• Big changes can happen.
• Some is not a number; soon is not a time.
• successful change efforts involve connecting all three parts of the framework: Rider, Elephant, and Path.
• The Rider part of our minds has many strengths. The Rider is a thinker and a planner and can plot a course for a better future. But as we’ve seen, the Rider has a terrible weakness—the tendency to spin his wheels. 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 see too many problems and spend too much time sizing them up.
• 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.
• “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.
• This is a theme you will see again and again. 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.
• When the Rider analyzes a problem, he seeks a solution that befits the scale of it.
• Across the board, we seem wired to focus on the negative.
• A group of psychologists reviewed over two hundred articles and concluded that, for a wide range of human behavior and perception, a general principle holds true: “Bad is stronger than good.”
• More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan,
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It’s the critical moves that count.
• If you are leading a change effort, you need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change.
• It’s not good enough to ask your team to “be more creative” or to “tighten up on the purse strings.” That’s like telling the American public to “be healthier.”
• 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.
• The more instinctive a behavior becomes, the less self-control from the Rider it requires, and thus the more sustainable it becomes.
• Clarity dissolves resistance.
• To the Rider, the “analyzing” phase is often more satisfying than the “doing” phase, and that’s dangerous for your switch.
• The specificity of SMART goals is a great cure for the worst sins of goal setting—ambiguity and irrelevance
• SMART goals presume the emotion; they don’t generate it.
• We can’t expect to generate a magic-bullet solution. But big changes can start with small steps.
• If you’re worried about the possibility of rationalization at home or at work, you need to squeeze out the ambiguity from your goal.
• Expected-value calculations are bulletproof in situations where the risks and returns are well understood.
• What is essential, though, is to marry your long-term goal with short-term critical moves.
• 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.
• In other words, when change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Rider.
• We should make an effort to praise ingenious solutions to customers’ problems.
• But when people fail to change, it’s not usually because of an understanding problem.
• We know there’s a difference between knowing how to act and being motivated to act. But when it comes time to change the behavior of other people, our first instinct is to teach them something.
• This realization—that we can make an impeccably rational case for change and people still won’t change—is pretty frustrating.
• Why can’t we simply think our way into new behavior? The answer is that, in some cases, we really can’t trust our own thinking.
• We’re all lousy self-evaluators.
• We’ve all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive illusion factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average.
• One reason we’re able to believe that we’re better-than-average leaders and drivers and spouses and team players is that we’re defining those terms in ways that flatter us.
• It’s emotion that motivates the Elephant. In fighting for change, we’ve got to find the feeling.
• Negative emotions tend to have a “narrowing effect” on our thoughts.
• Fear and anger and disgust give us sharp focus—which is the same thing as putting on blinders.
• 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.
• To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.
• 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.
• 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 want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.
• The Elephant hates doing things with no immediate payoff.
• To get the Elephant off its duff, you need to reassure it that the task won’t be so bad. Look,
• Starting an unpleasant task is always worse than continuing it.
• if people are facing a daunting task, and their instinct is to avoid it, you’ve got to break down the task. Shrink the change. Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory.
• One way to shrink change, then, is to limit the investment you’re asking for.
• When you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to a change effort. It’s Elephant fuel.
• Once people are on the path and making progress, it’s important to make their advances visible.
• Former UCLA coach John Wooden, one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time, once said, “When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
• 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:
• They’re meaningful.
• They’re “within immediate reach,”
• When a task feels too big, the Elephant will resist.
• Small targets lead to small victories, and small victories can often trigger a positive spiral of behavior.
• It’s a theme we’ve seen again and again—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.
• We’ve seen that one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel “big” relative to the challenge.
• We’re not just born with an identity; we adopt identities throughout our lives.
• Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure.
• You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route.
• People who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are basically static.
• If you are someone with a fixed mindset, you tend to avoid challenges, because if you fail, you fear that others will see your failure as an indication of your true ability and see you as a loser
• In contrast, people who have a growth mindset believe that abilities are like muscles—they can be built up with practice.
• A growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill:
• In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Businesspeople think in terms of two stages: You plan, and then you execute. There’s no “learning stage” or “practice stage” in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how ya do it, just get it done!
• If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.
• Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.
• 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.
• Over the past few chapters, we’ve seen that the central challenge of change is keeping the Elephant moving forward. Whereas the Rider needs direction, the Elephant needs motivation. And we’ve seen that motivation comes from feeling—knowledge isn’t enough to motivate change. But motivation also comes from confidence.
• The Elephant has to believe that it’s capable of conquering the change. And there are two routes to building people’s confidence so that they feel “big” relative to their challenge. You can shrink the change or grow your people (or, preferably, both).
• What looks like a person problem is often a situation problem.
• We are frequently blind to the power of situations.
• people have a systematic tendency to ignore the situational forces that shape other people’s behavior.
• The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.
• The Fundamental Attribution Error complicates human relationships.
• Tweaking the environment is about making the right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. It’s that simple.
• What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
• Many people have discovered that, when it comes to changing their own behavior, environmental tweaks beat self-control every time.
• Self-manipulation works.
• In trying to minimize the risk of bad outcomes, injury-prevention experts often turn to the Haddon Matrix, a simple framework that provides a way to think systematically about accidents by highlighting three key periods of time: pre-event, event, and post-event.
• Simple tweaks of the Path can lead to dramatic changes in behavior.
• People are incredibly sensitive to the environment and the culture—to the norms and expectations of the communities they are in.
• Because we instinctively try to fit in with our peer group, behavior is contagious, sometimes in surprising ways.
• Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot.
• To change yourself or other people, you’ve got to change habits,
• Action triggers simply have to be specific enough and visible enough to interrupt people’s normal stream of consciousness.
• Remember that what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
• Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s why they’re such a critical tool for leaders. Leaders who can instill habits that reinforce their teams’ goals are essentially making progress for free. They’ve changed behavior in a way that doesn’t draw down the Rider’s reserves of self-control.
• Habits will form inevitably, whether they’re formed intentionally or not.
• The hard question for a leader is not how to form habits but which habits to encourage.
• How can you create a habit that supports the change you’re trying to make? There are only two things to think about:
• The habit needs to advance the mission, as did Pagonis’s stand-up meetings.
• The habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace. If it’s too hard, then it creates its own independent change problem.
• A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”
• Checklists educate people about what’s best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something.
• Even when there is no ironclad right way to do things, checklists can help people avoid blind spots in a complex environment.
• Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence.
• People fear checklists because they see them as dehumanizing.
• Even a simple checklist can make a difference.
• It’s easier to persevere on a long journey when you’re traveling with a herd.
• In ambiguous situations, we all look to others for cues about how to behave.
• When the environment is unfamiliar, we sprout social antennae that are exquisitely sensitive.
• Behavior is contagious.
• It’s clear that we imitate the behaviors of others, whether consciously or not. We are especially keen to see what they’re doing when the situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous. And change situations are, by definition, unfamiliar! So if you want to change things, you have to pay close attention to social signals, because they can either guarantee a change effort or doom
• If you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together. They need a free space. They need time to coordinate outside the gaze of the resisters.
• To develop better relationships, you don’t need to know whether your colleague is a Navigator or a Pleaser or a Passive-Aggressive Chieftain. You just need to notice and reinforce your colleague’s positive behaviors—as Sutherland did with her husband—and trust that your colleague will do the same with you.
• Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on to the second, third, and hundredth steps. And that’s a problem, because most of us are terrible rein-forcers. We are quicker to grouse than to praise.
• At work, we love to bond with our colleagues through communal complaining.
• Change isn’t an event; it’s a process.
• Small changes can snowball to big changes.
• 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.
• We can say this much with confidence: 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.
• When change happens, it tends to follow a pattern. We’ve got to stop ignoring that pattern and start embracing it.
• For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Preload your decision by imagining the time and place where you’re going to act differently.
• Shrink the change so you can start today.
• If you can’t start today, set an action trigger for tomorrow.
• 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?
• Focus on building habits. When you create habits, you get the new behavior “for free” (think of the stand-up meetings), and you’re less likely to backslide.
• Every success is going to involve rough patches.
• Progress doesn’t always come easily—achieving success requires some failures along the way. Don’t beat yourself up when those failures occur.
• Remember, what looks like resistance is often lack of clarity.