Switch - How to change, when change is hard
Chip & Dan Heath
Description
Why is change so difficult and frightening? How do you create change when you have few resources and no title or authority to back you up? Chip and Dan Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick, are back with a ground-breaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives — how to change things when change is hard.
Key words: Change, strategy
To read reviews of this book visit Goodreads
My Notes
Snapshot summary
To make a change, you need to do 3 things:
1. 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.
2. 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 a growth mind-set.
3. 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 is spread.
Read on for more information
Surprises about Change
Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?
Bigger container = more eating.
You can see how easy it would be to turn an easy change problem (shrinking people’s buckets) into a hard change problem (convincing people to think differently). And that’s the first surprise about change: what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.
Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side it 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 outmatched.
Changes often fail because the Rider simply can’t keep the Elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination.
The Elephant’s hunger for instant gratification is the opposite of the Rider’s strength, which is the ability to think long-term, to plan, to think beyond the moment (all those things that you’re pet can’t do).
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 t your team but not the Elephants, team members will have understanding without motion. If you reach their Elephants but not their Riders, they’ll have passion without direction. In both cases, the flaw can be paralyzing. A reluctant Elephant and a wheel-spinning Rider can both ensure that nothing changes. But when Elephants and Riders move together, change can become easy.
Self-control is an exhaustible resource.
The research shows that we burn up self-control in a wide variety of situations: managing the impression we’re making on others; coping with fears; controlling our spending; trying to focus on simple instructions such as “Don’t think of a white bear; and many, many others.
Here’s why this matter for change: When people try to change things, there 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.
And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
Remember that if you reach your colleagues’ Riders but not their Elephants, they will have direction without motivation. Maybe their Riders will drag the Elephant down the road for a while, but as we’ve seen, that effort can’t last long.
Once you break through to feeling, though, things change. Stegner delivered a jolt to his colleagues. First, they thought to themselves, we’re crazy! Then they thought, we can fix this. Everyone could think of a few things to try to fix the glove problem – and by extension the ordering process as a whole. That got their Elephants fired up to move.
What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.
You don’t need to change drinking behavior. You need to change purchasing behavior.
This bring uses to the final part of the pattern that characterizes successful changes: if you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.
By now, you can understand the reason this is so important: 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 comptemplating the optinos endlessly.
If you want people to change, you don’t ask them to “act healthier. “ You do - “Next time you’re in the dairy aisle of the grocery store, reach for a jug of 1% milk instead of whole milk”.
3 steps to change
To change behavior, you’ve got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.
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 bucket).
There’s good reason why change can be difficult: The world doesn’t always want what you want. You want to change how others are acting, but they get a vote. You can cajole, influence, inspire, and motivate – but sometimes an employee would rather lose his job that move out of his comfortable routines. Sometimes the alcoholic will want another drink no matter what the consequences.
Berwick had the same tools the rest of us have. First, he directed his audience’s Riders. The destination was crystal clear: Some is not a number; soon is not a time. Here’s the number: 100,000. Here’s the time: June 14, 2006 – 9am. But that wasn’t enough. So he proposed size specific interventions. Second, he motivated his audience’s Elephants. He made them feel the need for change.
Berwick had to get beyond knowing, so he brought his audience face-to-face with the mother of the girl who’d been killed by a medical error.
Third, he laid the Path. He made it easier for the hospitals to embrace the change. Think of the one-page enrollment form, the step-by-step instructions, the training, the support groups, the mentors. He was designing an environment that made it more likely for hospital administrators to reform.
He also connected people – he matched up people who were struggling to implement the changes with people who had mastered them, almost like the “mentors” found in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your charity, in your organization, or in society at large, you’ll get there by making three things happen. You’ll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.
Direct the Rider
Stenin’s strategy was to search the community for bright spots – successful efforts worth emulating.
“Knowledge does not change behaviors, he said. “We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obsess doctors and divorced marriage counselors”. He knew that telling the mothers about nutrition wouldn’t change their behavior. They’d have to practice it.
Sterling said that that most mums where “acting their way into a new way of thinking”. Most important, it was their change, something that arose from the local wisdom of the village. Sternin’s role was only to help them see that they could do it, that they could conquer malnutrition on their own.
By organizing these cooking groups, Sternin was addressing both the Rider and the Elephant. The mother’s Riders got highly specific instructions: Here’s how to cook a tasty lunch with shrimp and sweet-potato greens. And their Elephants got a feeling: hope. There really is a way to make my daughter healthier. And it’s not very hard – it’s something I can do! Notice that the Path played a role, too. When so many of the mothers were doing something, there was strong social pressure to go along. The cooking classes, in effect, were changing the culture of the village.
Stories don’t come much more heroic that this. Sternin and his small team of believers, working with a shoestring budget, managed to make a big dent in malnutrition. 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.
“Can I ask you a sort of stage 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 will you do instead?
How could you tell that the other was really listening?
If a miracle solved your drinking problem, what would you be doing differently the next morning?
Solution-focused therapists learn to focus their patients on the first hints of the miracle – “What’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think the problem was gone”?
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 tme you saw a little by to the miracle, even just for a short time?
It’s an ingenious tactic. What the therapist is trying to demonstrate, in a subtle way, is that the client is capable of solving her own problem. As a matter of fact, the client is offering up proof that she’s already solved it.
If you’re trying to change things, there are going to be bright spots in your field of view, and if you learn to recognize them and understand them, you will solve one of the fundamental mysteries of change: What, exactly, needs to be done differently?
You are spending 80% of your time exploring Debbie’s success and finding ways to replicate it.
What’s working and how can we do more of it? That’s the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.
Even success can look like problems to an overactive Rider.
Murphy: Tell me about the times at school when you don’t get into trouble as much?
Bobby: I never get in trouble, well, not a lot, in Ms. Smith’s class.
Murphy: What’s different about Ms. Smith’s class?
Bobby: I don’t know exactly, she’s nicer. We get along great.
Murphy: What exactly does she do that’s nicer?
There is a clear symmetry between the scale of the problem and the scale of the solution. Big problem, small solution.
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.
No one, other than Sternin, thought to ask, “What’s working right now?”
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?
In a more exhaustive study, a psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words – every one that he could find in the English language – and found that 62% of them were negative versus 38% positive.
“Honey, you made an ‘A’ in this one class. You must really have a strength in this subject. How can we build on that?” Making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.
If you are a manager, ask yourself: “What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling success?
Bright Spots – can illuminate the road map for action and spark, the hope that change is possible.
Script the Critical Moves
The more choices the Rider is offered, the more exhausted the Rider gets.
And that’s why decision paralysis can be deadly for change – because the most familiar path is always the status quo.
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.
Behring had scripted the moves that helped his people make hard decisions. What tires out the Rider – and puts change efforts at risk – is ambiguity, and Behring eliminated it. For every investment decision, his rules suggested the correct choice.
When you want someone to heave in a new way, explain the ‘new way’ clearly. Don’t assume the new moves are obvious.
If you are leading a change effort, you need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change.
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.
To the Rider, a big problem calls for a big solution. But if you seek out a solution that’s as complex as the problem, you’ll get the Food Pyramid and nothing will change.
He needs a script that explains how to act, and that’s why the success we’ve seen have involved such crisp direction. Buy 1% milk. Don’t spend cash unless it makes cash. Shop a little more in Miner County.
Clarity dissolves resistance.
Crystal Jones, in contrast, knew that if she wanted to motivate the kids, she had to speak their language.
In creating change, though, we’re interested in goals that are closer at hand.
We want what we might call a destination postcard – a vivid picture form the near-term future that shows what could be possible.
Crystal Jones provided a great destination postcode: You’ll be third graders soon! Notice that the goal she set for her students didn’t only direct the Rider; it also motivated the Elephant. It was inspirational. It tapped into a feeling.
Our first instinct, in most change situations, is to offer up data to people’s Riders: Here’s why we need to change. Here are the tables and graphs and charts that prove it. The Rider loves this.
Destination postcards do double duty: They show the Rider where you’re headed, and they show the Elephant why the journey is worthwhile.
A “long-term mindset” isn’t a behavior.
Destination postcards – pictures of future that hard work can make possible – can be incredibly inspiring.
The B&W goal worked exactly as the management team had intended. When BP left nowhere for people to hide, its people stopped trying to hide. They tighten up their analysis, and they made fewer ‘play-the-odds’ decisions.
What is essential, is to marry your long-term goal with short-term critical moves. Esserman’s vision was completing, but it would have been empty talk without lots of behavior-level execution.
You have to back up your destination postcard with a good behavioral script.
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.
Follow the Bright Spots. Think of the Vietnamese children who stayed well-nourished against the odds, or the Genentech sales reps who racked up sales against the odds. 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 close the success.
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”).
Motivate the Elephant
Find the Feeling
Since Target had analytical, numbers-driven culture, publishing the early results was critical. Waters could point to “heroes” in the organization who’d taken a risk and succeeded. (“Check out what the turtleneck merchant did.”)
In the Heart of Change, John Kotter and Dan Cohen report on a study they conducted with the help of a team at Deloitte Consulting. The project team interviewed over 400 people across more than 130 companies in the United States, Europe, Australia and South Africa, in hopes of understanding why change happens in larger organizations. Summarizing the data, Kotter and Cohen said that in most change situations, managers initially focus on strategy, structure, culture, or systems, which leads them to miss the most important issue:
… 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. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.
In other works, when change works, it’s because leaders are sparking to the Elephant as well the Rider.
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. It’s something that speaks to the Elephant.
Waters thought carefully about what her colleagues would see because she knew what she wanted them to feel: energized, hopeful, creative, competitive. They took the bait.
We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don’t do it with information. We do it with Identity: ‘If I buy a BMW, I’m going to be this kind of person. If I take that kind of vacation, I’m that kind of eco-friendly person’.
The change is not one of understanding but one of feeling. It’s realizing that I can do this. I’m in charge. Chemo isn’t a reminder of the sickness; it’s how you get your life back – how you steal back the real you from the cancer.
At Microsoft, the developers were invited to visit the usability testing lab. There, from behind a one-way mirror, they could watch real users struggling with their programs. It made all the difference. The test lab manager says that when developers see a user live, 20 ideas immediately come to mind. First of all, you immediately empathize with the person.
But when it comes time to change the behavior of other people, our first instinct is to teach them something. Smoking is really unhealthy! Your chemotherapy medicine is really important! We speak to the Rider when we should be speaking to the Elephant.
Attila the Accountant was a hard case. Healy and Sitkin managed to break through his prickly exterior and make him feel something. And once he felt something, he changed. That outcome should give us all hope that we can reach the Attilas in our own life (Atilla the Dad, Attila the Boss, or Attila the Teenager).
It’s emotion that motivates the Elephant. In fighting for change, we’ve got to find the feeling.
“If you have a stone in your shoe, it hurts and you’ll fix the problem,” said Marin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In a sense, removing the stone from your show is what negative emotions are designed to do – to motivate specific actions.
On a daily basis, then, negative emotions help us avoid risks and confront problems.
Bottom line: If you need quick 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.
This brings us back to Robyn Waters, who was a master of positive emotions. She didn’t try to create a burning platform: “Wal-Mart is eating your lunch! Target is on its deathbed! Come with me into the fiery seas!” Instead, she found a way to engage the fresh thinking and enthusiasm of her colleagues. What if we had colors that ‘popped’ like these iMacs? And look at his Paris Boutique’s display – what if we could arrange our sweaters like that?
Waters helped shift an entrenched culture, product by product, because she found a way to install hope and optimism and excitement in her coworkers. She found the feeling.
Shrink the Change
People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one. That’s why conventional wisdom in development circles is that you don’t publicly announce a fund-raising campaign for a charity until you’ve already got 50% of the money in the bag. (After all, who wants to give the first $100 to a $1 million fund-raising campaign?)
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’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.
If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.
Make it seem small and easy.
Wouldn’t it be easier just to make the house cleaner than clean? Can we free ourselves from dread by scaling down the mission?
Their number-one problem is too much debt.
Being a certified nerd, I always used to start with making the math work. I have learned that the math does need to work, but sometimes motivation is more important than math.
Another way to shrink change is to think of small wins – milestones that are within reach.
When you engineer early success, what you’re really doing is engineering hope. Hope is precious to change effort. Its Elephant food.
Solutions-focused therapists… ask their patients the Miracle Question: “Image that in the middle of the night, while you were sleeping, a miracle happens, and all the troubles you brought here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, how will you know?”
These therapists know that the miracle can seem distant to their patients and that they need to keep their patients motivated and hopeful end route to the destination. To do so, they’ve devised a way of quantifying progress toward the miracle. They create a miracle scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 10 is the miracle. In fact, in the very first session they often ask their patients where they’d score themselves. Patients often report back that they’re at 2 or 3, which prompts an enthusiastic response from their therapist. Wow! You’re already 20% of the way there!
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.
An SFBT therapist would ask your son, “What would it take to get you to 3?” 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, what may seem very remote.
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 time. That’s the only it happens – and when it happens, it lasts.”
Coaches are masters at shrinking the change. By pushing their teams to attain a sequence of “small, visible goals”. They build momentum.
You want to select small wins that have two traits:
They’re meaningful
They’re within immediate reach
It’s critical to ask yourself, ‘What’s the next action?
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.
With each step, the Elephant feels less scared and less reluctant, because things are working. With each step, the Elephant starts feeling the change. A journey that started with dread is evolving, slowly, toward a feeling of confidence and pride.
Grow Your People
Butler knew he couldn’t make an analytical case for protecting the bird. He’d have to make an emotional case.
Butler’s goal was convince St Lucians that they were the kind of people who protect their own.
We’ve seen that one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel “big” relative to the challenge. But here we’re seeking something different. Paul Butler didn’t shrink the change. Instead, he grew the people. He made the St. Lucians swell with pride over their parrot – a species that exists nowhere else. He inspired them to feel more determined, more ready, more motivated. And when you build people up in this way, they develop the strength to act.
March says that when people make choices, they tend to rely on one of two basic models of the decision making: the consequences model or the identity model. The consequences model is familiar to students of economics. It assumes that when we have a decision to make, we weigh that costs and benefits of our options and make the choice that maximize our satisfaction.
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.
Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone’s identity is likely doomed to failure. (That’s why it’s so clumsy when people instinctively reach for ‘incentives’ to change other people’s behavior). So the question is this: How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?
A consultant who specializes in Appreciative Inquiry, a process for changing organizations by studying what’s working rather than what’s not. Wood and Davis decided not to investigate why so many nurses where leaving. Instead, they began to explore why other nurses where staying.
Davis and Wood found that the nurses who stayed at the hospital were fiercely loyal to the profession of nursing. In other words, their satisfaction was an identity thing – the nobility of the nursing profession gave meaning to their work. Once the hospital administrators realized this, they knew they’d have to do more to help the nurses cultivate their identity. For instance, they began to find ways to recognize people for extraordinary nursing performance. They developed a new orientation program that stressed the inherently admirable nature of nursing work. They created mentorship programs to help nurses improve their knowledge and skills.
Manufacturers like Honda and Toyota, which empowered their frontline employees to take ownership of their work. For instance, at Toyota, any employee who spotted a defect could stop the assembly line (this would have been unthinkable in Detroit at the time).
Ideas or innovative from their employees. In 1987, the founders of Brasilata launched an employee-innovation program modeled on the Japanese forerunners.
A new identity was the core of the program. Employees of Brasilata became known as ‘investors’ and when new employees joined the firm, they were asked to sign an ‘innovation contract’. This wasn’t simply feel-good language. Top management challenged employees to be on the lookout for potential innovations – ideas for how to create better products, improve production processes, and squeeze costs out of the system. Procedures developed within the factory made it easy for inventors to submit their ideas.
Brasilata has no-dismissal policy and also distributes 15% of its net profits to employees.
Being an inventor has become a source of pride and strength.
Their little-yes seemed to pave the way for the big-yes. When the researchers came back two weeks later and asked the home owners to install the eyesore billboard, 76% accepted it. Freedman and Fraser called this strategy a “foot in the door” technique. Accepting the tiny driver-safety sign greatly increased the likelihood that the home owners would accept the gigantic driver-safety sign.
In a sense, signing the petition because evidence to the home owners that they were ‘concerned citizens,” and this subtle shift in identity led to a shrift in their behavior. Two weeks later, when they were approached with the option to put a billboard on their lawns, they subconsciously asked themselves James March’s three identity questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?
Leaving aside the sleaze factor, the science of the billboards study says something pretty remarkable. It shows us that people are receptive to developing new identifies, that identities “grow” from small beginnings. Once you start seeing yourself as a “concerned citizen”, you’ll want to keep acting like one. That’s tremendously good news for someone leading a change effort. It means, for example, that if you can show people why the environment is worth carrying about, it won’t take years for them to think of themselves as “environmentalists”. It took only a few days from the home owners to think of themselves as ‘concerned citizens’.
How do you keep the Elephant motivated when it faces a long, treacherous road?
Once you become aware of these concepts, you start to spot the fixed mindset everywhere. Look at the way we praise our children: “you’re so smart!”, “You are so good at basketball!” that’s fuel for the fixed mindset. A growth mindset complement praises effort rather than natural skill: “I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project!”
“Everything is hard before it’s easy”
In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Businesspeople think in terms of 2 stages: You plan, and then you execute. There’s no ‘learning stage’ or ‘practicing stage’ in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how you do it, just get it done!
But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and install it in your team.
One of IDEO’s designers even sketched out a ‘project mood chart’ that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It’s a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labelled ‘hope’, at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labelled ‘confidence’ at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labelled ‘insight’.
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. And that’s critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than failing.
Dr M. put the focus on practice, he acted as a cash, and he set up the routines to allow the maximum chances to learn and improve.
“If they do substandard work, the teacher will say, ‘Not Yet.’… That gives them the mindset: My teacher thinks I can do better. It changes their expectations.
…We see that amazing things can happen when you combine the aspiration of a new identity with the persistence of the growth mindset. That’s how you grow your people.
Over the past few chapters, we’ve seen that the central challenge of change is keeping the Elephant moving forward. Whereas the Rider need 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 with 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).
Shape the Path
Tweak the Environment
When some guy cuts you off in traffic, you probably think, instinctively: What a jerk. (Or perhaps your inner voice is more vulgar). What you almost certainly don’t think to yourself is, Gosh, I wonder what’s wrong that he’s in such a hurry.
It’s not hard to see why we don’t think that – it seems kind of naïve, as if we’re making an excuse for a bad person. But think about your own behavior. Think of a time when you were driving so crazily that others would have been justified to curse you. Was your crazy driving on that day a manifestation of your true character (i.e. you’re a jerk at the core)? Or was it sparked by the situation you were in?
What looks like a person problem is often a situation problem.
The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.
You can simply make the journey easier. Create a steep downhill slope and give them a push. Remove some friction from trail. Scatter around lots of signs to tell them they’re getting close. In short, you can shape the Path.
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.
Then the firm developed an online time-sheet tool.
Frustrated, the executives tried using fiat power, announcing that the new online tool was mandatory. “That worked for about 50% of the employees”, said Bregman. “The rest simply ignored it”. The executives were ready to escalate the battle: They prepared a memo saying that people wouldn’t get their paychecks unless they used the online tool. (Side note: In our experience, people who are trying to change things often reach instinctively for carrots and sticks. But this strategy indicates a pretty crude view of human behavior – which people act only in response to bribes and punishments. And it quickly becomes absurd. Are you going to break out the ‘no paycheck’ stick for every change you want to make in your workplace?)
“People weren’t being defiant”, said Bregman. They were just proceeding on the easiest Path.
What’s sadly typical about this story is that the executives didn’t initially look for a Path solution. Instead, they wanted to spook the Elephant by threatening to withhold a paycheck.
If you change the path, you’ll change the behavior.
Is it possible to design an environment in which undesirable 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.
We believe in standardization. We want a narrow focus – these are the things we do, and these are things we don’t do.
Simple tweaks of the Path can lead to dramatic changes in behavior.
Build Habits
People are incredibly sensitive to the environment and the culture – to the norms and expectations of the communities they are in. We all want to wear the right clothes, to say the right things, to frequent the right places. Because we instinctively try to fit in with our peer group, behavior is contagious, sometimes in surprising ways.
When we think about habits, most of the time were thinking about bad ones: biting our fingernails, procrastinating, eating sweets when we’re anxious and so on. Buff to course us also have plenty of good habits: jogging, praying, and brushing our teeth. Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot. They allow lots of good behaviors to happen without the Rider taking charge.
To change yourself or other people, you’ve got to change habits, and what we see with Romano is that his habits shifted when his environment shifted. This makes sense – our habits are essentially stitched into our environment.
Say that you’ve been putting off going to the gym. So you resolve to yourself: Tomorrow morning, right after I drop of Anna at school, I’ll head straight to the gym. Let’s call this mental plan an ‘action trigger’. You’ve made the decision to execute certain action (working out) when you encounter a certain situational trigger (the school circle, tomorrow morning).
Action triggers are quite effective in motivating action.
Action triggers can have a profound power to motivate people to do the things they know they need to do.
The value of action triggers resides in the fact that we are preloading a decision. Dropping off Anna at school triggers the next action, going to the gym.
Gollwitzer says that, in essence, what action triggers do is create an ‘instant habit’.
The next time your team resolves to act in a new way, challenge team members to take it further. Have them specify when and where they’re going to put the plan in motion. Get them to set an action trigger. (Then set another one for yourself).
The hard question for a leader is not how to from habits but which habits to encourage.
What’s exciting here is not the existence of the habit, but rather the insight that the habit should serve the mission.
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.
Elder shows us how new habits can clear the Path. She inherited chaos at Hardy Elementary School, and she asked herself, “Which parts of this chaos can I tame? What kind of morning routine can I set up that will improve the changes that the kids are ready to learn?”
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?”
How can something so simple be so powerful? 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). You can ignore the checklist, but you couldn’t disprove it.
Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence.
A checklist could have helped these people. Imagine if you’d provide them with a list of ‘solution categories’ to guide their thinking, reminding them to think about ‘solution categories’ to guide their thinking, reminding them to think about ‘solutions that raise the cost of parking’ and ‘solutions that help more cars park in the same amount of space’ and so on. It would have sparked their thinking and kept them from forgetting key areas of consideration.
How can you create an environment that would make it easier for you, or your team, to change?
The influence of other people. It’s easier to preserve on a long journey when you’re travelling with a herd.
Rally the Herd
Think of the last time you were in a situation where you weren’t totally sure how to behave. Maybe it was your first time in a new church, or your first time in another country, or maybe it was a dinner party where you didn’t know many of the guests. What did you do try to fit in?
You watched other people, of course.
In ambiguous situations we all look to others for cues about how to behave.
Behavior is contagious.
“You change your idea of what is acceptable body type by looking at the people around you”
When you’re leading an Elephant on an unfamiliar path, chances are it’s going to follow the herd. So how do you create a herd?
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?
You want certain people to act differently, but they are resistant to the change. So you rally the support of others who in turn could influence those you hope to sway. In essence, it’s an attempt to change the culture, and culture often is the linchpin of successful organizational change. As former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner said, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game”.
Change was coming into conflict with culture, and let’s face it, a new rule is no match for culture.
Every culture, whether national or organization, is shaped powerfully by its language. Across the reform-minded Alpha teams, a new language was being incubated that reflected team versus doing it all yourself. Being efficient versus living in the hospital.
At Alpha, the reformers had the space and the language need to brew a new identity. At Beta, they didn’t. The lessons are clear. IF you want to change the culture of your organization, you’ve got to get the reformers together. They need free space.
Finally, you should rally the herd. At Alpha, the leaders helped the reformers find one another, and the reformers began to create a language. 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.
Keep the Switch Going
Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on the second, third, and hundredth steps.
Our Riders, by nature, focus on the negative. Problems are easy to spot: progress, much harder. But the process is precious. Shamu didn’t learn to jump through a hoop because her trainer was bitching at her. She learned because she had a trainer who was patient and focused and reinforced every step of her journey.
Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. There is no moment when a monkey learns to skateboard; there’s a process.
To lead a process requires persistence.
Once the change started, it seemed to feed on itself.
Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favour. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. SO 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. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.
“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.”
